Friday Miscellanea

I find most organs thick and lugubrious sounding, but old Spanish organs have a wonderful crisp and "crunchy" sound that is quite surprising. Here is Tiento de batalla, 5e tono ''Punt baix'' by Juan Cabanilles played on a 1695 organ in the Cathedral of Valencia:

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One of the most interesting pieces in 20th century music also has one of the most interesting "origin" stories. The piece is Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time and the Wall Street Journal chose it recently for its Masterpiece series: Finding Grace in a Grim Setting.

At the first performance on Jan. 15, 1941, in Stalag VIII-A, the prisoners sat mesmerized, shivering in the cold for an hour. “Never before,” wrote the composer, “have I been listened to with such attention and understanding.” Many were actually bewildered by what they heard, yet they grasped that something truly special had occurred. Several had donated money to purchase a used cello from a nearby town for the occasion, a transaction made possible with the aid of the armed guards, who transported the cellist to pick up the instrument. That in itself seemed a minor miracle.

I encourage you to read the whole piece as it offers some information about the composition of the piece that I was unaware of. I have actually been to Görlitz, the site of Stalag VIII-A, though not to the actual camp, the site of which which does not exist any more.

The Masterpiece series, incidentally, is one of the few places in the mass media where you can find reliably interesting discussions of, yes, masterpieces. In a lot of the progressive cultural world any mention of art created by Dead White Europeans has to be accompanied by flagellation and apologies as the writer sets out to deconstruct the very idea of a masterpiece. That's all quite wrong, of course. Every person on earth who has any interest in or regard for the fine arts knows perfectly well that there are masterpieces.

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Ran across this in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, p. 295:

Hearing something new is embarrassing and difficult for the ear; foreign music we do not hear well.

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Via CTV news comes the intriguing statistic that the average person stops seeking out new music by age 28:

A survey by streaming service Deezer found that the average person reaches "musical paralysis" -- when she or he primarily listens to familiar tracks and does not seek out new genres -- at the age of 27 years and 11 months.

Musical discovery peaks nearly three years earlier, with 25-year-olds on average listening to at least 10 new songs per week.

Deezer surveyed 5,000 adults online across Brazil, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Brazilians reached musical paralysis the earliest, at 23 years and two months, while Germans stayed curious the longest, hitting paralysis at 31 years old.

On the other hand, some of us are not all that average.

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Via Slipped Disc comes this list of free access scholarly music journals. There has to be a lot of interesting stuff there.

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Another article about the crisis in music education in the UK: Music education ‘crisis’ laid bare in parliamentary report.

It says: “To date, the target of 75% (90% by 2025) for EBacc take-up has failed to be met by a very long way. Currently the number of students studying the EBacc has plateaued at 38% in state-funded schools. Indeed the number of students passing the EBacc was 16.7% in 2017/2018. And yet this failing policy is causing untold damage to music and many other creative subjects in our schools. And for what?”

The report goes on to argue that the government and Ofsted should take on board a number of recommendations around music education, “in particular as a matter of urgency the EBacc must be reviewed and reformed, and creative subjects, including music, must regain their central role in a broad and balanced curriculum for all of our children”.

The recommendations also include calls that music should be taught by a specialist teacher as part of the curriculum in all state schools for at least one hour every week and that schools have at least one full-time staff member teaching only music.

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I am very much of two minds regarding articles like these: Daniel Barenboim is a great musician and humanist. So why are so many people afraid of him?

In musical circles, Barenboim’s temper is legendary. He has thrown fits because a violist rolled his eyes, because a singer bowed in the wrong place, because a favored principal player was on vacation. He once berated a musician who lacked concentration because someone in their immediate family had died. He has insulted a doctor who said that a performer with a stomach flu was too sick to play. On at least two occasions, he has allegedly grabbed and shaken members of his staff in anger.

Yes, sounds rather dire. But I have a considerable degree of mistrust for all muckraking articles like these that often are nothing more than journalistic malpractice. Are these a few isolated incidents out of a decades-long career of great creativity and good behaviour? Do we forgive great artists for their human flaws? Well, not really. Bad behaviour is bad behaviour and being creative in another part of your life does not get you off the hook. On the other hand, journalism thrives on nasty stories about famous people. But a more insidious issue is why should anyone fear a mere conductor and pianist? Is he going to stab us with his baton? No, the reason people might fear someone like Daniel Barenboim is because of the power he wields. If you need to curry favor with someone because they can make or break your career then they can get away with the arrogant misuse of power. So let's look at how power is wielded in arts institutions.

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Sorry, due to the pressure of other duties today, this will have to be an abbreviated miscellanea. So let's have a nice big envoi. This is Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time in a performance by four excellent players: Richard Stoltzman(cl)　Peter Serkin(p)　Yo-Yo Ma(vc)　Pamela Frank(vn).

Slow Practicing

I have long advocated slow practicing to my students (and nowadays, to myself!) but what that means exactly needs to be spelled out in some detail, I suspect.

The virtues of slow practicing are widely known and widely practiced. I have been told by people who were there that guitarists like John Williams can be heard before a concert playing through certain repertoire at very slow speeds, perhaps half of the actual tempo. I have been told by orchestral players that they have heard Pepe Romero practicing the Concierto de Aranjuez at one-quarter tempo before a concert. If you have never done this you will be astonished at how much sheer concentration it takes and how much energy.

But just playing the piece at a fraction of the normal tempo is only part of the story. You need to ask yourself why this is a useful technique. The reason you are practicing very slowly is to observe exactly what is going on in both hands. Is there some fixed tension somewhere that you might need to release? Can you improve the right hand attack so as to remove any harsh sounds due to rushing? Are your fingers moving in the most efficient way possible? Do you feel any strain anywhere and can you reduce or remove it? In other words, it is all in how you practice. Frankly, if you practice slowly in a sloppy inattentive manner, you will actually make things worse instead of better! I think that one of the most important factors in good playing is your alertness to what is physically comfortable. You also need to be sensitive to good tone, rhythmic precision and musical phrasing. In the absence of these abilities, I suspect it doesn't matter how slow you practice.

Here is a piece I recorded years ago and I assure you, there was lots of slow, careful practicing beforehand. This is Las Abejas by Barrios:

Soothing Classical Music

This topic is always a slightly uncomfortable one for me as it involves reconciling how I listen to music with how other people listen to music. Or more accurately, how non-musicians listen to music. Still more accurately, how non-classical musicians listen.

A while back a commentator linked to an article in The Guardian about a new classical station in the UK: Young people are turning to classical music to escape ‘noise of modern life'.

To many, the decision announced last week to launch Scala Radio, a major new station founded on the belief that classical music can appeal to younger audiences, will have come as a surprise. But research has shown clear indications of new listening trends, with almost half (45%) of young people saying they see classical music as an escape from the noise of modern life.

I looked through the rest of the article to see if there were any details about the research, but found nothing specific. I generally distrust journalism because they tend to both follow a predetermined narrative and get the facts wrong. More:

The launch of a new classical entertainment station aimed at younger listeners is based on more than a hunch. Research found that a new generation of listeners was switching on to classical music through different sources, with 48% of under-35s exposed to it through classical versions of popular songs, such as the Brooklyn Duo version of Taylor Swift’s Blank. And 74% of people in the same age group had experienced classical music via a live orchestral performance at a film screening, according to analysts at Insight working for Bauer Media, owner of the new station.

"Research found" is such a weak reed that you can hang almost anything on it. OK, I can believe that a lot of young people have heard "classical versions" of popular songs, but the 74% of young people being exposed to a live orchestra at a film screening seems very odd. Is this a big city thing? Does this happen a lot that an orchestra shows up at a film screening and plays a few tunes? Let's have a listen to the one concrete example, the Brooklyn Duo version of "Blank Space" by Taylor Swift:

And now let's hear the original. (Blogger doesn't want to embed, so follow the link.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-ORhEE9VVg

That explains a few odd things about the "classical version." As a piece for cello and piano it is awkward and not very successful. The melody is jerky and uninteresting, largely because it was originally intended to be sung with words and the rhythm is that of speech. This can be interesting, of course, and some Russian theorists, Boris Asaf'yev in particular, had a theory on intonazia that suggests that instrumental music can suggest the moods of vocal rhetoric--music can "speak" in other words. But just transcribing a vocal line for cello without the words does not necessarily make the music speak. Usually it just comes out like something is missing, which it is. Looking at the Taylor Swift original we hear the words and therefore the "meaning" of the music. The song, like so many in the genre, seems to be largely about narcissism and wealth porn. I have to say though, that the cello has a much nicer timbre than the thin, edgy sound of Taylor Swift's voice.

Frankly, I would much rather hear the gritty realism of a good pop song than the smoothed out diluted "classical version." Like in the old Zen saying, not seeing the difference is to mistake the map for the territory. A good pop song is an authentic aesthetic expression. The "classical version" is a watered down remembrance; like a faded postcard from the beach it is not much of an aesthetic experience in itself.

But I am not a normal listener: I don't look to music to soothe me at the end of a long day working in a factory or serving meals or berating employees. Instead, I look to music to take me on an aesthetic journey to new places that offer new experiences. Sure, sometimes I listen to music to take a familiar journey, like returning to Paris or Rome to refresh your experience. Or perhaps it can be like participating in a great conversation or some more intimate act. But while there can be soothing moments, if the whole experience is a soothing refuge, then I'm not interested. I also don't respond well to tranquilizers--they tend to make me anxious!

I think I have always had this kind of relationship with music. I didn't develop an interest in music until I was exposed to some rock music in the middle-60s and it is always the challenging music that has caught my interest. It puzzles me why not everyone shares this interest! Once in university I challenged some friends of mine by making them listen to the whole of the Grosse Fuge by Beethoven. This was in answer to some question or other like: what's your favorite piece of music? At the time it was this one:

Here is a thought experiment for you: why don't the Brooklyn Duo or 2Cellos or any of the other "classical version" ensembles do a version of this piece? There are obvious answers, but also less obvious answers.

Friday Miscellanea

Here is a lovely act of kindness: pianist Paul Barton plays for an old blind elephant who seems to quite enjoy it:

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If you like books, and why wouldn't you, then you have to go over to Abe Books' Weird Book Room for a collection of books that challenge the very notion of weirdness. Most are not music-related, but this one is:

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I would not have believed this was possible! Remember the aria that the blue diva sings in The Fifth Element, the Luc Besson film? The one where a normal soprano voice is carried up to the stratosphere and down to the depths by use of electonics? I don't know the name of the device, but it simply transposes the frequency of a pitch up or down as needed. The music of the first part is from Lucia di Lammermoor by Donizetti then it turns into a rock tune with synthesized voice. Here is the scene from the movie:

So what's not possible? Recreating this with a live soprano with orchestra and rock band. But no, soprano Jane Zhang manages a pretty fair reproduction:

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This article from The Guardian is yet another example of an unfortunate trend: 'Preserved in aspic': opera embarks on diversity drive.

Opera is shockingly white, overly traditional and too slow to change, according to the leader of one of the UK’s leading companies.

Stuart Murphy, the former TV executive who joined English National Opera as its chief executive last spring, made the damning assessment as he announced new measures to tackle its lack of diversity.

That includes positive action to recruit at least four chorus members from a black, Asian and ethnic minority (BAME) background.

Murphy recalled joining the company and and finding it “really shocking” that 39 of ENO’s 40-strong chorus were white. “We weren’t true to our values, we didn’t represent Britain,” he said. “It just felt strange to me … Young white audiences also think it is weird.”

The story is really one of a collision between two different ideologies. On the one hand there is the progressive ideology, the idea that you identify social flaws or biases and immediately create policies to correct them. Seems perfectly reasonable, right? But it is one of those slippery, dangerous ideas that can easily lead to extremes. The Soviet "new man" starting from zero is a similar idea, as was the idea of wiping history clean in the French Revolution. They even had a new calendar starting from the year zero. I can see exactly how people like Stuart Murphy are envisioning what is needed. There are many non-white people living in the UK, therefore the proportions of non-white people in, for example, the English National Opera should reflect that. But all this depends on you having absolutely no knowledge of nor respect for history. To say that opera is "shockingly white" is disingenuous at least. Opera was the creation of a small group of cultural leaders in Italy in the late 16th century. They were all white, as was the cultural milieu. The fact that this art form has been pursued with great creative energy in Western societies ever since is also not shocking. If we look at the audiences for opera we would likely see that they remain mostly white as well. Opera so far has been largely a white thing. Not shocking at all. Now if you want to add non-white members to the chorus, sure, why not? But do it for musical reasons, not ideological ones. I very strongly suspect that no-one has been blocking the door to persons of color auditioning for the ENO chorus. That would be wrong and likely illegal. But creating a quota for certain minority groups? No reason for that save ideology.

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We can add this one to the annals of technological hubris:

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Slipped Disc mentions the passing away of a very fine Canadian voice teacher, Selena James. I knew her quite well when we were both teachers at the Victoria Conservatory of Music in British Columbia. I actually met her a few years earlier when I was a young guitar student at the university. Selena had a voice student prepping for her graduating recital and decided that the student had just the right sort of voice to do the Songs from the Chinese by Benjamin Britten, written for voice and guitar. This was a radical idea at the time as voice recitals were always, 100%, accompanied by piano. It was the first time I had the opportunity to do some serious chamber or ensemble music as I had only been playing classical guitar for a couple of years. I had to do some really hard work to learn the part. It was a great experience for both of us and entirely due to the breadth of vision of Selena. A remarkable number of outstanding singers came out of her studio as we see in the obituary from the local paper: Selena James, Saanich soprano who guided the stars, was ‘like family to us all’

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Roger Scruton has some interesting things to say about conservatism and the arts: CONSERVATISM AND THE CONSERVATORY. Impossible to summarize, but:

THE OBSERVATION IS OFTEN MADE that political conservatives do not have anything much to say about the arts, either believing, with the libertarians, that in this matter people should be free to do as they please, or else fearing, like the traditionalists, that a policy for the arts will always be captured by the Left and turned into an assault on our inherited values. Of course, there is truth in both those responses; but they are not the whole truth, and in my view one reason for the precarious state of the arts in our public culture today is that conservatives – who often come out near the top in fair elections – have failed to develop a clear cultural policy and to understand why, philosophically, such a policy matters...

For many people music is simply a matter of enjoyment, irrelevant to the greater things in life, and a matter of personal taste with which we cannot argue. John likes hard rock, Mary likes bluegrass, Fred likes hip-hop, Judith likes modern jazz, and so on. Once you enter the realm of classical music, however, you realize that such simple views no longer apply. You are in the presence of a highly learned, highly structured art form, in which human thought, feeling, and posture are explored in elaborate tonal arguments. In learning to play the music of Bach or Beethoven, for example, you are acutely aware that you are being put to the test by the music that you are playing. There is a right and a wrong way to proceed, and the right way involves learning to express, to control, to respond in mature and persuasive ways. You are undergoing an education in emotion, and the skills you learn do not remain confined to your fingers: They penetrate the whole body and brain, to become part of your world.

Moreover, this kind of education is inseparable from the art of judgment. In learning classical music, you are learning to discriminate, to recognize the authentic examples, to distinguish real from fake emotion, and to glimpse both the depths of suffering and the heights of joy of which human beings are capable. Not everyone can excel in this form of education, just as not everyone can be a mathematician, a motor mechanic, or a basketball star. 

If that seems intriguing, then read the whole thing.

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Alex Ross has a new piece in The New Yorker about singer/songwriter Gabriel Kahane, Strangers on a Train: Gabriel Kahane's Wrenching 'Book of Travelers'

Gabriel Kahane, a Brooklynite singer-composer who sways between pop and classical worlds, has taken the concept of the concept album to rarefied heights. For his record “The Ambassador,” released in 2014, he created a suite of songs inspired by various buildings in Los Angeles, the title track paying tribute to the venerable hotel where Robert F. Kennedy was shot. In “Book of Travelers,” which Nonesuch issued last year, Kahane recounts an adventure he undertook in November, 2016: the day after the Presidential election, he boarded the Lake Shore Limited out of New York and racked up almost nine thousand miles riding trains across the country, talking to fellow-passengers and making songs from the stories that he heard.

Here is a song from the album:

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I think the right envoi for today would be the "Unfinished Symphony" of Franz Schubert in a performance by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Riccardo Muti. Incidentally, the name of the symphony is in quotation marks because it is just a nickname. There is no evidence that reveals why Schubert only wrote two movements (there is a third, a scherzo, complete in piano score, but with just a small part orchestrated). He wrote so much music in his short life that it is easy to imagine him stopping work on this piece and taking up some other project and just never getting back to it. Hey, if you look on my hard drive you will see many brief fragments that I never got around to turning into complete pieces. These two movements are so ravishing that many have wished that he had found the time to finish it.

Salzburg 2019

I am going to get to Salzburg this summer and the slate of concerts looks pretty good. I have applied for the tickets already--you have to select them online and then wait to see if they have been "allocated" to you. I notice that the production of the Mozart opera Idomeneo is sold out already. Looks like there are tickets for everything else. I requested tickets for Grigory Sokolov on August 1st, the Bavarian Radio Symphony on Aug. 2 conducted by Mariss Jansons (Beethoven and Shostakovich), on Aug. 3 the Mozarteum Orchestra conducted by Ivor Bolton playing Mozart of course, on Aug. 4 Igor Levit playing Mahler and Liszt, on Aug. 5 the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Franz Welser-Möst playing Wagner, Strauss and Shostakovich, on Aug. 6 Evgeny Kissin playing Beethoven and that's all for now. I may try to get an additional ticket to the Camerata Salzburg conducted by Roger Norrington doing Mozart, Stravinsky and Haydn. I have been dying to hear Stravinsky in an historically informed performance on original instruments. 8>)

Here is a photo of the Big Hall, or as they say, the "Grosses Festspielhaus"

Aussie TV

My latest discoveries on Netflix are Aussie tv series. I have sampled Swedish and Finnish crime dramas, a Serbo-Croatian newspaper drama, action series from Israel and Turkey, a Russian show about a detective with an exceptional sense of smell, and one show about disaffected youth in Rome. None of them caught my fancy. But then I had a go at an Australian tv series and got hooked. So far I have not found one not worth watching.

Pine Gap is a one season show that takes place on a high-tech intelligence facility run jointly by the US and Australia in the Aussie outback. It just aired in 2018 so there likely will be more seasons coming out. It involves international intrigue and romance.

The Code also involves high-tech espionage, but it is more personal centered around two brothers, one of whom is a journalist and the other a brilliant, high-functioning Asperger's personality who can do just about anything with computers so he usually has to be kept away from them! Somehow he lands a gorgeous Iranian immigrant girlfriend. The three get mixed up in corruption in high places. Two seasons and well worth watching.

Secret City I have just started watching. It also involves corruption in government and stars a journalist. The amazing architecture of the Parliament House in Canberra, where much of the action takes place, is almost another character:

Click to enlarge

Wanted is my favorite so far. It follows the adventures of two women, one hiding out from the authorities after she killed her husband in self-defence, and the other the sheltered daughter of a wealthy businessman. While coincidentally waiting at a bus stop together they get mixed up in illegal drug deals, corrupt cops, and end up wanted, on the run and, of course, best friends. Three seasons and still going.

What all these series have in common is interesting and believable characters which seem to be rare in US tv these days. Plus, NO SUPERHERO COSTUMES AND NO CGI SPECIAL EFFECTS. If I see Thor throw his hammer one more time, or Iron Man rocket into the sky or Captain America do something really ludicrous with his shield I swear I'm going to hurl...

UPDATE: Just watching Season 3, episode 5 of Wanted and there was a little bit of dialogue that captures rather nicely the Australian view of things: the two leads are still on the run, on foot, and they come across an abandoned barn at dusk where they decide to hole up for the night. One character looking dubiously into the dark barn says "Do you think there'll be rats?" to which the other replies, "Not if there's snakes." Yep.

Art is Right Wing?

Reading Ann Althouse this morning, she refers to an old post of hers that sounds rather interesting: Art is right wing. That post itself quotes a comment she made on an even older post:

To be a great artist is inherently right wing. A great artist like Dylan or Picasso may have some superficial, naive, lefty things to say, but underneath, where it counts, there is a strong individual, taking responsibility for his place in the world and focusing on that.

Especially in today's environment, something like this is very provocative. Here is one comment on the post I linked:

There are two separate issues here: the creative element, that is, the art itself, and the artist's personal politics. Those artists who are leftists do not seem to realize that their individualism is at odds with actual leftism in practice.

Soviet and Chinese "art" and "literature" (the words require scare quotes in this context) made a mockery of true art, because their mandatory service to leftism destroyed originality and individualism. Only the dissidents made anything lasting.

I like the mapping out of a distinction between an artist's activity qua artist and their personal politics, but! The second paragraph, while seeming plausible, goes wildly wrong if you know something about Soviet art, specifically music composition in the Soviet Union. Three names come immediately to mind: Sergei Prokofiev, who left Russia in 1918 but in the 1930s spent more and more time going back and forth between the Soviet Union and France and in 1936 he returned permanently and took up residence in Moscow until his death in 1953, on the same day that Stalin died. Dmitri Shostakovich lived his entire professional life under the Soviet regime, born in 1906 he died in 1975. His music was condemned twice, in 1936 and 1948, but he survived both those attacks and continued to compose without ceasing until his death, though he did keep a number of works, such as the Violin Concerto no. 1, in the drawer until after Stalin's death. Sofia Gubaidulina struggled her entire career in the Soviet Union against official strictures and in 1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union, she took up residence in Hamburg, Germany.

Two out of the three: Prokofiev, Shostakovich with Aram Khatchaturian on the right.

Gubaidulina is a later generation, of course. The irony here is that a lot of the finest musicians in the oppressive political environment of the Soviet Union, were quite creative individuals whose work was often contrary to the imposed narrative. Of course they were not dissidents--there were no active, living dissidents under Stalin as he either had them shot or banished them, like Solzhenitsyn, to concentration camps. They were forced to write works that were at least superficially regime-praising, like some rather embarrassing cantatas, but most of their output was creatively quite free of those requirements. Examples would include all of Shostakovich's string quartets and Prokofiev's piano sonatas and concertos. Gubaidulina never seems to have written anything directly in service to the regime, but she came along much later.

If we look at the work of artists in Western countries today we seem to see more ideological conformity than in the Soviet Union! Isn't that a surprise? Most of the composers working in the US, for example, seem to be following the same playbook of identity, gender equity, diversity, environmentalism and so on. Art, for them at least, does not seem very right wing. We might look for evidence at Alex Ross' column on Notable Performances and Recordings of 2018:

At a time when some orchestras are unspooling entire seasons devoid of female and nonwhite composers, the L.A. Phil has commissioned twenty-two women and twenty-seven people of color. In October, at an event in the orchestra’s Green Umbrella new-music series, I was shaken by Tina Tallon’s “. . . for we who keep our lives in our throats . . .,” a response to sexual abuse.

Most works mentioned are quite free of political reference though none that I know of are as satirical of the current pieties as Shostakovich's Preface To The Complete Collection Of My Works And Brief Reflections Apropos This Preface, Op.112, or his absurdist opera The Nose.

I guess my point here is that the truth is in the details, not the superficially plausible generalization.

A good envoi here might be Shostakovich's Anti-Formalist Rayok, a work so satirical that it was not premiered in his lifetime:

In January 1989, a much-rumored work by Dmitri Shostakovich titled Anti-Formalist Rayok received its public premiere. Rayok is a single-act satirical opera/cantata for bass soloist and mixed chorus. Each character represents a prominent Soviet political figure: Joseph Stalin, Andrei Zhdanov, and Dmitri Shepilov. The text of the libretto is either taken directly from actual speeches given by these political figures or follows their idiosyncratic style of public speaking.

Of course we are not going to get any of the jokes.