Friday Miscellanea

Our Municipal Christmas Tree

Mexico is a lot better at things like Day of the Dead and Holy Week than Christmas which is really a Northern European festival. Still, lots of parties are had and gifts exchanged and the municipality puts up an artificial Christmas tree in the central plaza. So Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all readers of The Music Salon. I am grateful for your interest and will do my best to put up at least one weekly post and hopefully more in the coming year. I have business responsibilities that take time and I am also spending a lot more time on the guitar, plus I am back composing. I am revising my String Quartet No. 2 which will finally have its much-postponed premiere in Vancouver next May. I hope you are all well and happy and looking forward to a better 2023 than 2022. Let's hope this year was not "average" in the Russian meaning: average year, worse than last year, better than next year! So, on with the regular Friday miscellanea.

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First up, the Salzburg Festival just announced their program for next summer which can be found here https://www.salzburgerfestspiele.at/cms/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/programmbuch_2023_72dpi.pdf

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This looks like a very interesting book and it goes on my list to read next year: The Northern Silence: Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture.

Andrew Mellor journeys to the heart of the Nordic cultural psyche. From Reykjavik to Rovaniemi, he examines the success of Nordic music’s performers, the attitude of its audiences, and the sound of its composers past and present—celebrating some of the most remarkable music ever written along the way. Mellor peers into the dark side of the Scandinavian utopia, from xenophobia and alcoholism to parochialism and the twilight of the social democratic dream. Drawing on a range of genres and firsthand encounters, he reveals that our fascination with Nordic societies and our love for Nordic music might be more intertwined than first thought.

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From an economics blog: My Conversation with John Adams

COWEN: How do you avoid what Harold Bloom called the anxiety of influence?

ADAMS: Harold Bloom was a very great literary critic, sometimes a little bit of a windbag, but his writings on Coleridge and Shelley, and especially on Shakespeare, were very important to me. He had a phrase that he coined, the anxiety of influence, which is interesting because he himself was not a creator. He was a critic, but he intuited that we creators, whether we’re painters or novelists or filmmakers or composers — that we live, so to speak, under the shadow of the greats that preceded us.

If you’re a poet, you’ve got all this great literature behind you, whether it’s Shakespeare or Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson. And likewise for me, I’ve got really heavyweight predecessors in Beethoven, in Bach, in Mahler, in Stravinsky. Maybe that’s what he meant, just the anxiety of, is what I do even comparable with this great art? Another thing is, if I have an idea, has somebody already thought of it before? Those are the neurotic aspects of my life, but I’m no different than anybody else. We just have to deal with those concerns.

COWEN: Are you more afraid of Mozart or of Charles Ives?

ADAMS: [laughs] I’m not afraid of either of them. I love them. I obviously love Mozart more than Charles Ives. Charles Ives is a very, very unusual figure. He was almost completely unknown in most of the 20th century until Leonard Bernstein, who was very glamorous and very well known — Bernstein brought him to the public notice, and he coined this idea that Charles Ives was the Abraham Lincoln of music. Of course, Americans love something they can grasp onto like, “Oh, yes, I can relate to that. He’s the Abraham Lincoln of music.”

Charles Ives was a hermit. He worked during the day in an insurance firm, at which he was very successful, but spent his weekends and his summer vacations composing. His work is very sentimental, also very avant-garde for its time. I’ve conducted quite a few of his pieces. They are not, I have to admit, 100 percent satisfying, and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that Ives never heard these pieces, or hardly ever heard them.

When you’re composing, you have to hear something and then realize, “Oh, that works and that doesn’t.” I think the fact that Ives — maybe he was just born before his time. He was born in Connecticut in the 1870s, and America at that time just was still a very raw country and not ready for a classical experimental composer.

COWEN: You seem to understand everything in music, from Indian ragas to popular songs, classical music, jazz. Do you ever worry that you have too many influences?

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Bach’s accidental masterpiece: The keyboard works of The Well-Tempered Clavier sound more novel and luminous 300 years later than in their composer’s day.

Unfortunately behind a paywall. But it provides me the opportunity to make an observation about Bach: his major works during his lifetime were overwhelmingly for the church and include hundreds of cantatas (composed on an almost weekly basis), plus the massive passions, oratorios and other works for soloists, chorus and orchestra. But while we certainly listen to these works today, we seem to derive the greatest enjoyment from his more mundane compositions such as the Well-Tempered Clavier, written to demonstrate a new tuning system, the inventions, written to educate his children, the Goldberg variations, written as a diversion to while away the hours and the solo music for cello and violin, written to demonstrate the potential of these relatively newish instruments. For the longest time these were regarded as little more than technical studies. But now, all of these works seem to represent to us the essence of Bach's craft, unlinked to any religious message.

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Alex Ross in the New Yorker: Looking Past the Celebrity Conductor

Some years ago, when I was interviewing the pianist Mitsuko Uchida, she poked fun at the idea of a youthful star conductor: “Do you want yourself to be operated on by a genius twenty-year-old heart surgeon? Do you want to go to the theatre and see a teen-ager play King Lear?” Uchida’s point was that practitioners of the arm-waving profession tend to grow better and wiser with age. Orchestras register not only the gestures a conductor makes in front of them but also the history of music-making that those gestures reflect. Herbert Blomstedt, who is ninety-five, can mesmerize a jaded first-tier ensemble with a gentle wave of his hands. It’s more than a question of personal mystique: it’s trust in a cumulative record of collective work.

That's an intriguing start to an excellent discussion of young conductors--especially their shortcomings.

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New research finds UK public ‘can’t live without music’, while musicians face brutal conditions

This data follows on from a survey released by the charity last month which showed that close to half of professional musicians think they will be forced to leave the industry, due to the ‘brutal’ impact of the cost of living crisis, alongside the ongoing impact of the pandemic and Brexit. 

At a time when music is more important to Brits than ever, six in ten professional musicians (60 per cent) say they are worse off financially now compared to the same time last year. Nine out of ten (90 per cent) are worried about affording food over the next six months, with 84 per cent concerned about paying their mortgage or rent.

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 The Cello Suite No 6 by Bach is probably the least well-known of the set. Here it is performed on a five-string cello for which it was originally written.

Here is the Symphony No. 5 by Sibelius with Jukka-Pekka Saraste & Lahti Symphony Orchestra:

And here is John Adams' Shaker Loops:

Friday Miscellanea

Finland, music's superpower: The Rising Star of Conducting Arrives in New York. As a Canadian, once again I am astonished at how many great musicians Finland produces, at a fraction of the population of Canada.

The hype, that is, around the 26-year-old Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä. He’s the fastest-rising maestro of his generation, a darling of fellow musicians and orchestra administrators alike. It seems that every time I meet with someone in the industry lately, there comes a moment in the conversation when I’m asked, “Have you heard Klaus Mäkelä?”

Outside New York, it’s been hard not to. He has collected podium appointments so quickly, an ensemble as prestigious as the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam was willing to create a title, artistic partner, to keep him in reserve until he officially becomes its chief conductor in 2027. That’s when his contracts will be up at the Orchestre de Paris and the Oslo Philharmonic; already, there are whispers about where he could go next.

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From The New Criterion, a tribute to the Orlando Consort: A farewell to voices

Anchored by Robert Macdonald’s bass and propelled upward by Matthew Venner’s lofty countertenor, the Consort had no issue filling the church’s massive nave with sound. From behind their unadorned music stands and without pomp, the small chorus cast barreling waves of voice into every corner of the space with quintet pieces such as De profundis clamavi (Desprez) and maintained the same vigor in more restrained pieces, including Brumel’s (1460–1513) Mater patris et filia, arranged for a trio.

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Has Spotify really wrapped up the mystery of musical taste? Well, I strongly suspect no, but let's have a look:

But for anthropologists, taste is less of a romance than a science. “People often think about taste as being really individual,” Seaver laughs apologetically. “But in the social sciences we say: ‘Ah, that’s not really true.’ Your tastes are part of a broader social patterning that extends beyond you.” He suggests that our typical understanding of taste is shaped by the illusion of choice, akin to going to the record shop: “Among a set of available selections, what record are you going to pick?” Seaver asks me to carry out a thought experiment. “Imagine, what would it mean to have taste in music before there was audio recording?”

It’s flattering to think of taste as a personal choice because it encourages us to believe in our own individuality. Music technologies have long capitalised on this, all while leveraging the emotional connection between a listener and a song.

Nope. In my book, taste is a cultivated collection of aesthetic judgements.

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A Seattle Business Blasts Classical Music To Harass Homeless Encampment Aha! It's not to their taste!

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Melodies unheard, a review of a new book on Music of Ancient Greece.

 However distant the practice of Greek music may be from our experience, the ideal persists. The continued presence of Greek words in musical terminology testifies to ancient music’s cultural authority. (The Greek kithara or concert lyre is the source, via Spanish, for our word guitar, though the two instruments bear little resemblance.) Ambition to revive the music of Greek drama motivated the Italian Renaissance invention of opera and inspired Wagner’s romantic syntheses of myth and spectacle. Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy—the full title is The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music—identified in music the generative force behind the supposed Hellenic Dionysian spirit. Above all, Greek theories about music’s nature and effects—from Plato, Aristotle, and the Pythagoreans, among others—continue to shape our attitudes toward music, even if the sounds that provoked such reflections have long since faded to silence.

The whole review is well worth reading.

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 As an alumnus of McGill University in Montreal, Québec, Canada, I like to keep tabs on the state of affairs in the School of Music. Here is an ex-roommate of mine, Hank Knox, now head of early music performance, conducting the McGill Baroque Orchestra and opera studio in a performance of Handel's opera Rodelinda.

(McGill has three orchestras: the McGill Symphony, who have often played Carnegie Hall, the McGill Chamber Orchestra and the McGill Baroque Orchestra--that's two more than a lot of cities!)

And here is Klaus Mäkelä conducting the Concertgebouw at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg in two symphonies by Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky: the #6 of each. I particularly love the Shostakovich.

A final delight: the Orlando Consort with De profundis clamavi by Josquin:

Is Classical Over?

It used to be the case the the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the CBC, had some sort of mandate to expose and educate the populace with a bit of classical music. I remember watching Glenn Gould do a half-hour show on Sunday afternoons on CBC television. But now it looks like the CBC, the public school system and even the Victoria Conservatory of Music, have thrown in the towel and decided that there is only one kind of music: popular music. Here is an article: Five music classes from Island finalists in CBC's Canadian Music Class Challenge. Here is the Victoria Conservatory entry:

So why this song?

The eighth annual contest is run by CBC Music in partnership with the charitable organization, MusiCounts. In order to qualify, music teachers at the elementary, middle, and high school level were asked to to submit videos of their students performing selections from a list of 24 pre-approved songs, including hits by Neil Young, Blue Rodeo, Trooper and Tegan and Sara, among others.

Ah, so a classical music conservatory was actually not allowed to submit a classical piece. But if they had I'm sure it would have been far more professional.

Weird times. I have the feeling that in a thousand little ways classical music is simply being pushed to the curb and not even allowed to win over new audiences.

UPDATE: And the Victoria Conservatory group won the contest in their category, Community/Independent/Private School. The prize? $1,000 in new musical instruments and a plaque.

Friday Miscellanea

The Grawemeyer Award is one of the most prestigious prizes for composition: Music Inspired by Notre-Dame Fire Wins a Top Prize.

When a fire broke out at the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris in 2019, the British composer Julian Anderson was devastated.

“Seeing a precise and beautiful and precious structure like that dissolving almost into the fire was very, very traumatizing,” he said in an interview.

Anderson soon began channeling some of his despondence into “Litanies,” a 25-minute meditation for cello and orchestra. In the second movement, a series of chords emerges then melts away, echoing the disaster.

The only clip available on YouTube is this one, an excerpt from the end of the work:

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A Path to Freedom is one of the best things I have read recently about the nature and function of art. Hard to excerpt so you should read it all. But here are some quotes:

Apart from the aesthetic pleasure it gives, what’s the relevance of Starry Night? Can we read it as a record of mental illness (Van Gogh loosely depicts his view from an asylum window), and thus as an indictment of a society that refuses to accommodate people who think differently? Or rather as an idealizing, idyllic picture of a lost harmony between humans and nature, a bond soon to be severed irrevocably by climate change?

In the opinion of Jed Perl, longtime art critic at the New Republic and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, that all misses the point. “I want us to release art from the stranglehold of relevance,” Perl writes in Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts (Knopf, $20, 176 pp.), the sharpest, most inspiring book of criticism I read this year. True, art can shed light on social problems and may indeed inspire us to work for change. But art’s primary task, Perl asserts, is not to “promote a particular idea of ideology, or perform some clearly defined civic or community service.” Art is meaningful, valuable, and exciting precisely because of its irrelevance to our most immediate, surface-level concerns.

At the center of Perl’s analysis is the notion that all art is the result of a tension between the authority of tradition on the one hand and the freedom of creativity and invention on the other.

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One blogger takes on the issue of nationalism in music during wartime.

Unless the music somehow expresses the enemy country's commitment to its war, the music — and other art — created by human beings from that country heightens the awareness of what is lost in war. But, yes, it may move us to love Russian people, and Ukraine may be intentionally demanding that we hate the enemy — not merely its government, but its people.

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A couple of years ago I decided to de-digitize parts of my life. I took up sketching with pens and pencils on actual paper (sadly, that didn't last); I switched from doing preliminary sketches for compositions using my music software to doing them with pencil on paper and I started writing a journal and a sequence of haiku using fountain pens instead of, you know, a word processor. It has been a fulfilling and I think inspiring choice. Here is someone musing on one aspect: On the Gift of Longhand.

I’m a longtime longhand writer. I’m old enough to remember writing by hand when it was the only choice. Then I fell to the seductions of these newfangled things called laptops, like so many others. I was delighted by the convenience and by the final-draft look of even the messiest prose. But I switched back to longhand several years ago, and now it’s the only way I write my drafts. When I returned to pen and paper, I did so with the zeal of a convert. Not content to have just one or two good pens, I’ve amassed a small collection of mostly fountain pens. I’m catholic in my tastes, and cherish my Paper Mate Ink Joy, Pilot G-1, and Pilot Varsity, along with two ‘40s-era Parker 51s, one of which belonged to my father. But it’s the fountain pens I really prefer to use when writing first drafts.

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More data on the problems of music and economics: Flutist Mary Barto on the Mannes School of Music strike.

Our base salary is some $70 per hour, as opposed to other parts of the university, where the average is about $130 an hour. Somebody might say, “$130, that’s incredible!” But this includes hundreds of hours of preparation, grading, and writing recommendations. I stopped counting up how many hours I spent prepping my chamber music class when I got to 53. Some of the faculty who teach classes that meet three times a week stopped when they got to 150. This is not an accurate hourly wage; it includes a huge amount of outside time.

The whole interview is worth having a look at. Private music teachers are perhaps the most critical element in music education and they are usually not well-compensated.

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And you might want to have a look at this: Climate Activists Threaten to Start Slashing Paintings as They ‘Escalate’ Their Campaign to Model the Suffragist Movement

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I was also struck by the Notre Dame fire and I took a piece by François Couperin for harpsichord and recomposed it for violin and guitar. Here is the original:

And here is the first page of my recomposition. When I get a chance I will try to do a recording.

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Now for some music clips. Here is Toward the Sea by Toru Takemitsu for alto flute and guitar:

And here is Le rossignol-en-amour by Couperin:

And finally, a really unusual cover of The Rolling Stones Satisfaction:

Sofia Gubaidulina, part 18!

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.

Friday Miscellanea

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.

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 Via Slipped Disc: IS BUDAPEST THE NEW WORLD CAPITAL OF ORCHESTRAL MUSIC?

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!

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Norman Lebrecht does an Inquest into the death of ENO

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.

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The Culture Workers Go On Strike:

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.

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Climate activists target Elbphilharmonie:

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:

Well, I'm impressed.

Today's Listening

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.