Friday Miscellanea

This is, I guess, really good news. Canadian violinist Marc Djokic is awarded the $125,000 Prix Goyer, which is named after art patron Jean-Pierre Goyer of Montréal. What is really great about this is that it is a significant amount! Remember the last time I wrote about music prizes in Canada it was in reference to the insultingly tiny amounts for a competition in Vancouver? $800? Canadian? Now this one is worth winning. I know some of his collaborators as well, Jérôme Ducharme and Jaime Parker, both brilliant Canadian virtuosos. Djokic seems to be well-adapted for a career in today's media world. He won this, it seems, for the multitude of unusual collaborations which include marimba, piano, two guitars, dance and visual arts. Here is a short clip showing the diversity of his efforts:

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Make a joke with a friend and if it is overheard by a "useful idiot" then you can be fired from your prestigious job directing the Oregon Bach Festival. Read the Daily Mail for the details:

A British conductor has been fired from his job directing a prestigious American music festival after being branded racist over a joke, his friend says.

Matthew Halls, who was educated and taught at Oxford, was hired in 2014 as artistic director at the Oregon Bach Festival which is run by the University of Oregon.

But he has now been fired after a joke he made with African American friend and singer Reginald Mobley was overheard by a white woman and reported as racist.

Mr Mobley, who is from Florida, has since spoken out to defend his friend, saying Mr Halls was 'victimised' and the jibe had nothing to do with race.

He told The Sunday Telegraph: 'It was an innocent joke that has been entirely taken out of context.'

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This might be just a tad cruel, but I found this interview with pianist Yuja Wang and conductor Jaap van Zweden on the occasion of a concert in New York when, I believe, she was playing one of the Prokofiev concertos.

Ok, so what does she say when she does actually say something? Here, let's listen to her discuss the Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 3:

Well, actually, I think I prefer the first interview...

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Offered without comment is this remarkably articulate essay by a student in the UK about the sidelining of classical music:

Growing within our schools today is a disturbing trend; increasingly, music is viewed as an optional subject – something equivalent to a passion that merely runs parallel to ‘academic’ subjects – that leads to contempt for classical music borne out of an ignorance of all it contains. Maxwell Davies, speaking of his students at Cirencester Grammar School, said that 'It was extraordinary how the musical activities of those youngsters I taught influenced their whole attitude towards life inside the school, and outside. It was as if music were a catalyst or a trigger, which in so many instances sparked off a creative understanding in subjects which, on the surface, may not seem to be closely related - foreign languages, mathematics, religious studies.'

Read the whole thing.

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I'm always whining about how, in the absence of any really strong arguments from aesthetic value, the classical repertory will be swept away as if it never existed, replaced with ephemera. I say this because the process in literature is far advanced, English departments having long since been gutted by post-modernism. Witness this denouement in the Ontario school curriculum:

"There's probably a small minority who still believe that there is a literary canon that we need to hold onto. I think it's because it is the way we've always been taught," said Poleen Grewal, associate director of instructional and equity support services at the Peel board. "[But] if we are focusing on equity and inclusion as a school board, the work around inclusion must be visible at the student desk."

Ms. Grewal sent a memo to English department heads in June, asking them to explore culturally relevant texts after the school board heard from its students that their experiences were not being reflected in classroom literature. She attached a list of books, which includes A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry and Richard Wagamese's Indian Horse. Students in Ontario are required to take an English course every year of high school.

The Globe and Mail allowed comments on this article and when I read it there were forty-three comments of which forty-two were strongly against this policy and one (1) was weakly for it.

The 60s idea of "relevancy" is now buttressed with "equity" and "diversity." Any arguments to the contrary are depicted in the news story as "backlash." Instead of any kind of aesthetic criteria, the idea is that literature, to find its place in the curriculum, has to reflect the "experience" of the students. What experience? The experience of being indoctrinated in the assumptions of post-modern identity politics? It would appear so. Music has been resisting this fairly well, but recent indications seem to show that it is being overwhelmed as well.

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This concert was a bit of a tour-de-force, but one that he has done before, Yo-Yo Ma does the impossible at the Hollywood Bowl: all six of the Bach cello suites in one concert with a tiny intermission in the middle.

Safety tip: don't drink a lot of coffee before the concert.

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Here is a follow-up to the Oregon Bach Festival story, UNIVERSITY PAYS SACKED MAESTRO $90,000 FOR HIS SILENCE. As always with items at Slipped Disc, the comments are fun reading.

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This item has a bit of a "pushing on a string" feel to it, Can City Hall Make a Music Scene?

If a city wants to cultivate its musical biome to boost quality of life, education, tourism, and the local music biz itself, then it has to get serious about it. “That means it needs a policy,” he says. “It needs assessment mechanisms. It needs to be discussed in public. It needs to be less reactive and more proactive.”

Truth be told, local governments can hinder local music more than help. Hot scenes often arise from illicit spaces in struggling neighborhoods—musicians gravitate to lightly regulated and low-rent environs. Witness the punk and hip-hop movements that emerged from Lower East Side and South Bronx, respectively, during the 1970s: That didn’t happen because nigh-bankrupt New York City was promoting them. Today, several cities wary of disasters like Oakland’s Ghost Ship fire last year have shuttered the kinds of underground ad-hoc live-work-performance spaces that can incubate local scenes.

I don't know how it plays out in the US, but what often seems to happen in Canada is that as soon as some government arts policy, meaning funding of some sort, is announced, a host of opportunists spring up to siphon away the money.

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The inevitable envoi for today will be Yo-Yo Ma playing the Cello Suite No. 1 from his 2015 performance at the Proms when he also played all six suites in one go. YouTube won't embed, so just follow the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGgG-0lOJjk

Stravinsky and the Rite, part 4

Taruskin goes into great detail about the peasant rites and the sources that document them, much of which we can skip, though I encourage you to read the account in his book. One of the primary sources for Roerich and therefore Stravinsky seems to have been the Russian Primary Chronicle which describes the rites of the Kupala festival in exactly the same order that they appear in Stravinsky's sketchbook (see Taruskin, p. 884 et. seq.) Things like the notorious bar of 11/4 might have been inspired by a passage describing an old woman beating on a linden bark drum and the opening bassoon solo by the folk instrument dudki, mentioned in Roerich's scenario.

The ethnological accuracy of the scenario and costumes (based on peasant originals) is also reflected in the music, though Stravinsky was keen to disavow this in later years. He confided in one biographer that the opening bassoon solo was taken from an anthology of Lithuanian folk songs, and did so largely to give the impression, later clearly stated, that this was the only instance in The Rite! As we shall see, the use of folk melodies was extensive. With few exceptions, the ones that have been discovered so far belong to the type known to ethnographers as obryadnïye pesni or ceremonial songs, specifically to the category of kalendarnïye pesni, seasonal or calendar songs. That is, ones associated with the very festivals on which Roerich based the scenario. These songs are some of the oldest and come down, largely intact, from pagan times.

Roerich recounts that when he and Stravinsky were meeting at Talashkino in the summer of 1911, another guest was the singer and gusli player Sergey Kolosov (1855 - after 1915) who was then collecting folk material. He sang for the collaborators and Stravinsky took down a number of melodies. It is unlikely, therefore, that it will ever be possible to identify all of the folk melodies in The Rite. There are about a dozen, however, that are easily identified. It is astonishing that no-one even bothered to look up any sources for folk melodies in The Rite until Lawrence Morton, in 1979, began examining the mammoth anthology of Lithuanian melodies (over 1700) that Stravinsky had used. Morton found not only the source of the opening bassoon solo, but three additional melodies he also used. Why the long delay? Prior to this, all the approaches had been strictly abstract and analytical, typified by Pierre Boulez' in the early 1950s, in which not a single mention is made of the scenic or choreographic design.

Here are all the melodies taken from the Lithuanian anthology (collected by Anton Juszkiewicz) used in The Rite:

And here is how they appear in the work (in the same order):

As you can see, the transformations are largely rhythmic.

That should give you enough to chew on for today. Let's listen to a concert performance, with score, by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra conducted by Yoel Levi:

Stravinsky and the Rite, part 3

"The Great Sacrifice" as the original project was called, was set, not in Spring, but in midsummer to correspond to the ancient Slavic rite of Kupala which was the one with the sacrificial aspect. After Russia was Christianized in the tenth century the festivals of the folk calendar were accommodated to those of Christianity and Kupala became associated with the feast of John the Baptist. In Russia there grew up a set of ritual folksongs known as Ivanovskiye pesni, "Songs of St. John's Eve." One of these was published in a collection in 1899 and part of the tune found its way into the middle section of Stravinsky's Danse russe from Petrushka:

This Ivanovskaya could be described as a khorovod, often translated as "round dance." But khorovodï are more than that, they are often enactments of folk rituals that contain elements of long-forgotten folk customs. One Vladimir Propp has given a description:

Unlike ... songs [that] are performed only vocally [khorovods] are accompanied by various body movements. ... The khorovod may be performed by various movements in a circle (usually to the left posodon', that is, as the sun moves), with or without stopping; there can be two circles, one inside and one outside, moving in opposite directions. While those moving in the circle sing, those standing inside the circle (a young man, or a girl, or a pair) perform and portray what is being sung. ... the chorus may form not only a circle, but also a chain, it can perform different movements in a straight line or in various line formations... [quoted in Taruskin, op. cit. p. 868]

And so on. We see all of this reflected in the scenario and choreography. The opening tune used in the Danse russe was also a khorovod and the text was associated with matchmaking. Both this and the tune quoted above refer to the ancient "ritual of abduction" a somewhat rough form of matchmaking where the youth abducts the girl. This was part of the ritual of Kupala. Recall that Stravinsky had actually started sketching "The Great Sacrifice" before he began composing Petrushka. Obviously the Danse russe was originally intended for it.

The scenario was finalized towards the end of July 1911 in a visit Stravinsky paid to Roerich in Talashkino where the latter was designing and supervising the creation of murals and mosaics for Princess Tenisheva's private church, one of the landmarks of the neonationalist movement. At this time the scenario was divided into two parts instead of one and the name was changed to Prazdnik vesni or "The Festival of Spring." Later the Russian name would become "Vesna svyashchennaya" or "The Consecrated Spring." Stravinsky's sketchbook, which has survived, contains the titles for the individual dances, worked out in this meeting. Here they are, together with the equivalents in the published score:

 

The most significant change from this to the final arrangement is the movement of the "Jeu de rapt" from its penultimate position in Part I to much earlier, just after "Les augures printanières." The earliest surviving synopsis of the action is in a letter of Stravinsky dated December 1912:

The first part, which bears the name "The Kiss of the Earth," is made up of ancient Slavonic rituals--the joy of spring. The orchestral introduction is a swarm of spring pipes [dudki]; later, after the curtain goes up, there are auguries, khorovod rituals, a game of abduction, a khorovod game of cities, and all of this is interrupted by the procession of the "Oldest-and-Wisest." the elder who bestows a kiss upon the earth. A wild stomping dance upon the earth, the people drunk with spring, brings the first part to its conclusion.

In the second part the maidens at night perform their secret rituals upon a sacred hillock. One of the the maidens is doomed by fate to be sacrificed. She wanders into a stone labyrinth from which there is no exit, whereupon all the remaining maidens glorify the Chosen One in a boisterous martial dance. Then the elders enter. The doomed one, left alone face to face with the elders, dances her last "Holy Dance"--the Great Sacrifice. These last words are in fact the name of the second part. The elders are witness to her last dance, which ends in the death of the doomed one.

Throughout the whole composition I give the listener a sense of the closeness of the people to the earth of the commonality of their lives with the earth, by means of lapidary rhythms. [quoted in Taruskin, op. cit. p. 874]

A number of other synopses are extant, some were published around the time of the premiere. Stravinsky went to great lengths to disavow some of these later in life.

The ultimate source for the folk rituals was likely the three volume compendium by Alexander Afanasyev published 1866-69 titled, in English, The Slavs's Poetic Attitudes Toward Nature. Rimsky-Korsakov had drawn heavily on Afanasyev for a number of his operas. The book was a kind of bible for the Russian Symbolists and World of Art circle.

The original choreographer was going to be Fokine, but he left the Ballets russes and the job was given to Nijinsky who began work in November 1912.

Let's stop here for today and listen to a performance of the Danse russe from Petrushka. The conductor is Valeria Martinelli at the INTERNATIONAL BARTÓK SEMINAR AND FESTIVAL 2014:

Popularizing Experiments

I missed this article when it first came out: BBC Proms end experiment with Strictly and Sherlock after audiences fail to stick around. I think it supports my  view that the strategy of trying to sell classical music by turning it into something else doesn't work:

The BBC is turning its back on TV-themed Proms after finding no evidence that audiences for Doctor Who or Strictly concerts develop a lasting love of classical music.

Sherlock and CBeebies have also been given the Proms treatment in recent years, along with Sir David Attenborough's natural history shows.

But the BBC has decided to “try other things” after conceding that concerts based around its television brands have not succeeded in building new audiences.

This is a slightly different approach than the usual. The BBC hoped that they could leverage interest in, say, Doctor Who into interest in classical music. But the Doctor Who audience are, of course, interested in Doctor Who so I think that counts as another case of trying to turn classical music into something else. Other examples include the use of videos, light shows, venues more suited to other kinds of music like pubs and parking garages, costumes, and so on. Every single one of these strategies involves trying to turn the music into something else, or inserting an element that does nothing but distract from the music. How does that make sense?

I'm afraid that the only method likely to work is the slow and incremental one of actually taking the time and effort to inform your audiences and spark their interest, not in Doctor Who or some odd distraction, but in the music itself. I'm a big Doctor Who fan, and what drew me to the show was that I became interested in it for what it was in itself. Mind you, I can understand why the promotors wanted to try these different linkages as a way of attracting new listeners. But it didn't seem to have the desired effect.

I think you have to go deeper in the audience supply chain! How do people get interested in classical music? What are the "gateway drugs" as it were? What age does this happen at? Under what circumstances are people open to this kind of new experience? How much of an effect do music lessons at an early age have? What about the experience of ensemble playing? What about classes in music appreciation? All this frightfully dull stuff is probably more to the point than just putting on a concert with a Doctor Who angle.

Hey, here is an idea. Now I have not by any means seen most of the Doctor Who episodes, so perhaps they have done this, but wouldn't it be extremely helpful if there was a Doctor Who show that referenced music? In the Fifth Series there is a show where the Doctor and his companion go back in time and visit Vincent van Gogh in his later years and it was a wonderful introduction to his work as an artist in a very Whovian manner. A show where they visit Mozart or Bach or Stravinsky would be equally inspirational, I think.

But what do I know?

Since we are talking about the Proms, let's have a piece from the Last Night of the Proms for our envoi. This is Finlandia, one of Sibelius' early successes. The artists are Sakari Oramo conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra:

Stravinsky and the Rite, part 2

The 1912 Ballets Russes season did not have a Stravinsky premiere--he was hard at work on The Rite already. He also took time to write Three Japanese Lyrics and make the acquaintance of Schoenberg, with whom he was quite impressed at the time (later on their rivalry came to the fore). Stravinsky heard Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire at a concert in Berlin's Choralion Saal on 8 December 1912. Just a few days before, Schoenberg had been Stravinsky's guest at a performance of Petrushka.

Taruskin discerns some influence by Schoenberg on Stravinsky around this time in a tendency towards a spare linearity. Stravinsky was also impressed with Schoenberg's virtuoso writing for instruments.

The Three Japanese Lyrics were received positively in France, but performances in Russia were greeted with the most vicious invective (see Taruskin, pp. 844-5). It is not surprising that more and more Stravinsky turned away from Russia and to the West. Ironically, The Rite itself, while usually viewed as being a powerful break with tradition is in reality profoundly linked to tradition, which gave Stravinsky a unique approach, different from most composers of the day. Taruskin writes:

The usual accounts of the work place almost exclusive emphasis on the putative rupture with tradition; and despite all his subsequent disclaimers, that is the view the composer chose to abet, increasingly alienated as he was from the cultural milieu in which the ballet was conceived. It was, however, precisely because The Rite was so profoundly traditional, both as to cultural outlook and as to musical technique, that Stravinsky was able to find through it a voice that would serve him through the next difficult phase of his career.

Precisely because The Rite was neither rupture nor upheaval but a magnificent extension, it revealed to Stravinsky a path that would sustain him through a decade of unimaginable ruptures and upheavals brought on by events far beyond his control. [Taruskin, op. cit. p. 847 ]

 The cultural context in Russia in the early part of the 20th century was characterized by a "relentless sense of catastrophe" in the words of the poet Alexander Blok. The tragedy of modern man lay in his estrangement from the earth and the business of humanity was to heal this rift, to recover the stikhiya or elemental spontaneity of the people. Artists must renounce kul'tura (culture of the intelligentsia) and become elemental people, indivisible from the earth. The model for all this was the life of the peasant, who still practices the ancient religion of the earth. One of the artists who followed this project was Nikolai Roerich (1874 - 1947), then (early 1909) head of the revived World of Art organization. Benois recalled him as:

utterly absorbed in dreams of prehistoric, patriarchal and religious life--of the days when the vast, limitless plains of Russia and the shores of her lakes and rivers were peopled with the forefathers of the present inhabitants. Roerich's mystic, spiritual experiences make him strangely susceptible to the charm of the ancient world

Apart from being a masterly essayist,  Roerich was the creator of a series of archaistic paintings that depict this kind of ancient life, one of which, Idols, Taruskin reproduces in his book. Unfortunately, all the photos in the book are black and white and extremely muddy! Shame on you, University of California Press. Luckily, the Internet can provide us with much better.

Nikolai Roerich, Idols. Click to enlarge

Roerich was catapulted to fame when Diaghilev chose him to provide the curtain, decor and costumes for the second act of Borodin's Prince Igor, presented in the opening program of the first saison russe in Paris, May 18, 1909. The Parisian audiences felt as if transported to the ends of the earth. 

A while back we mentioned the trend called "Scythianism" which was just one manifestation of a longing for a primitive wholeness that influenced writers, poets, painters and composers. The only source of information about the ancient Scyths is found in Herodotus, The Persian Wars, Bk. IV where they sound a lot like the Reavers from Firefly, using the skulls of their enemies as drinking bowls. The most Scythian composer was the young Prokofiev even before he wrote his Scythian Suite in 1915. The one thing we know for sure is that the conception of The Rite of Spring arose out of a whole complex of ideas and trends that were very much "in the air." After Stravinsky had a dream of pagan sacrifice, he wrote to Roerich in early December 1912, who had a similar dream of his own. Stravinsky described his dream in his autobiography in these words:

One day, when I was finishing the last pages of L'Oiseau de feu in St. Petersburg, I had a fleeting vision which came to me as a complete surprise, my mind at the moment being full of other things. I saw in imagination a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watched a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring. [quoted in Taruskin, op. cit. p. 862]

In other accounts, Stravinsky describes it as an actual dream and later on he demoted Roerich's role to being one of mere designer. Other accounts from the time actually credit Roerich with the original idea (Taruskin cites a number of sources on p. 863). The truth is likely that they were both equally responsible for the idea and its fleshing out into a ballet scenario. "The Great Sacrifice," to use the original working title, would be all stikhiya, all primitive immediacy, with choreographic action devoid of a conventional plot. The ballet would not "tell the story" of a primitive ritual, it would be that ritual. The balletic equivalent of recitative, the mime that was so prevalent in The Firebird, would be eliminated entirely in favor of dance.

That sets the scene for the composition of the ballet, which we will get to in subsequent posts. For now, let's look and listen to a revival of the original production with Roerich's costumes and sets and Fokine's choreography. UPDATE: Correction, the choreographer was Nijinsky, not Fokine, who had already left the Ballets russes.

The Bachtrack Top Ten Contemporary Pieces: a Review

Here is the list from Bachtrack of the Top 10 contemporary works. Since some of these I have never heard, I thought it might be interesting to give them a listen.

Top 10 contemporary works

1=	Nunc dimittis (Arvo Pärt)
1=	Film music from Star Wars (John Williams)
3.	The Deer’s Cry (Arvo Pärt)
4.	Danzón no.2 (Arturo Márquez)
5.	Scheherazade.2, (John Adams)
6=	Fratres, (Arvo Pärt)
6=	Short Ride in a Fast Machine, (John Adams)
8=	Con brio (Jörg Widmann)
8=	Orawa (Wojciech Kilar)
10.	Other film music (John Williams)

Arvo Pärt I know fairly well, of course, but Nunc dimittis is not on the CD collection I have of his music, though I may have heard it on YouTube. Here is performance by the Elora Festival singers.

This is an a cappella work and as such does not have the interesting timbres we find in Pärt's instrumental music. It is a very nice piece, of course, as one would expect. Very meditative and peaceful, which is probably why it is popular. The most liked classical music these days seems often to be the stuff that is the most relaxing. We lead tense lives, it seems.

I don't think we need to say much about the music for Star Wars. Very appropriate and excellent film music.

Then another piece by Arvo Pärt that I don't know, The Deer's Cry. This is another a cappella work somewhat similar to Nunc dimittis, but with a different kind of texture, less sustained, more pointillist. The performers are the Erebus Ensemble:

I do know the Danzón no. 2 by Arturo Márquez, a Mexican composer. This is the kind of infectious Latin American music that we guitarists have a lot of. There are lovely syncopated dance pieces from Venezuela, Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, all over. This is not what I usually think of when I think of contemporary music, but hey. The performers are Gustavo Dudamel, and, I think, the Bolivar Youth Orchestra:

Next we have Scheherazade.2 by John Adams, as Wikipedia says, a "dramatic symphony" for violin and orchestra. This is a lengthy work and is in four clips on YouTube. The performers are Leila Josefowitz (for whom Salonen's Violin Concerto was also written) and the St. Louis Symphony conducted by David Robertson. Blogger will not embed, so here are the links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXJ0-CkfmhU

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNIAFR2axv4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afy9tuCFML0

Now that is quite interesting. I am wondering how BachTrack comes up with these statistics as there doesn't seem to be any information on the site. Anyone have an idea? Is this piece really this popular? How is it measured? Are the numbers just for the US? Anyway, let's stop here for now, halfway through the list.

Friday Miscellanea

The Boston Globe has a nice article on composers and birdsong prompted by a four-day festival at Tanglewood that celebrates birds and music.

This week, Tanglewood and Mass Audubon will be joining forces to follow Messiaen’s advice. An imaginative four-day minifestival called “Tanglewood Takes Flight” is being billed as a celebration of birds and music. It starts up on Thursday at 5:30 a.m. with a guided bird walk in Lenox’s Pleasant Valley Wildlife Sanctuary, followed by a 7 a.m. concert in the Pleasant Valley barn by the French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, a peerless interpreter of Messiaen’s music, who will be performing selections from the epic “Catalogue d’oiseaux.” The minifestival runs through the weekend, concluding in Ozawa Hall on Sunday morning with a chamber program that features Messiaen’s “Oiseaux Exotiques.”

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 These seem to be the top five best-selling classical albums--at least for some values of the word "classical."

I know what the number one album is, so let's have a listen to the second one, the first song of which is Russell Watson singing Nella Fantasia which is a song created from music written for The Mission by Ennio Moricone, so I guess "crossover" is the genre.

Honestly, nothing against Russell Watson, who seems a nice fellow with good vocal technique, but there is nothing here of what I look for in music. It is lulling, soporific, emotionally shallow and predictably clichéd. Which is, I suppose, its appeal!

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We live in very strange times--so strange that someone has actually decided to play violin. While skydiving. Naked. I kid you not. Glenn Donnelly did this on his 30th birthday. For a longer clip go here.

And, not unsurprisingly, he is Australian. Now it all makes sense...

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The Guardian alerts us to a new study that claims that listening to happy music makes you more creative! Writers unblocked? Happy music boosts imaginative thinking, say researchers:

Simone Ritter from Radboud University in Nijmegen and Sam Ferguson at the University of Technology in Sydney decided to test the power of music by setting 155 people in their late teens and twenties a series of puzzles to tackle in silence or while listening to classical scores ranked as either calm, happy, anxious or sad.

Music turned out to have no effect on convergent thinking. But when compared to sitting in silence, listening to happy music boosted people’s scores on divergent thinking from an average of 76 to 94. In the study, that meant more and better ideas came from people who listened to Vivaldi’s uplifting Four Seasons, than from those who heard Samuel Barber’s sad Adagio for Strings; Holst’s anxious Mars movement from The Planets; or the calm Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saëns.

Ok, so if a composer wants to boost his creativity, he should listen to Vivaldi? But will this help him write a really gloomy piece of music? That seems, ah, counterintuitive.

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Perhaps my favorite conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen just directed an ensemble of the combined orchestras of the Julliard School and the Sibelius Academy in a concert of music by the late Steven Stucky, himself, and Jean Sibelius, the early “Lemminkainen Suite,” which includes "The Swan of Tuonela." The New York Times favorably reviews the concert:

Through much of the 20th century, it bears recalling, the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius remained a puzzling figure, an outlier from the frozen north largely preoccupied with exotic local color. His music, urgent and pulsating, was either very hot or very cold — no one could quite be sure. His reputation rode a pendulum: in one generation, out the next.

Strangest of all, Sibelius fell almost completely silent during the three decades before his death in 1957

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The Guardian has another piece on the commercial radio station Classic FM that offers some interesting data on listening habits:

 some classical music purists have always been a bit sniffy about Classic FM. They don’t like the way the station seldom plays a work in full. They don’t like the “don’t frighten the horses” emphasis of its output. They don’t like crossover artists such as Katherine Jenkins and Ludovico Einaudi. They don’t like the way film and video game music is treated on a par with Mozart and Chopin. 

Classic FM’s success has been built on a creative tension between innovation and an instinctive desire to play safe. Nowhere is this more evident than in its playlist. If you want to listen to opera, then tune in elsewhere. The most you are going to hear is the very occasional bit of Puccini or Mozart. Nor will there be much in the way of mainstream composers such as Mahler, Bruckner or Britten. And certainly nothing from the likes of Bartók and Schoenberg.

Lots of obscure second-rank composers like Henry Litolff and William Boyce, though. I have the impression that the tendency is to create a kind of "smooth classics" genre.

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 Huib Schippers is the director and curator of Smithsonian Folkways, the iconic non-profit record label of the Smithsonian that I spent a fair amount of time listening to years ago when they were all on vinyl. He recently penned an essay titled How We Can Support the World's Rich Musical Diversity:

a great number of “small musics” are being marginalized. Just as we can access music from inner Mongolia and the Amazonian rain forest, people in those regions are listening to Christian hymns, military band tunes and Western pop music, often pushed with considerable force by missionaries, colonial powers, and the—now effectively collapsed—international music industry that has for more than a century largely determined what we listen to.

While musics have always emerged and disappeared through changing tastes or circumstances, some “small musics” are —in the words of former Smithsonian Folkways director Tony Seeger—“being disappeared” by non-musical influences and powers. That is causing a substantial reduction in the diversity of music we can access and enjoy now, and even more so in the future.

While any effort to preserve and support this rich diversity seems to be laudable, there are some assumptions here worth notice. The underlying ideas are structuralist and post-modern which means that everything is seen in terms of power structures, not aesthetic or even social value. For example, these "small musics," meaning very specific genres confined to small numbers of performers and geographic regions, have always been small--by definition. So they have always come and gone as enthusiasms wax and wane. The big intervention here is the project to sustain and support them, possibly at the cost of hindering the development of a different "small music." Also, I doubt very much that "colonial powers" are pushing much music these days as the days of colonialism are long gone. Also the idea that a shadowy "international music industry" has largely determined what we listen to just sounds paranoid. Finally, to talk about how the diversity of music is being "disappeared" seems even more odd in a context where much more music is available to many more people now than ever before in history! Still, lots to admire in the kinds of projects they are involved in. Read the whole thing for an overview.

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History Today has a fascinating account of the loggionisti of La Scala in Milan and their long-standing practice of booing productions and performances they don't like. This provides an opportunity to review the history of noise-making audiences for music:

When the first public opera houses were founded in the mid-17th century, they were designed more as venues for social interaction than as sites of aesthetic experience. Fanning out from the stage in glittering tiers were the boxes. Owned or leased by aristocrats or wealthy bourgeois, these intimate little spaces were perfect for entertaining guests, exchanging gossip or simply being seen. Down below was the parterre. Usually left open and generally without seating, this was the preserve of lower-income groups, including soldiers, students and servants, who used the space to meet friends, share a drink and gamble. Accordingly, the music was treated with noisy indifference, at best, or vocal contempt, at worst. Audiences were more interested in their own conversations than with what was happening on stage. They might perhaps listen to an aria, or watch the ballet (if there was one), but no more; and, if they did not like what they heard, they would make their displeasure known. 

Not until the late 19th century did silence come to be expected of audiences. Even then, it took longer to reach some countries than others. An amusing illustration of the difference between Britain and Italy can be found in E.M. Forster’s novel Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905). Hoping to talk their widowed sister-in-law out of marrying an Italian, the interfering siblings, Philip and Harriet Kingcroft, rush off to the Tuscan town of Monteriano. Soon after arriving, Philip spots a poster announcing a performance of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor and tries to persuade the sceptical Harriet to go with him. ‘However bad the performance is to-night’, he warns, ‘it will be alive. Italians don’t love music silently, like the beastly Germans. The audience takes its share – sometimes more.’

The evolution of the idea of silent appreciation of music was quite complex and tightly interwoven with the nature of the music itself, but this article provides some clues.

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Finally the LA Times has an article on the Salzburg Festival with some numbers to put in in perspective:

the grandest classical music gathering of opera, orchestral concerts, recitals, young artist projects, opera camps for children and new music series remains in Austria. It has been around for 97 years, and glamorous, big-name performers continue to flock to Mozart’s birthplace at the scenic foot of the Austrian Alps. Music bigwigs wheel and deal at restaurants facing a festival theater built into the side of a mountain. They pay whatever it takes to see and be seen, parading in finery that ranges from black tie to the occasional formal lederhosen. 

The final report of this summer’s six-week festival, which ended Wednesday, said 97% of all tickets were sold. Attendance was 261,500, more than double the capacity of the Coachella music festival.

The article has some history of the festival, which is interesting, but some of which is flatly wrong. Discussing a new director, appointed in 1992, they say:

With a gift for studied outrage, Mortier immediately pushed aside the refined Vienna Philharmonic and superstar conductors for the brash Los Angeles Philharmonic and its newly appointed 34-year-old modernist music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen. Mortier replaced fusty opera directors with the likes of another 34-year-old, Peter Sellars. To program new music concerts at the festival for the first time, Mortier brought in a third 34-year-old — an Italian-born, Viennese-trained pianist who specialized in playing American avant-garde composers like John Cage and Morton Feldman. They were underwritten by the Beverly Hills patron Betty Freeman.

The only problem here is that the festival had programmed lots of new music previously. In 1988, when I was there attending a master class with Pepe Romero, they had Karlheinz Stockhausen with his ensemble perform seven concerts of his chamber music. Also that year Witold Lutosławski conducted the premiere of his violin concerto. Isn't it awkward when the facts don't quite fit your narrative?

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For our envoi today, let's listen to that early Sibelius Lemminkainen Suite which dates from the early 1890s. The performers are the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen: