A Bach Film

I haven't been able to watch all of this film, but judging by the first part, it seems quite good.

 

Curate yourself!

Around 1970 I became a listener to classical music rather than pop. After all, the Beatles had just broken up, so pop was obviously over (heh!). I also transitioned from being a rock/blues musician to being a classical guitarist. For about ten years I never paid any attention to pop music. But since the early 80s I have enjoyed checking in on the pop world from time to time. Lately that has meant watching some clips from Rick Beato. Here is one that went up two days ago and already has over 5,000 comments.

If we step back a bit and take a more historical view, we might want to ask how were previous musical eras characterized? It is fair to say that the "Classical" era which was centered on Vienna between, say, 1770 and 1830 was characterized by a certain kind of musical vocabulary that, influenced by Italian opera buffa, simplified the intricate counterpoint and chromatic harmony of the Baroque in favor of clarity, simplicity, rhythmic vivaciousness and dramatic harmonic contrasts. For the details, have a look at The Classical Style by Charles Rosen. By the end of this era and the music of Franz Schubert the vocabulary has become much richer and starts to show signs of the Romantic inwardness. Where did this style or genre come from? Pretty clearly from the explorations of people like Mozart and Haydn followed by the development and elaborations of Beethoven and Schubert. Was it influenced by publishers, marketers and record labels? Certainly not as none of these existed at the time (with the exception of publishers, but they had little influence on what composers actually wrote).

Throughout the 20th century the development of recording and broadcast technologies brought to the fore the influence of business people whose main interest was ensuring a profitable return on their investment. That is certainly fair enough, but the unintended consequence we see in the 21st century is that musical taste seems to be being shaped by algorithms more than anything else. Sure, the individual curating of micro genres is happening--the Music Salon is an example as I definitely tend to promote the music that I think is significant and ignore everything else. But honestly, there is a mainstream genre consisting of Taylor Swift and similar acts with much of the songs written by that committee of guys in Sweden. To me this feels rather like the tail is wagging the dog. I think it is better that we develop our own musical taste rather than have it curated for us.

How do we do this in the current environment? Now that's an interesting question!

Music to meditate with, the Piano Sonata No. 21 in B-Flat Major, D. 960 by Franz Schubert, first movement, played by Sviatoslav Richter.

Random Thoughts

Puebla, Mexico

That remarkable photo is of a convent that the Spanish built on a hill near the town of Puebla. In the background is the active volcano Popocatépetl. Hundreds of years after the convent was built, it was discovered that the hill it was sitting on was actually a huge pyramid, seriously overgrown. Here's another photo:

While we are on Mexico, this past Thursday was the day celebrating the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico who appeared to Juan Diego in 1531. Each year there is a pilgrimage to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe outside Mexico City. This year over eleven million people visited the Basilica. When I saw that number I thought it had to be a mistake: 11 million! But I asked my friend and she said, no, this is normal, her parents took her when she was three years old. The tradition is to dress your child up in indigenous costume, put them on a burro and take pictures.

Some musicians that particularly impressed me this year

The Norwegian Chamber Orchestra whose performance of Verklärte Nacht by Schoenberg from memory was remarkable:

Patricia Kopatchinskaja doing almost anything:

Thomas Dunford and the Jupiter Ensemble with Lea Desandre:

The young French (Russian) pianist Alexandre Kantorow:

And still, Grigory Sokolov playing Bach with crystal clarity:

The Three Taboos

Alongside the three transcendentals, the Good, the True and the Beautiful, we might set the three taboos: politics, religion and sex. This goes back a long way; the Royal Navy prohibited discussion of politics, religion or women at the officers mess going back to early in the 19th century. I'm not sure of the current etiquette in this area. Here at the Music Salon we avoid politics with the single exception of when politics threatens to invade the world of music and the fine arts. But I would like to just put a toe onto the dangerous waters of religion.

I recently had a discussion with two colleagues about religion. I'm afraid I rather heatedly pronounced that in my view this whole climate crisis was nothing but an ideological scam and it was "insane" for Germany, for example, to deindustrialize its economy trying to achieve net zero carbon dioxide. I will mercifully spare you the details. One of my colleagues, both of whom are very committed Christians, retorted that in her view it was equally insane not to accept Jesus Christ into one's life. Woo-hoo, that energized the discussion!

At one point, I made the slightly excessive claim that religion was nothing but a "category error" a technical term in philosophy taken from The Concept of Mind, a work of analytic philosophy by Gilbert Ryle. It is a category error to extend the idea of a personal deity to the universe. Well, maybe, maybe not. My real point was that the idea of an all-powerful, all-knowing God is simply beyond our ken.

But the truth is that my colleagues and I really are coming from two different traditions. When I am not engaged in an intellectual discussion, I have profound respect for my Christian and Jewish colleagues based on the view that anyone pursuing virtue is to be admired as it is not so easy in this world. I respect the traditions and literature of both those religions and have done a fair amount of reading of both.

I wanted to respond in a more thoughtful manner to the discussion so I got copies of the slim volume published by Hackett of the Five Dialogues of Plato (Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno and Phaedo). I accompanied this by a brief note saying that I both respected and was acquainted with the sources of their beliefs, but wasn't sure that they had much knowledge of the sources of my beliefs.

UPDATE: For some inexplicable reason, I forgot to mention that I gave these copies to my two colleagues--but I guess that was obvious.

It is my understanding that Western Civilization really derives fundamentally from two places: Jerusalem and Athens. For some reason, my early experiences with Christianity were not too inspiring, but over the years I became more and more attracted to Ancient Greece. Judaism gave us monotheism and a profound sense of moral duty while Christianity added the virtues of mercy, love and administration (borrowed from Rome). Sure, that's a grotesque simplification, but bear with me! Athens, on the other hand gave us cosmology, geometry, ethical reasoning, logic, history, aesthetics, comedy, tragedy, democracy, political science and a bunch of other things.

I chose Plato because his dialogues are a wonderful entry to the thought of Ancient Greece and Aristotle is just too difficult.

A Box of Schoenberg

Pierre Boulez rather unkindly published an essay when Arnold Schoenberg passed away titled "Schoenberg est mort." But as a conductor he was a great contributor to very good recordings of the music of both Schoenberg and Stravinsky. And so, in commemoration of this being the 150th year since Schoenberg's birth in 1874, Sony has released a handsome box of thirteen CDs containing all Boulez' recordings of Schoenberg on Columbia and Sony. These were recorded in the 70s and 80s, but the sound is excellent. Here are the contents:

• Gurre-Lieder (two discs)
• Moses und Aron (two discs)
• Pierrot Lunaire
• Verklärte Nacht and Berg: Three pieces from the Lyric Suite
• A Survivor from Warsaw, Variations for Orchestra op. 31, Five Pieces for Orchestra op. 16 and Music for a Movie Scene
• Serenade op. 24, Lied der Waldtaube and Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte op. 41
• Die Jakobsleiter and Erwartung op. 17
• Die glückliche Hand, Chamber Symphony no. 1 and 2, Three Pieces for Chamber Orchestra and Four Orchestral Songs, op. 22
• Suite op. 29, Verklärte Nacht (sextet version)
• Choral Works: Friede auf Erden, Kol Nidre, 3 Volksliedsätze and 2 Kanons and 3 deutsche Volkslieder
• 4 Pieces op. 27, 3 Satiren op. 28, 6 Pieces op. 35, Dreimal Tausend Jahr op. 50a, Psalm 130, Moderner Psalm Nr. 1

Interesting omission: no concertos! I've only listened to the Gurre-Lieder so far. This, plus the piano music and the string quartets and you have Schoenberg pretty well covered. Oh, and the concertos!

UPDATE: Boulez did record both the violin and piano concertos, but it was on Erato.

Today's Listening: Haydn at Wigmore

 

This just sparkles with wit and intelligence.

AI kills music workers

The actual headline is: Music sector workers to lose nearly a quarter of income to AI in next four years, global study finds.

The study concluded that under current regulatory frameworks in most countries, creators stand to lose on two fronts. Unauthorised use of their works by generative AI models will eat into remuneration earned through copyright, while at the same time work opportunities will shrink as AI-generated outputs become more competitive against human-made works.

The report predicted that by 2028, exponential growth in generative AI music would account for about 20% of traditional music streaming platforms’ revenues, and about 60% of music libraries’ revenues.

AI developers and providers in the music industry stand to gain €4bn (up from €0.1bn in 2023) while developers and providers in the audiovisual sector stand to gain €5bn over the same period.

It will be revenue “derived directly from the unlicensed reproduction of creators’ works, representing a transfer of economic value from creators to AI companies”, the report warned.

Reports like these are actually written mostly to benefit governments (who provided the grants to fund their production). They provide governments the opportunity to do something:

“We must ensure strong protections for their work, especially Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property, so that AI platforms respect protocols and enhances rather than exploits First Nations culture. The Australian and New Zealand governments need to take the lead and act decisively to protect the livelihoods of creators and the future of our creative industries.”

That's just blather, of course--and poor grammar. The real truth is that music, as an art form, is not actually an industrial "sector" because it is not actually a commercial product. Of course the music business consists entirely of commercial product, that's why it's a business, but that has little to do with music as an art. If you are a creative artist working to create music, your should not expect to have remuneration or earnings or income from copyright or work opportunities. Because you are not producing a marketable commodity. Whew. That's a relief.

Our non-commercial envoi of the day: Carlo Gesualdo, Moro lasso