Hilary Hahn Plays Bach

Hilary Hahn just released a CD of the solo sonatas and partitas for violin by J. S. Bach. This recording, containing the Sonatas 1 and 2 and the Partita 1 completes the project started by her first recording, made when she was seventeen, of the Partitas 2 and 3 and Sonata 3. She has taken her time to get to the second half of the project: twenty-two years separate the two CDs. I was going to say twenty-two years separate the two recordings, but that is not true as she recorded the second batch seven years ago, but was not comfortable releasing those recordings. Recently she got around to listening to those recordings and evaluating them. That resulting in re-recording much of the previous material. The current issue contains tracks from both sets of recordings. (This information all comes from a note from the current album.)

Hilary Hahn talks about how her approach to Bach has matured over her whole career. She played the Siciliana from the first sonata in her first recital when she was nine years old. My approach to Bach has likewise evolved over the decades I have played his music. As a guitarist, I have played a lot of the solo violin repertoire as well as the lute suites. As a listener I have gone through a couple of different stages as well. I came to the classical guitar in the 70s which was also the era in which early music performance practice became a huge trend in the classical music world. This process of replacing largely 19th century conceptions of timbre and phrasing with ones that, we hope, are more closely related to those of earlier times, continues to this day. Nowadays if we purchase a recording of music by Baroque masters we are likely to choose one on "original instruments" or guided by "historically informed" performance practice. I place scare quotes around those phrases because we should keep in mind Richard Taruskin's incisive critique of the whole "authenticity" movement in music performance.

Do we really want to talk about "authenticity" any more? I had hoped a consensus was forming that to use the word in connection with the performance of music -and especially to define a particular style, manner, or philosophy of performance-is neither description nor critique, but commercial propaganda, the stock-in-trade of press agents and promoters. I note with some satisfaction that John Spitzer's entry under "authenticity" in the New Harvard Dictionary of Music does not even mention performance. It deals, rather, with "the nature of the link between a composer and a work that bears his or her name," that is, with texts and transmission, the traditional and proper domain of scholarly authentication. 

Satisfaction is somewhat diminished as the eye wanders up to the entry preceding Spitzer's, where we find, as the third of five definitions of the adjective "authentic," the following: "In performance practice, instruments or styles of playing that are historically appropriate to the music being performed." There it is at last in all its purloined majesty, this word that simply cannot be rid of its moral and ethical overtones (and which always carries its invidious antonym in tow), being used to privilege one philosophy of performance over all others. While one certainly cannot fault a dictionary for reporting current usage-and the currency of the usage in question, alas, cannot be denied-there does seem to be some (perhaps unwitting) complicity in the perpetuation of the propaganda here, since the operative synonym, "appropriate," is also an ineluctably value-laden term. One simply cannot dissent from the concept when it is defined in this way. One is hardly free to say, "I prefer inauthenticity to authenticity," or, "I prefer inappropriateness to appropriateness"-at least if one is interested in maintaining respectability with the crowd that swears by the Harvard Dictionary. Once the terms have been equated in this way, commitment to the values they assign and the privileges they grant must necessarily follow.

Richard Taruskin. Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Kindle Locations 1170-1181). Kindle Edition.

 The replacement of reference to "authenticity" with the phrase "historically informed performance" or HIP doesn't quite solve the problem, of course. So while in the 70s and 80s I was rather committed to historically "authentic" performance, I have since then moderated my thinking. Actually, while I studied things like the kinds of timbre early instruments produced and read a great deal about phrasing and ornamentation, I never became enough of an acolyte to switch my instrument to the lute. Though I must confess I was thinking about purchasing a vihuela when I visited Spain last summer.

The point I am not quite making clearly here is that while I still find satisfying and compelling performances in HIP style on original instruments such as those by Scott Ross or Gustav Leonhardt, I am equally open to performances with a different, perhaps more modern, sensibility by people like Grigory Sokolov (whose Rameau has to be heard to be believed) and, of course, Hilary Hahn.

The overwhelmingly important thing is the expressive power and brilliance the performer brings to the piece and in this Hilary Hahn has no superiors on the violin these days. I just received my copy of her new CD this week and am listening as I write this. When you are following the career of a major artist such as Hilary Hahn there is a certain predictability with each new issue: you feel quite sure that the new issue will be up to the highest technical and musical standards. You might almost call this inevitable. Of course the performer feels it quite differently! Someone like Hilary Hahn will feel a great burden of responsibility. Each recording and performance has to be up to the standard one has set. Perhaps this is why she let her previous recordings of these pieces lie fallow for seven years.

You might notice that my tone in this review is rather less critical than, say, when I talk about a column by Alex Ross or compare different recordings of guitar concertos. I have had the great pleasure of being able to work with a truly world-class violinist in the person of Paul Kling. Like Ms Hahn he was famous from when he was nine years old with his first broadcast on Austrian radio. He did not have a recording career, instead he was concertmaster with the Vienna Philharmonic, the Louisville Symphony and the Tokyo Symphony (don't ask me which one!). He also toured Japan as soloist in the Brahms Violin Concerto with Herbert von Karajan. Paul and I did a number of chamber music concerts together. I recall he played the Bach Chaconne from the second partita in one of these. It was, simply, perfect. So when I listen to Hilary Hahn play Bach at this transcendent level I recognize that there are likely aspects that I won't fully appreciate for years.

A journalistic review will take a different tack. The writer is going to try and find something critical to say about either the artist or the performance or the repertoire. All I want to say here is that this is a terrific recording. Go buy it.

I may have put this up before, but who cares. Here, to loosen your fillings a bit, is Hilary Hahn playing the Presto from the Sonata No. 1:

Friday Miscellanea

If you can stand the incessant punning, you might find this article on the use of music to age cheese amusing: Cheesy music: Swiss experiment with sound to make cheese tastier.

The thought of playing rock 'n' roll music to influence the flavour of cheese may make some scientists cringe.

But parts of the scientific community have spent years analysing the effect of sound on plants, and some mums-to-be believe playing classical music to their unborn child makes them smarter.

Music can create feelings, reaching inside people and stirring their senses into a fondue of emotions, in ways that can make people smile, cry or jump in elation.

Is potentially testing whether Roquefort is a fan of hard rock or Queso a follower of flamenco really so completely far-fetched? The University of the Arts in Bern does not think so and is helping Wampfler conduct the experiment.

"At first we were sceptical," admitted Michael Harenberg, the university's music director.

"Then we discovered there is a field called sonochemistry that looks at the influences of sound waves, the effect of sound on solid bodies."

* * *

The Guardian has a long piece on the history and practices of the background music industry: Inside the booming business of background music.

Paul Hillyer, head of media at Mood Media’s UK business, described the approach his company often takes as “cradle to grave”, the least offensive to the widest spectrum of people. One of their clients is Fuller’s Brewery, which plays music in most of its 400 or so pubs in the UK. Andrew Durn, whose role at Fuller’s involves liaising with Mood Media, described its sound as being roughly like Radio 2, catering to an older, comfortable crowd. “What we don’t want,” he told me, “is customers walking in, listening to the music and saying: ‘What’s that all about?’”

It is the strenuously inoffensive nature of this kind of background music that riles up some of the industry’s fiercest critics. One group, Pipedown, have campaigned “for freedom from unwanted music in public places” since 1992, when its founder, Nigel Rodgers, was spurred to action by a particularly irritating experience in a South Kensington restaurant. “Do you hate unwanted piped background music?” reads the call to arms on the group’s website. “Do you detest the way you can’t escape it? (in pubs, restaurants and hotels; on the plane, train or bus; down the phone; ruining decent television programmes; adding to the overall levels of noise pollution in public places).” The group, which counts Stephen Fry and Joanna Lumley among its celebrity supporters, claims some credit for the decision Marks & Spencer took in 2016 to stop using music in its stores. “You’re not going for a special sort of atmosphere, you’re just going to do your shopping,” Rodgers said.

I wonder if this Nigel Rodgers is the same Nigel Rodgers that was the brilliant proponent of the performance practice of 17th century vocal music?

* * *

Over at Jessica Duchen's blog she explains how one gets inducted into the cult of Wagner: This man will take your life.

His name is Richard Wagner, and if you let him, that's what he'll do. Of course, you mightn't show him in through the door in the first place, but otherwise, what's likely to happen is set out below. The things to remember are that a) the work is not the man, and vice-versa, and b) the more effort you put into something, the more rewarding it will be. One suspects he knew that – and knew exactly what he was doing in demanding such commitment from his fans. I just went to the whole Ring, in a manner of speaking, mostly by mistake, and the Ring leaves you wrung. But I'd go all over again tomorrow if I could. How, then, does this happen?

First of all, you realise that Wagner was probably the most influential composer of any born in the 19th century, with the biggest, most lasting impact on musical history ever since – a quality he shares only with Bach, Beethoven and Stravinsky's 'The Rite of Spring'. So you start investigating. What on earth is so special about Richard Wagner?

I have never fallen under the spell myself, but she is correct, one really needs to attend a first-rate presentation in order to give the work a chance.

* * *

The blog On An Overgrown Path has an interesting meditation on the concept of a concert hall: Is this the concert hall of the future?

Why is the concert hall viewed, quite wrongly, as a technology-free zone? Quite wrongly, because, the 'perfect' acoustic of the highly-acclaimed Elbphilharmonie is the product of digital technology. Algorithm controlled parametric design was used to specify the 10,000 gypsum fiber acoustic panels that create the hall's signature sound. And the wooden Schalldeckel hood that Wagner specified for his Bayreuth Festpielhaus to cover the orchestra pit is both a screen to prevent the audience seeing the orchestra and a low-tech surround sound solution that blends instruments and voices to create the unique, but nevertheless artificially contrived, Bayreuth acoustic 

I am not a philistine arguing for the death of the traditional concert hall, and I have written at length here about the sonic excellence of my local concert hall, Snape Maltings. But tinkering with cosmetic conventions such as informal concert dress and mobile phone programme notes has had no significant impact on the classical demographic. This post does not advocate indiscriminately amplifying Western classical music. But it does argue that the art form now needs to get real and choose between one of two options. If classical music really wants a new younger audience it must start to selectively adopt the 'up close and personal' sonic argot of that generation. If changing historically informed acoustic conventions is not acceptable, the classical tradition should focus on its current and basically static audience; which means revising current fiscal and mass market ambitions dramatically downwards.

* * *

I'm not sure why, but I found this article about the four extant manuscripts of Old English literature fascinating: What Do Our Oldest Books Say About Us?

There are four original manuscripts containing poetry in Old English—the now-defunct language of the medieval Anglo-Saxons—that have survived to the present day. No more, no less. They are: the Vercelli Book, which contains six poems, including the hallucinatory “Dream of the Rood”; the Junius Manuscript, which comprises four long religious poems; the Exeter Book, crammed with riddles and elegies; and the Beowulf Manuscript, whose name says it all. There is no way of knowing how many more poetic codices (the special term for these books) might have existed once upon a time, but have since been destroyed.

I used to own a copy of a book of French poetry (I forget the author) that was published in Paris in the Year 7, meaning in the 7th year after the French Revolution when they had reinvented the calendar. It was a lovely small book and had a remarkable aura of authenticity about it. I purchased it in a second hand bookstore in Dresden that was full of similar treasures in the early 1990s, soon after the Wall came down.

* * *

We haven't visited NewMusicBox for a while and they have an interesting article on the practicalities of programming new music in orchestral schedules:

Take, for example, two 20th-century concerti widely regarded as modern masterpieces: the Ligeti Violin Concerto and James MacMillan’s percussion concerto Veni, Veni, Emmanuel. Both are thrilling pieces and very effective soloist vehicles. And when they do manage to get programmed, both have broad audience appeal, not just to new music aficionados. Why aren’t they in heavier rotation with your local orchestra?

In one of the Ligeti Concerto’s most memorable moments, the oboist, clarinetists, and bassoonist play ocarinas. In the climactic ending to Veni, Veni, the orchestra players are asked to play bells “or two pieces of loud clanging metal.” In addition to renting the scores and parts to these concerti, orchestras have to acquire the ocarinas, bells, and pieces of metal, and determine whether, as per the CBA, these passages warrant doubling fees for the musicians. These costs can add up and, for a smaller-budget orchestra, become quite significant expenses. The orchestra committee might agree to hold a vote to waive the doubling fees—but if they negotiate for an extra off-day in return, the guest conductor or soloist might feel she’s left with inadequate rehearsal time and opt for a warhorse like the Mendelssohn Concerto instead.

* * *

I'm not sure, but perhaps I should apologize: The Guardian offers the story of a trend endangering the survival of traditional orchestral instruments and it turns out the guitar and ukulele are partly to blame.

research shows that some orchestral instruments are in danger of becoming extinct, due to young people’s lack of interest. YouGov research, commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO) to find the most popular instruments among schoolchildren, has revealed the increasing popularity of the ukulele, with one in eight expressing a desire to learn, making it the highest ranked instrument behind the typical rock-band grouping of guitar, piano, keyboards, drums and bass guitar.

But younger generations’ interest in “more sophisticated instruments”, as the Times sniffed, is waning, with the three least popular being the French horn (also known as The Wolf, in Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf), the double bass (Peter) and the trombone (not a major player).

* * *

Anthony Tommasini is once more agonizing over aesthetic quality over at the New York Times: The Case for Greatness in Classical Music.

My most brazen venture into grappling with greatness came in 2011, with my Top 10 Composers project, a two-week series of articles I wrote for The New York Times. The goal was to determine a list of the top 10 composers in history. Of course, the whole project was an intellectual game, though one played seriously by me and the more than 1,500 readers whose comments were posted during the two weeks.

Some of the most interesting reactions came from music-lovers who actually found the game harmful. Others, while dismissing the exercise as absurd, sent in their own top 10 lists, often with injunctions like “Don’t you dare leave out Mahler!” For me, the game was also a genuine exercise in trying to be precise about what makes a composer’s music great, about why a composer merits a place. The final list, as I emphasized, was not the point. The analysis involved in determining it was.

The article is an advertisement for the writer's new book “The Indispensable Composers: A Personal Guide,” available this week from Penguin Press.

* * *

For our envoi here are Nigel Rogers (no "d" so likely not the same Nigel mentioned above) and Ian Partridge in the famous Monteverdi madrigal Zefiro torna e di soavi accenti:

Hey, it was either that or Wagner...

There Is Nothing Like Music

Watch the transformation of mood and spirit in this group of early morning commuters after two guys get them singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow:

Privacy and Inequality

Sometimes I think about moving back to Canada, but then something like this comes along and I change my mind: Statistics Canada looking at people’s banking records? Now that’s going too far.

The ability for governments to collect data through the information system is so easy that what is being collected should concern citizens. Global News reported this week that the Canadian government will be asking financial institutions to collect and provide data from some 500,000 Canadians without their knowledge. According to Global: “the national statistical agency plans to collect ‘individual-level financial transactions data’ and sensitive information, like social insurance numbers (SIN), from Canadian financial institutions to develop a ‘new institutional personal information bank.’”

What is really irksome is that this information was collected secretly and with no public consultation whatsoever. Privacy, to my mind, is a non-negotiable item.

I also ran across this item, which I think dovetails with the previous one: A question of class: how do social inequality metrics work in cultural organisations?

At the London Film Festival last week, the British Film Institute (BFI) announced it was going to start measuring ‘class and socio-economic background in their funding and staffing’. This move reflects the growing attention given to inequalities in the arts: academic evidence increasingly shows that cultural professions are unequal across ethnicity, gender, age, disability and class.

How we measure class and social mobility to reveal inequality is a thorny issue, however. Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn’s recent appeal for the BBC to publish information on the social origins of its workforce received some backlash. One columnist objected to the proposal, suggesting that people’s ‘backgrounds would be audited’ and that they would feel ‘judged’.

Oh, you bet! Jordan Peterson proposed a while ago that there should be a "red line" to evaluate when the extreme left has gone too far. There is certainly one for the right: as soon as you espouse racist or sexist ideas, you are adjudged to be beyond the pale. But what on the left is going too far? He proposed that demanding equity or some form of equality of outcome is the benchmark for an extreme left that has gone too far. I think he is correct on this.

There is a superficially plausible argument that goes like this:

• Poverty and want are real problems in society
• Some people have enormous wealth while others struggle
• This is fundamentally unjust
• Therefore we have to structure society so that people have more equal outcomes

There is just enough truth in this to give fodder to social engineers. But when you delve below the surface a number of other problems arise. First of all, the problems of wealth and poverty are global, not merely local. Some countries are wealthy while others are poor. Why is this? The reasons are manifold. Some countries have natural resources that they exploit successfully. Others with no natural resources have enormous human capital that produces wealth. Other countries have both natural resources and human capital but remain impoverished through corruption and failure to administer justice.

The problem with the socialist solution (and when the argument is given in the form above, it is always so the solution will be socialism) is that it begins by robbing the citizenry of both moral agency and freedom. You have no responsibility for your poverty (or wealth), it is instead a product of shadowy forces of evil and oppression. In order to identify who is virtuous and who is evil we have to carefully observe and monitor everyone. Then we will pass laws fixing the inequality. Oh, and whenever this is done the society collapses into a hellhole of crime, disease and hunger. See Venezuela, Cambodia, China under Mao, Russia under Stalin and so on.

The way to resist the early stages of this disease is to insist on the maximum personal privacy and freedom. The road to hell starts with the supposed innocent collection of personal information. It's downhill from there.

One composer who suffered under the totalitarian oppression of socialism (in an extreme form) was Dmitri Shostakovich. In Taruskin's discussion of his Symphony No. 5, described by the powers that be in the Soviet Union at the time as a "work of philosophical depth and emotional force," he notes that it is a "richly coded utterance, but one whose meaning can never be wholly encompassed or definitively phrased." He points out that in Russia in 1937, under the terror of Stalin, "this last was a saving, not to say a lifesaving grace." The work could be read in various ways and this double meaning is why the music could be both reassuring to the commissars and emotionally moving to the ordinary people who cried at the premiere.

In a socialist society ordinary people preserve a measure of privacy and freedom by lying to the authorities, even, or especially, artists.

Hard College Courses

I just ran across this fascinating description of a hard college course:

In the fall of 1941, as a visiting faculty member at the University of Michigan, the poet W.H. Auden offered an undergraduate course of staggering intellectual scope, entitled “Fate and the Individual in European Literature.” We know little about the origins or trajectory of this remarkable course: how it was conceived, how it was taught, how it was received.

Seventy-one years after the course was taught, a faded, marked-up copy of Auden’s original one-page syllabus was unearthed in Michigan’s archives by the literary scholar Alan Jacobs. He then posted on the internet for all to see. Soon it was circulating widely, eliciting a surprising amount of commentary.

The course was enormous. It was as if Auden had put together an idiosyncratic and mainly literary version of a Great Books curriculum and compressed it into a single semester.

Beginning with the ancient Greek tragedians Aeschylus and Sophocles, the course covered the Roman poet Horace, then St. Augustine’s Confessions, Dante’s Divine Comedy, a bouquet of Shakespeare plays, Pascal, Racine, Blake, Goethe, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Melville, Kafka, Eliot, and other certifiable greats, tossed in some then-classic scholarship about culture (including Ruth Benedict and C.S. Lewis), then washed it all down with the bubbly delights of nine opera libretti.

All in a single semester. Who could digest such a feast?

Sounds like a great course. But something like this would never appear in a college curriculum today, right? I'm not so sure. Let me describe a course I took when I was taking doctoral seminars in musicology at McGill. One was on the Shostakovich symphonies. This was in the 90s and scholarship on Shostakovich was still at an early stage. There were articles in the Musical Times covering the UK premieres of the symphonies but other than that, almost no secondary literature. If you look at the literature on Shostakovich, most of it dates from the last twenty years, not earlier. So the first thing we had to learn (and were quizzed on) was the Cyrillic alphabet because the edition of the complete works of Shostakovich in the library was a Soviet edition all in Russian. You had to know Cyrillic just to find the volume with the symphonies. Here you go:

My favorite letter is the "z", the one that looks like a squashed bug. Ok, so alphabet learned, each week we had to present a symphony in the seminar based on our original research. There are fifteen symphonies and about the same number of students in the class so we did one each. I had the Symphony No. 2. We had to find the score, listen to the symphony with the score and dig out any articles published on the symphony. There was a scarcity of musicological literature on Shostakovich at that time, the most interesting of which was by Richard Taruskin, a Russian specialist. He had written a paper a few years earlier, in 1991, titled "Public lies and unspeakable truth: interpreting Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony" (given at  a conference at Ohio State University in October 1991 and published in Shostakovich Studies CUP 1995).

Some preparatory assignments were to read that Taruskin paper and listen to the immediate symphonic predecessors: Mahler, Sibelius, Beethoven (Symphony No. 9) and so on. We were marked on our presentations, of course, but the main mark was based on a rarity in graduate school: a final exam. The professor argued that as we were mostly studying the symphonies directly and not secondary sources, we should strive to be as familiar with them as possible. So the final exam would be a listening test! He would play brief excerpts from the symphonies, fifteen of them, a total of around sixty movements, and we had to identify the symphony and movement. In order to do this we had to listen to the symphonies many, many times. We had to become familiar with all the themes from all the movements. Each movement might contain two, three or more contrasting themes. These are not short movements! One of the most famous, the Symphony No. 7 "Leningrad" is about an hour and twenty minutes in length. The first movement is almost half an hour! I can remember thinking to myself that "this could be very easy, or it could be very hard" depending on what excerpts he chose. He went on to add that we might be expected to identify the context of the theme: was it in the exposition or recapitulation? Agh! I got together with another student in the class and we managed to thoroughly depress one another. We were both pretty good students and were able to pick sections so sneakily that we could stump the other quite regularly. When we got to the actual exam we found that he had picked very obvious examples and were able to ace the test. That reminded me of a listening test in undergrad at the end of a course on 20th century music. That one had me worried a lot until the first example, the beginning of the Lyric Suite by Berg. Easy example!

But make no mistake, doing enough active and analytical listening to be able to walk into one of these listening tests with some confidence is not easy. Why don't you give it a try? Listen to all the Shostakovich symphonies enough to be able to identify all the themes from all the movements. I will wait right here...

A couple of envois for you. First, the Symphony No. 7 by Shostakovich:

Next, the Lyric Suite by Berg:

UPDATE: I forgot to link to the source of the quote. I also forgot to mention that three professors at the University of Oklahoma took up the challenge and recreated a version of the original Auden course. Every time they have offered it more and more students have clamored to take the course. Must be their irresistible advertising slogan: "This is the hardest course you will ever take!"

Book Review: Music After the Fall

Before I get into the book, I took this photo the other day where I live in Mexico. Pretty nice for November:

Click to enlarge

And it would be pretty much the same in February.

On to the book. This is a book I have known about for a while, Alex Ross had some favorable comments on it. The book is Music After the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 by Tim Rutherford-Johnson. The "fall" is the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Cold War. I was looking forward to hearing about a lot of recent music I may not have encountered and there certainly is that. But unfortunately, the whole project is marred by an obsessive focus on a progressive, post-modernist interpretation of everything.

The publisher is the University of California Press so one expects a genuinely scholarly work, but the writing uses the shock tactics of journalism. Published in 2017, the book represents the way musical historiography is practiced now. Instead of a conventional opening that, as in the introduction to Taruskin's Oxford history, outlines the kind of journey we will take ("The History of What?"), Rutherford-Johnson leaps into a kind of cinematic montage of several pieces:

It begins with a string quartet: two violins, a viola, and a cello pumping notes up and down like pistons. An image of the American machine age, hallucinated through the sound of the European Enlightenment.

Rutherford-Johnson, Tim. Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (p. 1). University of California Press. Kindle Edition. 

It begins with thumping and hammering, small clusters struck on the piano keyboard with the side of the palm or with three fingers pressed together, jabbing like a beak. The sound recalls a malevolent dinosaur or perhaps a furious child, but it isn’t random; a melody of sorts, or an identifiable series of pitches at least, hangs over the tumult.

Rutherford-Johnson, Tim. Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (p. 1). University of California Press. Kindle Edition. 

It begins with water, gently lapping, close miked. In the distance, the hum of a city. The occasional calls of a gull suggest we are on the coast. A woman’s voice enters, softly describing the location and where she is standing, where we are listening: “It’s a calm morning. I’m on Kits Beach in Vancouver. It’s slightly overcast—and very mild for January.” She is very close, almost inside our ears, but the place she describes and what we can hear is far away.

Rutherford-Johnson, Tim. Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (p. 2). University of California Press. Kindle Edition. 

It is loud, and it begins instantly. We hear what is probably feedback, controlled in some way to create different pitches. Blank, artificial, but somehow also animal (fleshy at least)—overdriven and very distorted. After a few seconds it is intercut with something like the sound of tape spooling backward—high-pitched, an almost glistening sound. Then sudden, violent splices of what sound like fragments of orchestral music. Again, lots of distortion, electric screams.

Rutherford-Johnson, Tim. Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (pp. 2-3). University of California Press. Kindle Edition.

 Only after these descriptions (and I have only quoted the beginning of each), putting the reader off-balance, does a clarifying narrative begin:

These five works were all composed within a year or so of each other, between 1988 and 1990. Capturing and explaining this sort of diversity presents obvious difficulties for the historian. Yet it also presents an opportunity. If we want to be able to discuss recent music history in any sort of collective sense (and let’s assume that some of us still find it useful to do so), many of the usual ways of writing such a history fall short. This book hopes, in a small way, to contribute to that historical analysis by reconsidering how we tell the history of late twentieth-century music and by looking ahead to what the twenty-first century holds.

Rutherford-Johnson, Tim. Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (p. 5). University of California Press. Kindle Edition.

That's fair enough. The author goes on to defend his choice of a date to begin the discussion: 1989.

Clearly, 1989 was a momentous year. Not only because of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9 and the events across Central and Eastern Europe and Russia that followed but also because of the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in China and the state-sponsored massacre that ensued and the beginning of a process that would see an end to apartheid in South Africa. The subsequent rapid ascent of a neoliberal political and economic orthodoxy across much of the globe in the 1990s was not a direct consequence of the fall of the wall; many of neoliberalism’s structures had been in place for a decade or more.

Rutherford-Johnson, Tim. Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (p. 7). University of California Press. Kindle Edition.

What is really striking to me about this choice is that it is based purely on political events, not musical ones. Even though the pieces he chose to describe at the open were all written in the period 1988 to 1990, this was not, to my mind, a really important turning point in music.

In their different ways, all five of these works connect with the wider political, social, economic, and technological changes of the time, whether late Cold War geopolitics, the emergence of digital technology, the conditions of modern-day globalization, or the politicization of the personal. Associations like these suggest the first component of my methodological framework: enablement and inspiration.

Rutherford-Johnson, Tim. Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (p. 17). University of California Press. Kindle Edition.

I see the point, of course: what inspires the creation of music and what enables the dissemination of music are important aspects of music history. But they are, to my mind, peripheral in the same way that the kind of manuscript paper Bach used and the kind of poetry that inspired Debussy are peripheral to the musical works they composed.

Technological, social, and political developments can and do influence developments in art in two ways: they either enable them, or they inspire them. That is, a new development can make certain artistic aims possible (through the creation of new technical means, for example), or it can inspire new aesthetic propositions, not necessarily by making use of the new technology, but by pursuing some of its wider implications.

Rutherford-Johnson, Tim. Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (p. 17). University of California Press. Kindle Edition.

Rutherford-Johnson is representative of the viewing of the arts and culture through a therapeutic lens. He actually attempts to reduce the whole aesthetic nature of the five selected works to trauma!

External forces may enable or inspire changes in musical aesthetics, but what in fact are those forces? Looking back to our five examples, they might all be described in relation to trauma. In the Reich and Ustvolskaya pieces, this relationship is clear: in Different Trains, a large-scale historical trauma is approached and to some extent assuaged (through aesthetics, technical intervention, and the narrative of the work); in Ustvolskaya’s sonata, a more personal trauma, the relationship of the individual to the totalitarian state, is presented raw through genuine pain and discomfort. In Sheng’s H’un, another historical trauma is described and partially resolved, similarly to the Reich, although by different stylistic means. Kits Beach Soundwalk is less specifically about trauma, although it does stem from a personal sense of anguish about the dehumanizing impact of the modern sound environment. However, the work did define a mode of musical subjectivity that enabled Westerkamp, a year later, to tackle the much more harrowing topic of the École Polytechnique killings. Merzbow’s work (at least at the time of Cloud Cock OO Grand) does not thematize trauma in the same way as these other pieces do, and it emphatically renounces any programmatic connection to real world events. Nevertheless, the experience of listening to the music, in its harshness, its disorienting, dizzying formlessness, and the aggression of its surrounding discourse, at least imitates trauma, if only to sublimate it or subvert it. This shared ground may suggest a connecting force.

Rutherford-Johnson, Tim. Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (pp. 18-19). University of California Press. Kindle Edition.

I'm sorry for the extensive quotations, but I want to illustrate the author's approach in its proper context. The problem for me is the replacement of any genuine aesthetics by a psychological and collective identity approach. I have railed against the interpretation of every musical composition as an autobiography. I do this not only because I think it is misleading and wrong, but also because there seems to be sufficient evidence that composers, at least up until the present generation, would be the first to condemn this kind of approach. Rutherford-Jones summarizes his approach:

the main developments of the last twenty-five years that might enable or inspire the stylistic development of new music are social liberalization, globalization, digitization, the Internet, late capitalist economics, and the green movement.

Rutherford-Johnson, Tim. Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture since 1989 (p. 19). University of California Press. Kindle Edition.

There is a sense in which this is true, but there is also a sense in which it misses the point. Yes, these are important influences. The music of John Luther Adams, for example, can be understood in terms of its relationship to the green movement. But in so doing you are simply buying the promotion and forgoing the opportunity of critiquing the work in musical terms. Isn't it fairly obvious that the music that is of lasting aesthetic value is that music that manages to not be "about" the shifting political winds of the day? Do composers ever sit down thinking to themselves "now I am going to write a piece about globalization and late capitalist economics"? Maybe some do, but are those the good composers? I see all this stuff as mere marketing buzzwords. Yes, maybe this is how you get the grants and the prizes, but I just don't see any good pieces coming about as a result.

Am I right or just out-of-touch?

For an envoi, let's listen to John Luther Adams' Pulitzer Prize-winning Become Ocean:

Friday Miscellanea

This month is the 50th anniversary of the release of the Beatles' double album universally known as "The White Album."

Sadly, I lost my vinyl copy, purchased new in 1968, years ago, but that's pretty much what it looked like. A lot of photos show "The Beatles" in high relief or brought out in some way, but on the original cover, it was not printed, just embossed so you barely saw it. The Beatles were so famous that they hardly needed to identify themselves on an album cover. The Wall Street Journal has an item on a new deluxe edition of the album. Since the band broke up in 1970 and besides, two of the original members are dead, the only way to keep up the revenue stream is to keep issuing new versions of the original recordings every few years.

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Whoever did this compilation is as obsessive as I am! Here are ten different pianists all playing Le Rappel des oiseaux by Rameau. The pianists are Emil Gilels, Youra Guller, Robert Casadesus, Wilhelm Kempff, Alexander Alexandrov, Cyorgy Cziffra, Jill Crossland, Marcelle Meyer, Pierre Barbizet, and Denys Proshayev. Whew!

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Prince's long-lost East Coast studio? A hip-hop haunting? No explanation for mysterious sickening pulsing beat driving inhabitants of Delaware and New Jersey to distraction: 'A sickening, pulsing heartbeat.' Mystery music is floating from Delaware to N.J.

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If that wasn't creepy enough for you, there is the newish phenomenon of dead musicians on tour thanks to hologram technology. A sample:

More at the Toronto Star: The dead musician holograms are coming — better get used to it.

This Sunday, a resurrected Roy Orbison will take the stage at the Sony Centre in Toronto as a high-tech spectre fronting a live orchestra in a touring production created by Las Vegas company BASE Hologram dubbed In Dreams: Roy Orbison in Concert. 

Winehouse is apparently next, by the way. The British singer died far too young in 2011, but now BASE Hologram is working with her father to put her back on the road with a live band of her own in 2019.

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The Daily Beast has a piece on composer Nico Muhly:

Muhly is resistant to defining his style of music-making, which combines electronic, choral and classical styles. “If you ever have 10 minutes to think about defining your musical style, I would suggest doing something else like learning German or doing ‘a Marie Kondo’ sorting through your drawers,” Muhly said with a hearty giggle.

“I find it supremely uninteresting and not productive, because you find yourself writing the press release before the piece. If you get caught up in self-definition, you don’t do yourself any favors announcing to the world what the project is stylistically.”

He prefers to talk about influences. “Influence is considered such a bad word, as if you’re stealing a recipe from someone. I confess quite openly when I steal something from John Adams. I email and tell him, too. He’s quite gracious about it. My emotional home base of music is from the 1500s to the late 1600s. Maybe then it picks back up to the choral world with Stanford, Finzi, and Howells. Then (Steve) Reich, Glass and Adams, and Messiaen and Stravinsky: the usual suspects. I don’t worry about how to mix them together.”

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And in the category of musical "fake news" here is a hoax video of Maurizo Pollini playing Beatles arrangements with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Karl Böhm. Yeah, right!

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Norman Lebrecht alerts us to this photo of Walt Disney with Dmitri Shostakovich. What could they possibly talk about?

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Environmentalist composer John Luther Adams pens an essay for The Guardian: 'I want my art to matter. I want it to be of use': John Luther Adams

Conventional wisdom holds that as people age they become more conservative. But now, in my mid-60s, I feel as passionate as ever about the imperative for cultural and political change. Neither divine intervention nor artificial intelligence will save us from the catastrophes that seem to lie ahead. To find that salvation, we must find our rightful place in the larger-than-human world – the world that encompasses great human cities and vast mountain ranges, the Mass in B minor and the song of the hermit thrush, the Sistine Chapel and the aurora borealis – this miraculously beautiful world that is our one true home. If my music can inspire people to listen more deeply to this miraculous world we inhabit, then I will have done what I can as a composer to help us navigate this perilous era of our own creation.

Speaking of "conventional wisdom" that collection of platitudes is about as conventional as can be.

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Just reading about Adams' piece Become Ocean reminds me of its soporific blandness. So let's have something rather different. This is the daunting and challenging Sonata No. 6 for piano by Galina Ustvolskaya:

And for the other side of the coin, let's have a rather whimsical piece by Shostakovich. This is the polka from the ballet The Golden Age played by the Apollon Musagete Quartet:

To all my readers a traditional Canadian farewell: have as good a weekend as possible, under the circumstances!

UPDATE: So sorry, I published this a day early by mistake. So have a good weekend anyway. Tomorrow I will put up another post on a new history of new music, so you at least have that to look forward to!