One has to admire, I suppose, the tireless efforts of symphony administrators to find new ways to lure audiences to their concerts. Because if they don't, the orchestra won't survive. But some of the efforts seem to me to go a bit astray. Here is a typical example--and I see something similar come along every few months:
This is a sample of the new "listening guide" that the Toronto Symphony is going to be using for "developing audience appreciation". I discussed this with my orchestral violist friend and we both are of the opinion that this doesn't offer very much at all in terms of actual knowledge, but just sort of a weak illusion of knowledge. In other words, you see these colored sections with the little musical instruments and you have a visual map, but one that doesn't actually tell you anything. It is like a very primitive cartoon of a performance.
Here is my criteria for "is there real information or not?" I ask myself, can I identify the piece in question by looking at the visual aid? Take the one above. What piece is it? Is it a violin concerto? Maybe, maybe not. It has some counterpoint, ok and it is in C major, ok, but that describes hundreds if not thousands of pieces. Actual music notation, though it certainly takes some training to read, does actually tell you something--everything, actually. If I see this, for example, it precisely describes the piece:
That is the opening of the Haydn Violin Concerto No. 1 in C major.
So that's the situation: a virtually meaningless cartoon, that doesn't seem to have any real content, or very rich content that takes training to read. I suppose we have to look at the actual purpose of the visual aid. If it gets more people out to the concert then it is a success, if not, not. But will it? I somehow doubt that, but I suppose I could be wrong. What does concern me is the worry that people might think that there is no need to have a look at the actual score if you have one of these cartoony visual aids handy.
Here is the visual aid for the first movement of the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 4:
This tells you the tempo, Allegro, that the piano is answered by the strings, the winds play some stuff, and so on. The odd thing is that most of the information is simply text ("Allegro"), most of which uses standard technical terms in music like "bridge" and "transition" and "exposition". If you don't know those terms, then this won't be of much help. If you do know what those terms mean, then it is likely that you can also read music.
Honestly, this kind of thing is like a bastardized analysis with little pictures of the instruments and pretty colors. Actually learning to read music a bit would be ever so much more useful, if, that is, you were curious about how music works. And why wouldn't you be?
Here is the opening of the score of the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 4:
Click to enlarge
It's not that hard to read. There's the piano solo and the string response. Each note played is a little dot. In order to know the names of the notes you have to learn what the clef signs stand for. How hard is that? Should take a couple of minutes. There are three clefs on this page. From top to bottom they are the treble clef, which indicates, with a stylized letter "G" where the note G falls, the alto clef, which indicates with a bracket where the note middle C falls and the bass clef, which indicates with a stylized letter "F", where the note F falls. Here they are:
All the other notes are just alphabetical from A to G. For example, the note above the G on the treble clef is A, then there is B, C, D and so on. It's not that hard. I'll save telling you about how rhythm is notated for another day!
The truth is that visual guides like the one used by the Toronto Symphony are a regression to an early primitive form of musical notation.
Now let's listen to the first movement of the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 4. This is Mitsuko Uchida with Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra:
I'm not a jazz fan myself, but this is a good and thoughtful review of a good and thoughtful book on how and why to listen to jazz:
Gioia is so confident that newcomers can appreciate jazz in part because he believes that objective benchmarks of evaluation exist, and that, in the case of jazz, we can listen for fundamental “building blocks” such as rhythm, dynamics, pitch and timbre, and phrasing. This view puts him at odds with more theoretical critics who claim that subjectivity is the only aesthetic standard. Nonsense, says Gioia: “Understanding jazz (or any other form of artistic expression) can never be reduced to personal whim or some flamboyant deconstructive manipulation of signifiers but always builds on a humble realization that these works impose their reality on us. . . . and in this manner can be distinguished from escapism or shallow entertainment, which instead aims to adapt to the audience, to give the public exactly what it wants. We can tell that we are encountering a real work of art by the degree to which it resists our subjectivity.” In this one passage, Gioia manages to push back against both highbrow and lowbrow wrongheadedness.
* * *
Ann Althouse reminds me of a song I had forgotten:
Couple of neat things: first, it is only the second rock song from back then that talks about tax policy, the other being "Taxman" by George Harrison. Back in the 60s rock artists were not financially sophisticated. When they finally had some hits and the money started rolling in they were astonished, astonished to find that they owed 96% of it to the Treasury. They just couldn't see how that could possibly be fair. Well, yeah! Nowadays rock stars are very financially sophisticated and have discovered all the ways that other financially sophisticated rich people have to avoid paying more than a pittance to the Treasury. Just ask U2...
Oh, and the other neat thing is that this is a pretty good song, pretty well performed.
* * *
Jordi Savall, the outstanding viola da gamba player and conductor just did a "Facing the Music" for the Guardian. This is an ongoing series in which musicians are asked to answer a pre-packaged list of questions. Sometimes the answers are interesting. Usually it is obvious that the questions are designed to elicit a politically-correct response. This wasn't the most interesting set of responses, but I would sure be in agreement about this one:
We’re giving you a time machine: what period, or moment in musical history, would you travel to and why?
Ancient Greece. We know so much about their art, literature and sculpture but so little about what they were doing with music.
It would be amazing to hear what the Greek tragedies sounded like with the original music!
It took me several attempts to make it all the way through this disc of recent-ish choral and orchestral works by Einojuhani Rautavaara. The 88-year-old Finnish composer, mystical with a capital M, has dipped into various styles from neoclassicism to serialism to glassy Nordic minimalism during his long career, but his late style has settled into a thick, gooey swirl of post-Romanticism, and I kept feeling overwhelmingly bloated.
* * *
Just a couple of blocks from my hotel in Madrid, facing on a little square with a couple of good tapas places, was this building:
Fairly ordinary, though that is nice ironwork. But you see that brass plate on the right? Here is a close-up:
Ah, yes, that is the Embassy of the Arab Republic of Syria! I guess, what with the civil war and all, they haven't had time to polish the brass much...
* * *
Allan Kozinn, one of our finest music critics, offers a final summation of the whole Arthur Kaptainis/Canadian Opera Company affair. And does it in a magisterial manner. You must read the whole piece as it is full of insights. But here is a taste:
What happened with Kaptainis was, in a nutshell, a wholly inappropriate editorial decision that spun out of control, thanks in part to an understaffed newsroom. Kaptainis had been the National Post’s freelance music critic since 2010, and though his beat was mostly local, he periodically filed high-profile reviews from abroad – Simon Rattle leading the Berlin Philharmonic in Bruckner at Carnegie Hall, for example. You would think that the paper would consider itself lucky to have him: he was, for many years, the chief critic of the Montreal Gazette, and he continues to write about music for them as a freelancer, having taken a buyout in 2007. He is fiercely opinionated – a job requisite, one would think – and respected internationally.
* * *
For those of you who long for lurid details of musicians' private lives, Slipped Disc is the place to go. Here is a particularly seamy story about violinist David Garrett: "Full court details of the $20m violin star vs porn star case." I'll spare you the details...
What’s with the conductor walking on and off the stage? Or the concert master shaking hands with the conductor? I don’t understand! Since these customs look odd to a newcomer there must be no sensible reason why they exist; it’s time for them to go. We need to get rid of everything that a newcomer would not understand and replace those things with things that no-one understands; this will help the newcomers understand why they do not understand what it is we understand about what we used to understand but have changed to help people understand.
Oh, that's just ... beautiful!
Don’t make us feel insecure!
Symphony? Movements? Masterpiece? What’s all that? We should only present things that are simple, easy, and accessible for absolutely everyone, like death.
Heh!
Let us clap!
Oh boy, this one is probably the most important of all. Some people go to concerts to enjoy music or to have a good time, but such people are a dwindling minority of toffs who don’t matter- most people go to concerts with only one thing on their minds: CLAPPING. As soon as they wake up, that is all they can think about. Before they even get out of bed, the questions begin: how can I best flail my hands together repeatedly? Where can I go that will allow me to do some good old fashioned happy-flappy palm-pounding? Why does nobody want to dance the smashy hand-flesh samba whenever I want to do it? How rude!
You must let these people be free to express their own unique identity with a prescribed action done at the same time as the group they are in. Nothing else matters.
* * *
And that provides us with the perfect envoi for today: Clapping Music by Steve Reich:
I'm very busy with other things this week, so you won't get a lot of extensive blogging out of me, but I wanted to share this with you: my blog traffic is up. Yuge! I have noticed this before: sometimes my traffic just spikes. The first time it happened, I knew exactly why: I got an Instalaunch, which is a spike in traffic from being linked to by the Blogfather, one of the first and most popular bloggers Instapundit, which is the nom de blog of Glenn Harlan Reynolds, professor of constitutional law at the University of Tennessee (Knoxville). He doesn't publish numbers these days, but he used to get around 800,000 page views a day. That is equivalent to a regional paper like the Boston Globe. The Drudge Report gets six million a day, or used to, probably more now. Anyway, when I got the Instalaunch, I was typically getting a few dozen page views a day. Suddenly I got 3000 in a half hour, just like that. This was in August 2011 and the blog was just a couple of months old. As the traffic grew over the months and years, I soon got to several hundred page views a day.
From time to time, and lasting a month or so, I seemed to be getting extra large amounts of traffic that didn't seem to correlate with actual human visitors. My comments didn't increase, for example. I decided that this was some sort of web spider or programmed browser that was visiting my site for some unexplained reason. It usually goes away after a while. But in the last couple of weeks it is back more than ever and I am getting almost 2000 page views a day. In the past month I have had over 32,000 page views. I'm not complaining exactly, but it is a bit of a puzzlement. How much of the traffic on the web derives from some sort of mechanical intelligence one wonders?
Sorry, don't have time today to do a real post, so this will have to do. But I will share a performance with you. This is one of the great pieces by the Paraguayan guitar master AgustÃn Barrios in a performance I recorded a while ago. There are three movements, Saudade, Andante religioso and Allegro solemne. Most of the images are of Barrios, but there are some of the church that was supposedly the inspiration for the second movement:
Like all good blogs (and musical compositions), this one does have some recurring themes, I just hope I can keep them varied and fresh enough so you don't get bored. The theme today is actually one I stole from musicologist Richard Taruskin, one of the smartest folks around. It was in a review he wrote of several new books attempting to promote or otherwise make the case for classical music that he wrote the following:
As with rising gorge I consumed these books, the question that throbbed and pounded in my head was whether it was still possible to defend my beloved repertoire without recourse to pious tommyrot, double standards, false dichotomies, smug nostalgia, utopian delusions, social snobbery, tautology, hypocrisy, trivialization, pretense, innuendo, reactionary invective, or imperial haberdashery.
He goes on to say that:
The only defense classical music needs, and the only one that has any hope of succeeding, is the defense of classical music (in the words of T.W. Adorno, a premier offender) against its devotees.
So the theme is, "with friends like these (defenders of classical music), who needs enemies?" The latest example is from Musical Toronto and, like so much else from that fair city, it fair reeks with condescending myopia.
the concert etiquette at classical music performances can be a stifling experience for newbies attending symphony concerts. Whether it’s the anxiety about when to clap or what to wear, the fact is, none of these things have anything to do with the enjoyment of music.
If classical music is ever going move beyond a reputation for stiff upper lips, it’s time to start to look carefully at the conventions that have formed around the concert ritual.
We really have heard this about a zillion times before, haven't we? So who is he talking to? Do readers of Musical Toronto need to be propagandized in this way? This is like a stale emanation from the 60s when the Beatles made the London Symphony Orchestra wear funny hats and false noses when recording the orchestral cacophony in "A Day in the Life" just to make sure everyone was being cool. So let's push back against this progressive idiocy.
To all those attending classical music concerts for the first time who have no idea what the experience is like, yes, please stifle your usual behavior. This is not a rugby match, nor a rave, nor a booze up at the pub. This is classical music and we would all be ever so grateful if you dressed properly and did not disturb your neighbor's attempt to hear the music by coughing, laughing, clapping whenever it moves you, blowing your nose, taking selfies and texting your friends. Just stifle it, ok? And listen to the music. That's why you came, right? The conventions that have evolved around the classical concert have a very useful function, on the whole: to enable music of some complexity to be heard and enjoyed with as little extraneous disturbance as possible. If you want to get rid of them, the consequences will be that the music will be more difficult to hear and enjoy. Simple. Now let's look at more of the article, which is, of course, in the form of a top ten list:
Clapping between movements
There has always been an innate urge for the audience to communicate to the musicians on stage. It’s not a one-way street, and sometimes people can’t help themselves. Sorry Mahler, but if you didn’t want people to clap at the end of the first movement of the 8th, you should have made people sit on their hands. If it were I, I’d be clapping at the recapitulation.
Sure, and people like to yell at sportscasters on television and sometimes throw things. Lots of innate urges need to be repressed.
Tuning on stage
Everything you do on stage sends a message. So what is the message you send by tuning on stage? There is no reason why an orchestra, soloist, or chamber ensemble can’t pre-tune before coming on stage.
The message is that actual musicians do check their tuning from time to time. That's how we know they are actual musicians and not holograms or lip-synching. The temperature gradient between backstage and onstage under the lights will usually alter the pitch of most musical instruments. And musicians do pre-tune, of course.
Conductors walking on and off stage
This is a silly tradition and seems mysteriously awkward, especially for anyone new to classical music. Toss it.
Mysteriously awkward? Who is this guy Michael Vincent and why does it sound like he almost never attends a classical concert? Oh, right, it's all a pose. Conductors walk on and off for various reasons, just like soloists do. If it were more logistically feasible, the whole band would walk on and off between pieces just like chamber ensembles do. But just to clue in Mr. Vincent, one reason conductors walk off at the end of a piece is to come back with the concerto soloist for the next piece. OK?
Conductors shaking hands with the Concertmaster
The concertmaster is a vital part of any orchestra, but the tradition of the conductor shaking their hand has become an expectation, rather than an earnest greeting or show of respect.
There are number of traditional customs involving concert etiquette. People who attend a lot of classical concerts get used to them pretty quickly. This particular one acknowledges the important role of the concertmaster in the direction of the orchestra. At the end of a piece, the conductor will probably shake his or her hand again as well as ask important soloists to stand. I have even seen, after an important premiere, the conductor shake the hand of every single person in the orchestra. It is a civilized courtesy.
Standing ovations
Standing ovations should be a rare and special gesture reserved only for most astonishing performances. Otherwise, the gesture becomes meaningless and cheapens the act.
I have left out a few items either because they were trivial or I agreed with them. But this one, while I do agree with it, is not trivial. There is an unfortunate tendency to give standing ovations to performances that don't really deserve them. Yes, it should be more special than it is. I often suspect that most standing ovations today are the audience complimenting themselves on their excellent taste, plus getting ready for a quick escape.
Contemporary music
The tradition of ghettoising contemporary music at the beginning of a program, regardless of how it balances hurts the piece and the overall concert.
There is a semi-good point here. There is a tendency for programming to lapse into a dreary sameness. Virtually every string quartet concert I have seen in recent years has followed exactly the same format: something 18th century by Haydn or Mozart (or earlier Beethoven), something contemporary and, in the second half, a big Romantic work. Every single concert! Sorry to say that, unless that big Romantic work was either by Schubert or later Beethoven, I tend to leave at intermission.
But I suspect that, at this point, Mr. Vincent was simply running out of ideas. Here let me add a few:
Make every classical concert into a real event that regular folks can appreciate: big video screens, dancers, sur titles, fireworks, Smellovision!
I have a fussy job to do: each day in Madrid, I downloaded the day's photos to my laptop and created suitable folders for them in Photos, the Mac OS application. But now I am home, I realize that none of this will transfer over to my desktop! So I have to do it all over. Actually, I can do it a bit better because I know what I have so I can probably do better categories or something. For your information, in the ten days of the trip (two of which were entirely travel) I took 330 photos! There were quite a few that never made it to the blog, including all those from the last day. So today you will get a few odds and ends.
There are two big traffic roundabouts on the Paseo del Prado, each with a fountain. One is Cybeles and the other is Neptune. It is actually pretty hard to get a decent photo because you can't get very close due to the traffic. Here is Neptune from behind:
Click to enlarge
Here is a nifty building I saw walking along the Carrera de San Jeronimo:
This is the facade of the Real Conservatorio Superior de Música de Madrid, which faces on the same square as the Reina SofÃa:
Just half a block from there is an excellent music store for guitarists with all those things that the Union Musical Española no longer bothers with: music scores, for example.
The proprietor, Angel, is a very nice fellow and I actually bought a couple of Brouwer scores and a new CD of a guitar concerto of his.
I didn't relate what I did on my last day. The first day I went to the Prado I bought a two day ticket as it seemed a good saving. So on Thursday, after their new Hieronymus Bosch exhibit had begun, I went back to use that second day and see the Bosch. Alas, there were big lineups. This is just to buy a ticket and it extended for the equivalent of two or three blocks:
Then you had to line up to actually enter the exhibit. I figured I was ahead of the game, so I just went to that second line. And encountered a museum employee who informed me that if I wanted to access the Bosch exhibit, I would have to buy a special ticket, which they might have told me. So I just glared at her and said "adios"! Standing in line for several hours is not my idea of a good time. Besides, I saw their Bosch years ago (I told myself). On the other hand, despite the best efforts of Jesse Jackson back in the 80s, ("hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go") which were pretty successful in US colleges, apparently there are lots of people who still believe that there is such a thing as Western Civilization and are prepared to stand in line all day just to look at some samples.
But I decided otherwise, at least on this occasion so, after fortifying myself with a second light breakfast:
This museum is devoted to artifacts from the former Spanish empire and includes both pre-Columbian and colonial artworks. The building itself is spectacular with this extraordinary boveda ceiling:
I took a lot of photos, but because of the glass cases, they didn't turn out very clear. Here is gold jewelry from what is now part of Panama:
Just to show the variety, here is a Tinglit carving from the Pacific Northwest:
And they have one of the very few remaining Aztec codices, the Codex Tudela, a 16th century pictorial codex:
Not to mention one of the earliest depictions of the Virgin of Guadalupe, this is from the mid-18th century:
The admission was only 3 Euros, which made up a bit for the two taxi fares, there and back.
What would be a good musical envoi? Nothing pre-Columbian as, despite what they tell you, we have absolutely no idea what pre-Columbian music sounded like. But how about something Latin American? This is my recording of Carora, a vals venezolano by Antonio Lauro:
Yes, the very first post was this one titled Welcome! on June 5, 2011. I just got up one Sunday morning and decided to do what I had been thinking about for quite a while: start a blog. That was 1949 posts ago and this will be post 1950. So what I want to do is reflect a bit about blogging and pick out a post or two from each year that was significant in some way.
First of all, what I think sets blogging apart from a lot of other forms of communication is its personality, that is, the way in which it comes directly from an individual (or, in some cases, a group of individuals) point of view. For quite a while and in a lot of posts I avoided being too personal, but it is the individual, personal element that authenticates a blog, gives it its imprimis. This is what sets it apart from all of those utterances that are primarily about expressing policy, manipulating opinion and perception, about promoting a product or making a bureaucratic ruling. The personal view is crucial, I think. And this dovetails well with the inherent purpose of this blog in particular, to reflect in an aesthetic way about music. Aesthetic judgment is a blend of the subjective and the objective, but the subjective brings with it its own authenticity. This is why an extended series of posts about my trip to Madrid is not so pointless and irrelevant as they might seem and why readers seem to enjoy them as much as the more objective ones about. oh, I dunno, the various ways Sibelius finds to reach symphonic closure.
Blogging has a spontaneity about it that is important too. This is another kind of authentication: we read what are real and immediate reactions to pieces of music, musicians, events and so on. But the spontaneity is mediated by a bit of thought: a blog post is not a Tweet, thank goodness.
What makes a particularly good blog, I think, is some devotion to principle, some overarching vision that, while it may not appear in an individual post, certainly has a deep influence on the whole shape of the blog.
Here are a couple of posts early on that revealed something of both the methodology and the whimsy of the blog:
Those two posts go together and expose in an implicit way, a lot of how I listen to music. In the first seven months of the blog I wrote a lot of posts, 304 in fact. This is because I tended to do more, and shorter, posts. This was probably due to the influence of one of my favorite blogs, Instapundit, who back then put up dozens of posts every day, most of them just a sentence or two and a link. It turned out that this is not a good model for what I am doing as there isn't that much I want to link to. So I settled into putting up one longer post every day. Here are a couple from the second year in which I talk about things that I regard as aesthetic virtues and sins:
I picked these posts out somewhat at random, just to give an idea of some of the breadth of the posting at the Music Salon. Why don't you go back and delve into some back posts?
Finally, thanks to my readers and commentators because, without you, there really would be no point in blogging at all!
This truncated post will be the denouement to my Madrid trip. Yesterday was a 10 hour flight from Madrid to Mexico City and I spend last night in a hotel here at the airport. I learned my lesson the last time! The best thing to do after a ten-hour flight is to simply collapse and get some rest. Oddly enough, last night was the most sleep I have gotten on this trip. The jet-lag to Europe really knocks me out. I think it would take a few weeks for me to fully adjust.
So no exciting photos from yesterday. Well, maybe a couple. The Terminal 4s at Madrid airport is pretty cool:
Click to enlarge
That wavy ceiling seems to be constructed of thousands of wooden slats, but maybe they are plastic or something. They look like wood. The terminal seems to be about a kilometre long with passenger access from one side and the airplanes all on the other side. In this photo the passengers come in from the left and the airplanes are on the right. This is a shot from the same place, but looking in the opposite direction. No CGI here, that's real perspective:
The flight is nearly 6000 miles, but even at over 500 miles an hour it takes nearly ten hours. (Yes, I know that doesn't add up, but it includes taxiing to and from the terminal, ascending to cruising altitude, descending from cruising altitude and that inexplicable 11 minutes in the middle when we were put into time stasis by the alien mothership.) But this time I watched some movies. They had a pretty good selection of everything from Bridget Jones to Harry Potter to James Bond to Deadpool. Ok, yes, I watched the latter because I read some very odd reviews. I see what they mean. It is kind of a anti-hero comic book movie. Sure, they have the usual absurd stunts, but the dialogue is all sardonic and stuff. Plus, more cussin' than a Snoop Doggy Dog video. For me, at least, all was redeemed by having Morena Baccarin play the romantic lead, with whom I fell hopelessly in love when she was in Firefly. May the Fox executives rot in hell forever for cancelling it in the middle of the first season. Sorry, it's just that the Joss Whedon cult of which I am the secretary requires me to say that whenever I mention Firefly. May the Fox executives rot in hell forever for cancelling it in the middle of the first season! Sorry, sorry.
Ok, moving right along. Obviously I am crawfishing all over the place here because I have nothing music related to relate. Well, maybe one thing. Back in North America again (yes, Mexico is still part of North America), I notice that the ubiquitous pop music is back and I suddenly realise that I heard no annoying pop music in any of the restaurants I ate in in Europe. Well, not quite true, but the only places I heard anything were a Burger King (sorry, it was just a moment's inattention) and a chocolate y churros place, both very casual "dining". Any serious eating place, and most restaurants in Europe seem to be serious eating places, there is either no music or the music is so discreet you don't even notice it. Yahoo!
So I will wrap up with a shot from my room of the courtyard here at the Courtyard Marriott here in beautiful downtown Mexico City:
It's not real sunny because I just took that photo a few minutes ago, around 7 am. Sun's not up yet.
Now let's have some travelin' music! This is "Going Up the Country" by Canned Heat:
Wow, the last time I listened to that tune, probably the early 70s, I didn't realise that the flute was pretty much out of tune all the time. Mind you, so is the guitar. Oh, yeah and much of the time, the singer too. It's earthy!!
