Friday Miscellanea

 Ur music?

The Italian-born composer-pianist Ferruccio Busoni was a clairvoyant who will never cease to magnetize a coterie of adherents. In his Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music (1907), Busoni proposed the notion of “Ur-Musik.” It is an elemental realm of absolute music in which composers have approached the “true nature of music” by discarding traditional templates. Sonata form, since the times of Haydn and Mozart a basic organizing principle governed by goal-directed harmonies, would be no more.

An example?

Encountering Adams’s Become Ocean on a 21st-century symphonic program is so fundamentally enthralling that it risks cliché. It is the proverbial oasis in the desert. The Sahara here is contemporary American concert music inscribed in sand. The ocean Adams supplies is equally physical and metaphysical. Its tides heave and recede. In place of tunes, it proposes shifting modulations of texture, pulse, and harmony. The harmonies are triadic but barely directional; they shimmer atop anchoring brass choirs.

Read the whole essay which covers a lot of ground 

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 A remarkable concert on the river Thames:

Travelers coming to London by sea were sometimes surprised when their sailing ships anchored at the mouth of the Thames and then simply waited—not for a shift in the wind but for a change in the water. Depending on the hour, the river flowed either forward or backward, pushed along by the estuarial tide, carrying lost boots, schools of pike and carp, occasionally corpses, and just now royals and nobility headed toward supper and an evening’s entertainment at a garden villa upstream in Chelsea. Early the next morning, with the water returned to its normal state, George floated back home and allowed everyone finally to retire to bed.

Two days later, when a newspaper gave an account of the outing, the most remarkable thing was reckoned to be not the king and his mobile court, swept along by a reversible river, but rather “the finest Symphonies, compos’d express for this Occasion,” and the German who had written them. He was thirty-two years old, graced with a royal pension, and comfortable in four languages. He was said to have survived a sword thrust when an opponent’s blade landed on a button. He had attached himself to dukes who became princes and princes who became kings. It would take the better part of a century for other people to rearrange his latest work, composed in bright major keys built for the outdoors, and drag it into a concert hall. Its title, Water Music, would forever carry a whiff of cow parsley and river mud. But chroniclers were already calling him “the famous Mr. Hendel,” and on this splendid July evening, a few months into his thirty-third year, he had every reason to believe one obvious thing: the right river, taken at the flood, could work miracles.

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Painting ancient statues:

Ancient Greek and Roman art tends to look really good today. 

This is not a universal rule. The Greeks weren’t always the masters of naturalism that we know: early Archaic kouroi now seem rather stilted and uneasy. As in all societies, cruder work was produced at the lower end of the market. Art in the peripheral provinces of the Roman Empire was often clearly a clumsy imitation of work at the center. Even so, modern viewers tend to be struck by the excellence of Greek and Roman art. The examples I have given here are far from exceptions. Explore the Naples Archa­eological Museum, the British Museum, the Louvre, or the Metropolitan Museum and you will see that they had tons of this stuff. Still more remarkable, in a way, is the abundance of good work discovered in Pompeii, a provincial town of perhaps 15,000 people.

Here is another Roman statue, this time depicting the Emperor Augustus. It is called the Augustus of the Prima Porta after the site where it was discovered. Something interesting about this statue is that traces of paint survive on its surface. This is because, like most though not all ancient statues, it was originally painted.

You really have to read the whole thing for a fascinating argument that the reason that our attempts to paint ancient statues come out looking so horrible is because we are doing it wrong.

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Bachtrack’s Classical Music Statistics 2025

Just picking out some interesting tidbits:

In 2025, Yannick Nézet-Séguin tops our list of busiest conductors, with an amazing 120 listed engagements – and looking back over the last decade of data, Nézet-Séguin has been a consistent presence among the busiest.

European orchestras are similar in their distance travelled. The Berliner Philharmoniker, Wiener Philharmoniker and Budapest Festival Orchestra all visited 11 countries in 2025. Their raw number of total listed performances are notable too – 137, 132 and 100 respectively, including concerts in their home bases, though the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester outpaced them with 187, visiting 8 countries outside Germany.

In the last decade, we have seen a steady rise of Maurice Ravel in our listings. 2025 marked the composer’s 150th anniversary, so it is no surprise to see his pieces in among the most performed concert works, La Valse and the Piano Concerto in G major both placing within the top five.

I didn't see statistics for most active soloists which would have been interesting.

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Now let's have some musical envois, Let's start with Become Ocean and work up from there.

Now some water music by Handel:

And here is Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting Tchaikovsky:

Finally Maurice Ravel:

 

 

Tasting the Lees

The 19th century is like a giant duffle bag stuffed with art, literature, music, culture, exploration, science and really big symphonies. Just coming to grips with how rich and deep the cultural soil is, would be itself a daunting task. And they did it all without AI! The century really extends from the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815 (amply chronicled in Victor Hugo's great 19th century novel, Les Misèrables) to the onset of The Great War, later known as World War I, in 1914. In between was a century of relative peace under the umbrella of the Pax Britannica. Incidentally, a great narrative that sums up WWI rather well is Robert Graves' Goodby to All That recounting his experience as a line officer in the trenches.

Between those two events, the century glows with prosperity, peace and cultural exuberance mixed with an underlying sadness that perhaps all this will not last--as it did not. Two symphonies from the very beginning of the century sum up both the exuberance and the misgivings and both are by Franz Schubert. First, the Great C Major, is a paean to exuberance:

And for the misgivings, the bittersweet depths of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony:

As a musician, I tend to look to music to illustrate history while others might choose art or literature.

The musical wealth of the 19th century is unsurpassed by any other era. The emotive beauty of Chopin, the brilliance of Liszt, the depth of Brahms, the rustic grace of Dvořák, the magnificence of Bruckner and the host of other talents. And when you consider literature, the harvest is even greater. I'm not qualified to say anything about 19th century painting and sculpture, but I suspect the same is true there.

The obvious causes of this efflorescence would include the unprecedented prosperity brought to Europe by the Industrial Revolution when for the first time in history the masses began to experience true prosperity. The end of the Napoleonic wars were the end of centuries of sectarian violence among a host of religious and cultural divisions. So, peace, a bit of material prosperity and, most important, some leisure to devote to the arts and science.

I'm not sure I can explain why it all came to an end, perhaps we might consult The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler or From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun. In any case, it did come to an end and all that expansive and glorious art and culture was replaced by something smaller, colder and more bitter: modernism. I love modernism in music and art, but I think we have to accept that it is a decline. For a musical illustration we could pick an example from Bruckner:

And for comparison, one from Bartók:

Both great works, but one is a kind of pinnacle and the other is a descent, though a wonderful one.

This is more of a sketch than an argument. I tend to come up with ideas that would really require a full-length book to fully illustrate and defend. But I don't have time for that, so mere hints will have to do.

We can hope that the next stage will be some kind of renaissance...

What I'm Reading Now

 I just finished the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio this morning, a pretty hefty read of some 900 pages, so I thought I would share what I am reading right now.

Apart from a couple of excessively long and turgid stories, this is more entertaining and an easier read than one would think. For me it plugs a rather large gap in my reading as (apart from Dante) I have read virtually nothing from the 14th century. I wish I had read it when I was twenty as it would have been quite helpful.

I purchased this a few years ago, but never got around to reading it. Now I am doing so with great pleasure and learning things like the difference between the madrigal style of Ferrara and Mantua. The late 16th century madrigal is one of the great repertories of the world and should be better known. Alongside the book I am enjoying listening my way through this fifteen CD collection:

Excellent performances with all-male singers and extensive use of instruments.

This novel by Thomas Mann, while lengthy, is a fairly easy read and a profound exploration of the fortunes of a German family in the 19th century. The Everyman printing, manufactured in Germany, is of superb quality.

I just started this one this morning and again, the quality of the printing, binding and editorial matter is excellent.

I started this serious reading project a couple of years ago in an effort to substitute quality reading for the junk one finds on the internet every morning. In the beginning I sought out challenging recent experimental fiction, critical commentary on the arts and poetry. But now I find I have gravitated to longstanding literary classics.

Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread

 This should brighten up your day:

Then have a listen to this, composed in 1932:

Now contemplate a piece titled "Anton Bruckner Buys a Loaf of Bread"!