Friday Miscellanea

I don't really care for jazz for reasons I have discussed before, but at the same time, there are jazz musicians I have a great deal of respect for. Miles Davis, of course. But the one jazz musician that always impresses me with his sheer creative spirit and imagination is Sun Ra. The New York Times has this guide to his work: 5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Sun Ra.

Now we’re putting the spotlight on Sun Ra, the experimental pianist, organist and bandleader whose idiosyncratic blend of jazz imagined life on other planets. Born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham, Ala., he wore ornate robes and Egyptian headgear, and composed progressive music meant to commune with Saturn, a place he said he felt a connection with after an out-of-body experience in college. “My whole body was changed into something else,” Sun Ra once said. “I could see through myself.” He said aliens spoke to him: “They would teach me some things that when it looked like the world was going into complete chaos, when there was no hope for nothing, then I could speak, but not until then. I would speak, and the world would listen.” In turn, Sun Ra’s music centered on space travel as a form of Black liberation. He believed Black people would never find freedom on Earth, and that real emancipation resided in the cosmos. Over the course of his career, Sun Ra recorded more than 200 albums with his band — called the Arkestra — before his death in 1993 at 79.

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The Observer offers a listening plan: Feed your soul: the 31-day classical music diet for January.

Choices have been shaped, in part, by the cold, dank days and long nights of January. A summer regime would have been altogether more airy. Away from live encounters in the concert hall, my preference tends to be contemplative and often quiet: a measure of what level of noise I want coming in through my headphones and invading rather than enhancing my day’s activities. You may have a different appetite for musical jolts and thumps and pulsating rhythms. All the composers here can provide that option too, easy to find with a bit of YouTube-ing or Googling. The boundaries of classical music are ever more porous and open, spilling into other forms and all to the good. Give up prejudice or fear or indifference. Open your ears. Get listening.

For today she recommends "Clair de lune" by Gabriel Fauré:

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Rehashing some controversies: I’m going to a classical music concert for the first time. What should I know?

Classical music is surprisingly controversial.

For some, it’s a pinnacle of cultural achievement. For others it perpetuates class inequality and upholds “white middle class social domination”.

To controversy, we can add contradiction! We love to hear the instruments and idioms of classical music in film and television (think of the theme from The Crown or the music from the Harry Potter films), but experience has shown classical music is most effective at repelling loiterers from public spaces.

But this is mostly a guide for beginning concert attendees.

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A Black Composer’s Legacy Flourishes 500 Years After His Birth from the New York Times.

Lusitano was an African-Portuguese composer and music theorist who was most likely born between 1520 and 1522, and who died sometime after 1562. Probably the child of an enslaved African woman and a Portuguese noble, Lusitano traversed Europe in a career that saw him depart the Iberian Peninsula for Rome as a Catholic priest in 1550 and, around a decade later, relocate from Italy to Germany as a married Protestant.

He wrote sacred and secular vocal music, taught extensively and produced scholarship that includes a unique manuscript treatise on improvised vocal counterpoint. But until recently, Lusitano has been mostly overlooked by music histories. He has been omitted altogether in some instances, and his appearances in centuries of academic literature have consistently minimized his biography.

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What Happens to Songwriters When AI Can Generate Music?

BandLab CEO Meng Ru Kuok says that having tools to spark song creation makes a huge difference for young music-makers, who, so far, seem to be the biggest adopters of this technology. Meng claims his AI-powered SongStarter tool, which generates a simple musical loop over which creators can fashion a song, makes new BandLab users “80% more likely to actually share their music as opposed to writing from zero.” (Billboard and BandLab collaborated on Bringing BandLab to Billboard, a portal that highlights emerging artists.)

Other applications for generative AI include creating “entirely new formats for listening,” as Endel co-founder/CEO Oleg Stavitsky says. This includes personalized music for gaming, wellness and soundtracks.

Can I remain skeptical? My enjoyment of popular music plummeted when drum machines and autotune became ubiquitous. I guess it could plunge even further!

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How about some music? Let's start with a little Sun Ra. This is "Satellites are Spinning" with vocalist June Tyson.

Here is a mid-16th century motet by Vicente Lusitano:

Finally, here is a song by the Incredible String Band from the days before pop music came to rely on technology:

For a bonus, frequent commentator Steven Watson just posted one of his compositions today. Here is the Prelude and Fantasy:

Concert Programming for Guitarists

I played a brief concert in November and I'm planning to do another in the near future. This was after a few years of no public performances. So now I find myself thinking about programming. This is a fairly important subject, but I don't think people talk about it too much. I recall the head of the performance department at McGill saying to me once "put your best piece at the beginning of the second half." Ok, makes sense I guess. But I honestly can't recall anyone else ever saying a thing about programming except maybe a few isolated remarks on encores and what one should and shouldn't play as an encore.

So, it might be worth while to talk about programming. In the past, especially when I was at McGill, I did some hefty programs. For my third year performance exam I did the Bach 4th Lute Suite, the Ponce Sonata romantica and the Tedesco Concerto in D. Whew! Later concert programs played as a performance requirement might start with some vihuela music, continue with the Hungarian lute composer Bakfark, some Scarlatti sonatas, Villa-Lobos etudes and maybe a concerto with piano accompaniment.

I used to play a lot of Latin American music by composers other than Villa-Lobos like Manuel Ponce, Agustin Barrios, Antonio Lauro and Leo Brouwer (though he is more modernist than Latin American). Apart from Ponce, I have pretty much let that repertoire go. Especially Astor Piazzolla. I went through a brief, though intense, bout of playing his music but now I avoid it like the plague. Not entirely sure why, but there seem to be two and only two moods/atmospheres and I don't like either of them! And, with the exception of Ponce, most Latin American composers seem pretty shallow, though not, I guess, Ginastera.

I used to play quite a bit of Fernando Sor and considerably less of Mauro Giuliani. While I still find Sor to be both charming and agreeable, I don't have much desire to play his music and even less to play Giuliani. Tarrega? Apart from the Capricho Arabe, what is there? Mertz and Regondi leave me a bit cold. The problem is that their music is embarrassingly slight compared to their contemporaries who wrote for piano.

The repertoire took a great leap forward with the arrival of Segovia who inspired Moreno Torroba, Castelnuovo-Tedesco and a host of others like Turina and Mompou to write for guitar. And there are some fine pieces there. In recent years I have especially found Torroba to be an outstanding composer for guitar with lots of tuneful character pieces that are very enjoyable. The Four Short Pieces by Frank Martin are very fine.

The next generation of players, Julian Bream and John Williams, inspired a new generation of composers and music by Benjamin Britten, Lennox Berkeley, Hans Werner Henze and others is well worth your time.

Joaquin Rodrigo is in a category of his own as the composer of a really terrific concerto and quite a few remarkable solo pieces.

But the truth is that there is only one truly great composer that we can successfully play on guitar and that is J. S. Bach, of course. He never wrote a note for guitar, but his lute music (and music only purportedly for the lute), and his solo cello and violin music adapts excellently for guitar.

Now sure, there are innumerable transcriptions from Beethoven, Mozart, Grieg, Chopin and others for guitar, but, with the exception of the piano music of Albeniz and Granados, they really just illustrate why they don't actually work on guitar.

So what will my next brief program consist of? Just two pieces, the Sonatina meridional of Manuel Ponce and the Chaconne of Bach. The Bach is one of the greatest pieces ever written, of course, and the Ponce is a delightful piece rich in melodic and harmonic interest. The problem is, which order to play them in...

Friday Miscellanea

From the New York Times: The Complex History Behind a Vienna Philharmonic Tradition.

If the Vienna Philharmonic’s annual New Year’s Concert is a global success, its legacy and reach rest on five pillars: a marvelous orchestra; internationally renowned conductors; a timeless repertoire, by the Strauss family and other composers of the 19th century; a splendid location, the gilded Musikverein; and TV broadcasts watched most recently by some 1.2 million people in 92 countries on five continents.

The event, which returns this weekend with Franz Welser-Möst leading the Philharmonic, is by now a familiar one, and a multiday affair with three concerts. Between the preview performance, the New Year’s Eve Concert and the New Year’s Concert, conductors and the orchestra are faced with the extreme demands of an emotionally and physically challenging marathon. Just days after the series of concerts, CDs and DVDs of the Jan. 1 concert are released for sale worldwide.

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One of the more unfashionable principles held to be true around here is that the crucial element in all aesthetics is quality, which is traditionally exhibited in the idea of a "masterpiece." This is often attacked from various angles: the relativity of taste, equity, social justice and even things like decolonization. Obviously masterpieces produced by dead white men are intrinsically suspect! But despite this, those pesky masterpieces keep hanging around, the real benchmarks and touchstones of their genres. The Wall Street Journal has an ongoing series titled "Masterpiece" and they collect the most popular ones of the year here: The Most Popular ‘Masterpiece’ Columns of 2022. One of the most interesting:

“The Waste Land,” the most influential poem of the 20th century, was published 100 years ago in T.S. Eliot’s highbrow journal The Criterion. This wildly original and difficult long poem portrays with imaginative authority the modern world as a spiritual desert. Wretched people devoid of religious belief lead a meaningless existence. By describing the bitter mood, after World War I had destroyed a belief in European civilization, the poem touched raw nerves.

The poem is written in disconnected pieces (“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”) and has sudden transitions.

Feel free to set this beside The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky, arguably the greatest composition of the 20th century. Another essay in the series is on Dante and begins with this quote:

T.S. Eliot said: “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.”

But he is wrong, of course: there is Homer. 

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Here is something interesting: Pandemic Woes Lead Met Opera to Tap Endowment and Embrace New Work

Facing tepid ticket sales, the company will withdraw up to $30 million from its endowment and stage more operas by living composers, which have been outselling the classics.

Art does often respond to necessity, going back to the Renaissance. And it does not necessarily result in bad art.

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Here's an interesting little statistic: https://twitter.com/byHeatherLong/status/1607808853462089728. Americans are far more likely to move to Mexico than Canada. Well, yeah, just compare the weather!

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From the Guardian: Tears, cheers and whirlytubes: our critics pick their classical highlights of 2022. Picking out one example almost at random:

No artist touched the soul more deeply and more often than the German baritone Christian Gerhaher. I heard him five times in 2022, all at the Wigmore Hall. Three recitals were devoted to Hugo Wolf, bringing peerless vocal illumination to this highly varied repertoire. The most recent, reunited with his regular accompanist Gerold Huber, was a hair-raising account of Schubert’s Schwanengesang cycle. But the most extraordinary was Gerhaher’s appearance at a private memorial concert for Bernard Haitink, at which his singing of Mahler’s Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen touched levels of vocal artistry that are exceptionally rare.

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Slipped Disc weighs in on: ALL-NEW 2023 POWER COUPLES OF CLASSICAL MUSIC. Or it might just be an excuse to post a photo of Yuja Wang's legs.

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'Second chair' musicians are just as trained as principals and paid lower. Here's why.

There are generally three roles in any section, and each is a tenured position that takes an audition to win.

First, there’s the principal player, the section leader.

Next is associate principal, who plays first part on some pieces during a concert if the principal wants to focus on a particular work. For concertgoers, this is why the wind section often looks different in the first and second halves of a symphony performance.

“The idea is that the demands of principal positions are such that to play entire programs isn’t conducive to peak performance,” said Ron Samuels, Pittsburgh’s second clarinetist, who played principal in a smaller orchestra in Toledo, Ohio, for 15 years before moving to Pittsburgh.

More information at the link, but it is actually a fairly complex situation that goes well beyond how much training the musicians have.

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 Here is baritone Christian Gerhaher and pianist Gerold Huber with a Schubert lied.

Here is Hommage à T. S. Eliot by Sofia Gubaidulina, one example of her close aesthetic connections with other art genres:

And finally, the Vienna Philharmonic New Year's concert from last year:

New Jordan Peterson Video

I doubt that there is a more important thinker in the English-speaking world today, which is reason enough to have a look at his latest talk. But there are more reasons than that. This talk, just posted yesterday, is given in connection with his new role as Chancellor of Ralston College and takes place in the ancient site of Ephesus in what is now Turkey. He untangles so many of the profound problems underlying not only our aesthetic conflicts, but also ones of a broader social nature dealing with justice, science, value and so on. I recommend you have a listen. YouTube these days is polluted with so many Peterson clips, many of them of questionable value as they are ripped from their original context, but this one is a well-organized and well-delivered presentation of some very important ideas and principles.

Creativity and Personal Expression

 A recent comment got me thinking because I realized that I didn't agree with the underlying assumption which was that creativity was closely tied to personal expression. This struck me because I am just starting a new composition and it is at times like these that I find myself confronting the basic problem which is, what am I trying to do? It seems odd to say, but I am not trying to express anything personal at all. In my earlier life, I was pretty convinced that this was the job: express yourself. Of course, this immediately leads to the very frustrating question of why would anyone want to hear it? This is the fundamental issue I have with jazz and most pop music which really is about expressing yourself.

I was talking with an old friend yesterday and I described in a few words what is hard about music composition: you have to start by just sitting in front of a blank sheet of paper, staring at it, until something occurs to you. This might take minutes, hours, days, weeks or in extreme cases, years. I've been staring at a particular page in my notebook for nearly a year now and only in the last couple of weeks have started to get somewhere. 

I started to think about a new piece for guitar in January, but got nowhere until this month. Slowly some ideas started to emerge and they led to other ideas and so on. Right now I am just considering some basic structural outlines, some pitch materials and relating this to the Greek myth of Hecate. I find that finding a way of relating these three things is a way of generating a musical fabric.

What does this have to do with my personal life and feelings? Nothing, really. This is an act of exploration in an aesthetic universe. It doesn't have anything to do with my personal life as the goal is to go somewhere I have never been.

This immediately brings up the question of why would anyone else want to listen to the resulting music? Well, if it is dull, boring, painful for no reason, or just weird, then, no, I can't think of a single reason. But the goal is actually to come up with something dynamic, stimulating and fresh, so that would be the reason to listen.

I described how Stravinsky composed the Rite of Spring, in a tiny village in Switzerland over the course of around eight months, spending every day in a tiny 8' X 8' room with nothing more than a chair and an upright piano (and the notebook and pencil, of course!). Speaking of notebooks, the one shown above is my favorite: a Moleskine A5 Music Notebook. I'm not a fan of Moleskine in general as their paper quality seems to have gone downhill, but for my purposes this is perfect. The left hand page is blank and the right hand page has blank music staves so you can jot down both general ideas and diagrams and specific musical ideas.  The pencil is also a favorite, a Graphgear 1000 in .5 HB.

Yes, you do have to have some creative spark, which really consists in being able to let your mind freewheel and open to whatever may drift by. But the big challenge is the determination to sit there until something does drift by and the understanding and craft of how to work this idea out and come up with a finished composition. That's really all there is to the "creative process" which is why it is so impossible to teach (though, mind you, nearly every music department has at least one staff member with that job description: professor of music composition. I'm just not sure what they do exactly. Chat about it, I guess. But the important thing is really to provide composers with some sort of regular paycheck!

Let's listen to the fruit of Stravinsky's stay in that little village in Switzerland. This is a recreation of the original costumes and choreography with Valery Gergiev conducting the Orchestra and Ballet of the Mariinsky Theatre:

And of course...

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4Anu6qvhrM&t=1622s

Some of the most joyful music ever.

UPDATE:  A suggestion, the only way I know to avoid the irritating ads on YouTube is to download the Opera browser and select the ad-blocker in preferences. Other browsers, even Brave, don't seem effective.|

Today's Listening

Here is something unusual: the Villa-Lobos Guitar Concerto played on three guitars.

 This turns it into an interesting piece of chamber music with a much different, tighter, kind of ensemble. I learned this piece in three months for a live broadcast with the CBC Vancouver Orchestra. It is heard a good deal less than it should be! This arrangement really seems to work.