After being reminded of my series of posts on this composer by a commentator, I decided to try and finish the series. Looking back, I was astonished to see that the last one in the series was posted in February 2019! Now that's a hiatus. Here is that post: Sofia Gubaidulina, part 17 and there is also a link to the first one if you want to go back and pick them up from the beginning. I started this series because I feel that Gubaidulina is one of the most important composers working today.
Sofia Gubaidulina
To write this series of posts I am mostly working my way through the biography by Michael Kurtz (English edition 2007) from Indiana University Press.
Picking up where I left off, we are in 1987 and after her successful concerts in Germany and the US, her next appearance was at the Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival in Finland. This festival, founded by the cellist Seppo Kimanen, commissioned Gubaidulina's String Quartet No. 2 for the summer of 1987. The piece uses timbral contrasts and the Fibonacci series as structural elements. This was followed by the premiere of the String Quartet No. 3 at the Edinburgh Festival in August. Let's have a listen to these two pieces.
No-one could accuse this piece of being atonal--at least not in the beginning where it is very firmly focussed on G!
The String Quartet No. 3 was given its US premiere in September by the Muir Quartet at a festival organized by the Louisville Orchestra.
This was a rich time for chamber music as after a visit to Paris in November 1987 she was commissioned to write a string trio by Radiodiffusion Française which was premiered by members of the Moscow String Quartet in the Salle Gaveau in March 1989.
If anyone is in the market, you can actually buy five adjoining stall seats in Royal Albert Hall. Price is listed at £825,000. I didn't even know this was a thing.
Seatholders are entitled access to their seats for all Ordinary lettings, which amount to approximately to two thirds of the performances in the Hall in any twelve month period. For those events for which seatholders do not use their tickets, the Hall operates a sucessful Ticket Return Scheme.
I guess the last sentence means you can rent your seats out when you are not using them. I'm still sorry I missed the Cream reunion concerts there in 2005.
Since I moved to Budapest in 2015, the constant question from Hungarians is: “Why on earth would you move here?” My answer is “the music life is like no other city in the world” — an answer that usually elicits confused stares from the questioner. My response to them is: “How many professional symphony orchestras does Budapest have?”
Here is the list of 12 professional orchestras (in no particular order):
MÁV Symphony Orchestra
Budapest Festival Orchestra
Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra
Concerto Budapest
Budafok Dohnányi Orchestra
Zugló Symphony Orchestra
Óbuda Symphony Orchestra
Liszt Chamber Orchestra
Pannon Philharmonic
Orfeo Orchestra/Purcell Choir
Hungarian National Radio Symphony Orchestra
Hungarian National Opera Orchestra
I then pose the question to the questioner(s): How many orchestras do you think New York City has? The answer is: one! That answer is the same for Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Boston. And none of them are supported by state or federal governments…
I think I just put Budapest on my must-visit list. But I think that other large cities have more than one orchestra. Montreal has two, the Orchestra Symphonique de Montréal and the Orchestra Metropolitaine--perhaps three if I Musici de Montréal is still going and even four if you count the McGill Orchestra. I suspect New York has a few as well. But I sure don't know of any cities that have twelve!
When the company’s funding line was finally cut this month, there was little uproar. ENO was a much-loved maiden aunt being laid gently to rest.
Did it have to die? The cause of death, in this coroner’s verdict, is a prolonged failure to address reality. Take opera in English, a founding act of faith. In the vast Coliseum the words were hard to hear, so subtitles were screened above the stage. We faced a Brobdingnagian drama of a Lithuanian tenor mangling Verdi in a foreign tongue while a trendy translation flashed above our eyelines.
This was comic opera on a boardroom scale with a lamentably unEnglish lack of irony. The decline and fall of England’s national opera is a lesson to all working in the arts that you cannot kick problems down the road. ENO died not for lack of cash or love but for want of definition.
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As you may recall, I am an occasional attendee at the Salzburg Festival. But I am thinking of checking out some other European fests. The one in Aix-En-Provence looks interesting as this review in the New York Times attests: At This Summer’s Aix Festival, the Only Laughter Is Bitter.
The characters who feel the freshest at this year’s Aix Festival are populating Ted Huffman’s vivid staging of Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea.” Almost 400 years old, “Poppea” is startlingly contemporary in the gray zone of morality it occupies. Almost no one is entirely likable or unlikable; lust and ambition are simultaneously reveled in and condemned.
At the jewel-box Théatre du Jeu de Paume — which seats fewer than 500, an ideal intimacy for Baroque opera — there is barely a set. Pretty much the only element is a huge pipe, half painted white, half black, hanging over the action, perhaps a symbol of the fate that never quite falls on the adulterous, power-hungry leads.
This season culture workers are organizing against their own exploitation. Professors of art, workers at museums, and assistants at a publishing house have all gone on strike or staged public protests during contract negotiations. Call this a black-turtleneck-worker uprising rather than a white-collar one. “Wages are stagnant and we earn far lower salaries than our peers elsewhere,” the union representing employees at the Brooklyn Museum recently tweeted. They’ve been busy protesting outside their work site. During one action, workers held up signs decrying the vacuity of the VIP opening for the museum’s haute couture fashion exhibit: One read, “You can’t eat prestige.” (The union is calling for a 7 percent salary increase this year and raises of 4 percent per year for each of the two years following.) Unions are currently on strike at the publisher HarperCollins and at the University of California system, where 48,000 academic workers are sitting out their underpaid teaching gigs.
Just as the Sächsische Staatskapelle was about to begin its concert, two climate activists from Germany's "Letzte Generation" (Last Generation) movement walked onto the stage and glued themselves to the conductor's podium. They began calling for resistance to what they saw as the German government's indecisive climate policy.
You know, I would like to stage a protest of my own, if I could just figure out how and where!
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Let's hear some of those Budapest orchestras. This is the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra with the Beethoven Symphony No. 4:
This is the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra with the Kol Nidre of Max Bruch:
And here is a whole program from Concerto Budapest:
The Suite Compostelana by Federico Mompou is one of the most interesting pieces in the Segovia repertoire, because it has a different character than most of the Spanish compositions. Unlike Federico Moreno Torroba, a Madrileño, Joaquin Rodrigo, born in Valencia, or Joaquin Turina, born in Seville, Mompou was Catalan, born in Barcelona, and his music has more of a French influence--elegance rather than rustic vigor.
I'm really stumped to put a tag on this one--not even my catch-all "aesthetics" one will fit! What I want to talk about are those rare unique individuals who set off on their own, exploring musical realms that no-one else has. These figures rarely make any kind of impression on the musical mainstream, or even classical music institutions and are often discovered only decades later, sometimes after they have died.
The one interesting exception to the usual profile is John Cage who was most certainly a musical eccentric following a unique path of his own, but also who managed to achieve a remarkable amount of career success despite this. He is one eccentric who everyone knows by name. I think the main reasons for this were that he always managed to move in closely-knit avant-garde circles and he also had a gift for promotion. He came up with a number of ideas that became so notorious that they were newsworthy. The most prominent of these is probably his silent piece, 4'33, but we should also include his pieces based on the I Ching and a few other ones. He was also a gifted writer and published a number of books, such as Silence, that effectively communicated his aesthetic vision. None of our other eccentrics had much success in self-promotion and most didn't even try. Before we move on, here is a sample of Cage's promotional skills, a 1960 appearance on the popular TV show "I've Got a Secret."
The next eccentric I want to discuss is the very reclusive Conlon Nancarrow who spent much of his life living in obscurity in Mexico. His path was to discover the potential of the manual excising of player piano rolls in order to explore possibilities that no living pianist could execute. You might say he discovered electronic music through mechanical means. Here is his Study No. 40:
Oddly enough, both Cage and Nancarrow were born in 1912.
Pauline Oliveros, born in 1932, is from one generation later and she was a very early explorer of the possibilities of electronic music. She spent most of her life teaching and working in California where she was associated with various colleges and universities. She is particularly known for the concept of "deep listening:"
an aesthetic based upon principles of improvisation, electronic music, ritual, teaching and meditation. This aesthetic is designed to inspire both trained and untrained performers to practice the art of listening and responding to environmental conditions in solo and ensemble situations
Here is Bye bye butterfly, a 1967 piece by Oliveros:
Our final eccentric is another Californian, Harry Partch, born in 1901, the oldest of the group. He focussed on the idea of microtuning and as a result had to invent all his own instruments, which he did with great ingenuity. I think my favorite is the Boo-Bam, a kind of sub-bass marimba which I had the great pleasure of playing when I was a graduate student. Here is a performance of Castor and Pollux, composed in 1952.
The film Tár fascinates me because it seems to deal with a lot of important issues and questions. Unfortunately, because of where I am, I'm not sure I will be able to see the film anytime soon. There is a lengthy review in The New Yorker that is frustrating because after reading it (or most of it) I still have no idea of the truth of the film, whether it is moral crap or not, whether it captures any reality or not. The writer seems to go to great lengths to prevent any such evaluations.
Is the movie saying that if we cancel the greats, we’ll be left only with mass, technology-driven culture? That there is only a superficial difference between a cosplaying fan and a self-mythologizing artist? That Lydia is already in Hell, playing to an audience of demons? That she possesses true artistic purity, because she loves conducting enough to do it at such a debased level? That she has no financial choice? That in being forced to really sublimate her ego, she might find renewal in music, instead of in power? These questions came to me later. In the moment, I registered only an enormous gulf. Lydia is still engaging in the act of making art. But the artist—that is, the person who knows she is connected to others—has separated herself with great success. She’s never been so untouchable.
Uh-huh, well I imagine watching the film might answer a few of those questions! The New Yorker is so attuned to the cultural moment that their writers regard with horror the idea of any kind of plausible evaluation of artistic quality. Waaayy too many other considerations to interpolate. A long while back I commented that Alex Ross would probably rather stab himself in the ears with knitting needles than actually criticize a piece of contemporary music. That principle still seems operative at The New Yorker. Or, heck, in most media and popular culture.
Have any of my readers seen the film and would like to comment?
In retrospect one of the most influential professors in my years at university was not even in the music department--he was a newly-hired philosophy professor teaching Philosophy 100, a first year introduction. I actually spoke to him a few months ago on the phone and thanked him for his inspiration. He was impressed that I am a composer (I didn't tell him how insignificant a composer!).
One of the things he liked to do from time to time was what he called "public service announcements" at the beginning of class before we got into the nitty-gritty. I had a theory professor who did something similar--what he called "ear training" that usually consisted of playing us a particularly unusual piece of music, like a player-piano study by Conlon Nancarrow. The only instance I can recall at this late date from my philosophy professor was when he warned us against hard contact lenses one day.
But I would like to take up the tradition and offer some thoughts on things that lie outside the usual boundaries of the Music Salon. Maybe they will even be useful to some readers.
There is a massive transfer of wealth going on right now from the Boomer generation to their children as many people in their 40s inherit fairly sizable sums of money. I experienced this myself quite a few years ago and can offer some advice. First of all, whatever your current level of understanding is, you will now have to enter the world of investment and finance. The alternative is to hand over your assets to financial advisors or flip-flam operators--and sometimes it is hard to tell the difference. Just look at FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried. The standard path for many is to walk into your bank and purchase whatever mutual funds they recommend. You could do worse, but you could certainly do better. The problem with mutual funds is that there are management expenses that over time can seriously reduce your gains. Another problem is that statistics show that over 90% of active managers do not beat the market. The obvious solution is simply to buy the market, an option offered by what are called "index funds" that simply track a stock index. I think an even better solution is to buy an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that tracks the index. The three biggest ones are SPY which tracks the S&P 500 list of the biggest and best US companies, DIA which tracks the Dow Jones Industrial Average and QQQ which tracks the NASDAQ. A conservative plan is to put 60% into equities (stocks) which make up these indices and 40% into bonds. But this should shift over time. When you are younger you should put more into stocks and less into bonds and vice-versa as you grow older. As no-one really knows where the markets are going over the short-term there is no point in paying experts for their financial advice.
Ethics: this should be a central concern for everyone, but it is surprising how little thought is put into it. There are three main ethical theories: deontology, which emphasizes duties or rules (such as do unto others as you would have them do unto you), consequentialism (which used to be referred to as utilitarianism) which strives to achieve the best result for the greatest number and virtue ethics, which actually goes back to Aristotle. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
What distinguishes virtue ethics from consequentialism or deontology is the centrality of virtue within the theory. Whereas consequentialists will define virtues as traits that yield good consequences and deontologists will define them as traits possessed by those who reliably fulfil their duties, virtue ethicists will resist the attempt to define virtues in terms of some other concept that is taken to be more fundamental. Rather, virtues and vices will be foundational for virtue ethical theories and other normative notions will be grounded in them.
I'm a virtue ethicist as I have long been of the opinion that a lot of the other ethical theories tend to obscure our basic intuitions about virtue and vice. We tend to know virtue and vice when we see them! Interestingly, moral philosophy shares similar methods and problems with aesthetics.
I will make no comments on political issues as there is no surer way to create outrage and dissention! But I will say that I think a modicum of individual liberty is fairly important.
So let's end with one of those pieces for player-piano by Conlon Nancarrow.
The concert on Thursday, 1 December is a compact, intimate Late Night programme without interval, in which the audience will be seated on cushions on the floor of the Concertgebouw’s Main Hall. The orchestra will perform Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen and Claude Vivier’s Lonely Child featuring Aphrodite Patoulidou. The Greek soprano will also be performing a Greek lullaby, accompanying herself on the nyckelharpa, a traditional Swedish string instrument.
On Friday 2 and Sunday 4 December Strauss and Vivier will be part of a more regular concert with interval, which will also feature Samuel Barber’s Mutations from Bach and Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto with soloist Vilde Frang. The programme is a musical voyage of ‘memory, loss, solitude, youthful innocence and coming of age’, in Hannigan’s words.
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Here is a brief comment on a new book on James Bond and the Beatles: *Love and Let Die*. Remarkably, the Beatles first single, "Love Me Do" and the first Bond film, Dr. No were released on the same day in 1962. Personally, I think the early Beatles endure a lot better than the Bond films, but that's just me. This is a fascinating excerpt from the book:
In 1978, George married Olivia Arias and in the same year they had a son, Dhani. Dhani only discovered his father’s past when he was at school. ‘I came home one day from school after being chased by kids singing “Yellow Submarine”, and I didn’t understand why,’ he has said. ‘It just seemed surreal: why are they singing that song to me? I came home and freaked out to my dad: “Why didn’t you tell me you were in the Beatles?” And he said: “Oh, sorry. Probably should have told you that.” It’s impossible to imagine, John, Paul or Ringo neglecting to mention they were in the Beatles to their children.
It’s do or die time for the English National Opera. Earlier this month Arts Council England, a Government body, said it would stop funding the ENO unless it agreed to move from London to Manchester. Now ENO chairman Harry Brunjes says the company will close rather than move up north.
“There is no relocation,” he told MPs on Wednesday. “This is closing ENO down. This is losing 600 jobs from London.” The forced move is part of the levelling up agenda, but there are mixed signals.
The banjo gets a bum rap. A staple of American country music, its bright tone and rhythmic clangor threaten to overwhelm musical gatherings of other, milder string-band instruments, such as guitar, mandolin, bass and fiddle. This piercing, metallic quality has made it the butt of a host of musicians’ jokes (“What’s the difference between a banjo and a chainsaw?” “A chainsaw has a dynamic range”). In her compelling, thoroughly researched history, Kristina R. Gaddy reveals a different instrument entirely, one intimately rooted in the African diaspora and capable of expressing flights of sorrow and joy.
Popular culture has tended to obscure the banjo’s roots as a warm, wooden instrument built by enslaved Africans in the Americas for use in dancing and on holy days.
In September 2022, a music critic named Anthony Fantano received a string of angry Instagram D.M.s from Drake. Fantano reviews new albums in short YouTube posts, in which he monologues directly at the camera, standing in front of stacked, cherry-red record shelves. In a recent post, he had likened Drake’s latest release, Honestly, Nevermind, to “a sad solo dance party.” “Your existence is a light 1,” the Canadian rapper clapped back, a reference to Fantano’s practice of rating records on a 1–10 scale. Uncharitable, perhaps. But the fact that Drake—a global superstar who is generally cagey toward journalists—bothered to inveigh against a critic at all spoke to Fantano’s status: He may be one of the few working music critics who can, in this day and age, be conceivably called a tastemaker. It was the sort of ego-first collision of artist and critic that’s in increasingly short supply.
History books will inform you that ballet properly begins in the late sixteenth century, with the elaborate marriage and birthday celebrations at the French court, drawing their imagery from the cabalistic and astrological geometry of Neoplatonic humanism. This may be true in terms of aesthetic theory, but in executive practice ballet also reflected more immediately the discipline of the military parade ground, with its insistence on straight lines, regular steps, and peremptory commands emanating from a central figure. For Louis XIV, courtly ballet at Versailles was, in the words of the historian and critic Jennifer Homans, “a matter of state” and yet “more than a blunt instrument with which to display royal opulence and power, a symbol and requirement of aristocratic identity.” And even when courtiers weren’t dancing, every move and gesture, every bow and curtsey in the royal presence was choreographed according to a strictly elegant etiquette.
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In case you don't know the work of Barbara Hannigan, here she is performing a Ligeti excerpt with Simon Rattle and the London Symphony:
And, what the heck, here is the Prelude to the Cello Suite No. 1 by Bach on banjo:
