The debate over diversity and gender is going to be going on for a long time, I suspect. As a followup to my comment on Clara Schumann vs Beethoven in the concert review, I want to draw your attention to this initiative: Columbia's library building features the names of only male authors. After 3 decades of trying, these students have fixed that. Yes, indeed they have, but in an interesting and not offensive manner. They could have chipped away or covered up the objectionable male authors, but instead, simply placed an alternative banner above. See the photo at the link.
These are the author's names chiseled into the stone facade of Columbia University's Butler Library. In case it hasn't become clear yet, every single one of them is a man.
Yes, and not only male, but also Greek and Roman and all of them core thinkers in the Ancient world. Which you might think is even more important.
The new 140-foot banner emblazons the last names of Toni Morrison, Diana Chang, Zora Neale Hurston, Ntozake Shange, Maya Angelou, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gloria E Anzaldúa and A. Revathi across the face of Butler Library and directly above the original names.
To which I say "who?" Well, ok, I have heard of Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, but the rest are a mystery. The names were selected by a small committee of students.
The original 1989 banner included the last names of Sappho, Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Brontë (meant to represent all three Brontë sisters), Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf.
I have heard of nearly all of those names, at least, though the list had to comb through a couple of millennia of literary history to find enough names. There was another list in 1994:
For the 1994 interpretation, the names of Sappho, Murasaki Shikibu, Mirabai, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, Simone de Beauvoir, Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko and Sandra Cisneros graced the northern face of the library.
You can see the tendrils of politics slowly exerting their influence, can't you?
Basically, what is going on here is a category error: the current banner is a demonstration that the students have not only no comprehension of history, they are also pretty weak in aesthetics as well. The new list is of those names that are fashionable among impressionable students in the humanities in the second decade of the 21st century. I would bet that those names will disappear in a decade or two to be replaced with other, equally ephemeral ones. But Homer, Herodotus and the rest of those vile males will continue to be just as important as they have been for the last two and a half millennia.
Last night was the first night of the new winter chamber music season. But perhaps I shouldn't say "chamber music" as this year they are doing two operas as well. But the season started in traditional fashion with a violin and piano recital and quite a good one. I notice that Salzburg has spoiled me a bit, though.
The program included two composers we are going to hear a lot from this year: Clara Schumann, who has her bicentennial this year, and Beethoven, who celebrates his 250th--as soon as 2020 rolls around. The first half had a violin/piano sonata by Franz Schubert (I neglected to retain my program so I can't tell you which, but it was nicely dynamic) and the only violin/piano sonata by Leoš Janáček. This was written in 1914, before he met his muse, Kamila Stösslová, who inspired all of his late-in-life masterpieces. Quite a good piece with a lot of strong gestures ending with a very subdued adagio.
The second half began with Three Romances by Clara Schumann followed by the Spring Sonata by Beethoven. The recital ended with an encore, the Zigeunerweisen (Gypsy Airs) by Pablo de Sarasate. I suppose this is what recitalists are doing more and more these days: not knowing if the audience will demand an encore, heck, just stick one on at the end of the program. I confess to doing it myself!
Two things became very evident in the second half of the program. We knew from the very beginning that the violinist, a Chinese-Australian now resident in the US, was a bold and strong player, but especially during the Beethoven, the shortcomings of the pianist became evident. She was an accomplished pianist, of course, and a good accompanist, but she didn't seem to have a clue as to how to play Beethoven. Every scale was rushed, with the notes all blurred together with no articulation. I heard a lot of Beethoven on piano in Salzburg and all of it was clear and defined. Sloppy, blurry Beethoven doesn't work at all. The other thing that became evident, apart from how boring unrelieved cheap virtuosity can be on the violin (coughSarasatecough) was that Clara Schumann is nowhere near being anywhere in the same league as Beethoven. The Three Romances were slight diversions and nothing more. Next to the Beethoven they were just a bit dreary. I'm afraid that we are going to hear this demonstrated time and time again this season...
But please don't take my word for it! Have a listen and decide for yourself. First the Schumann:
Ginger Baker, drummer for Cream and other groups and archetypal force of nature, has passed away at eighty years of age:
He gained early fame as a member of the Graham Bond Organisation alongside bassist Jack Bruce - but it was their partnership with Eric Clapton in Cream that made all three superstars.
One of rock's first "supergroups", they fused blues and psychedelia to dazzling effect on songs like Strange Brew, Sunshine of Your Love, Badge and I Feel Free. They sold more than 35 million albums and were awarded the world's first ever platinum disc for their LP Wheels of Fire.
One of his most interesting performances was for the song "We're Going Wrong" with soft mallets:
Richard Taruskin in a review of some new recordings of Bach trio sonatas talks about two kinds of performers: the straight and the crooked. The definition of "straight" vs "crooked" is not so simple and no, it has nothing to do with sexual proclivities. Here's how he introduces it:
One of the bonniest postconcert mots ever to reach my ears was uttered after a performance by a touring English early-music group, by the leader of one of its best-known American counterparts. 'They're one of the best straight groups I've heard," he said. After his listeners had recovered from the apparent sexual innuendo, he continued: "It's like this: There are the straight players and the crooked players. I can respect the straight players, but my heart is with the crooked players."
Richard Taruskin. Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Kindle Locations 4032-4034). Kindle Edition.
Whuzzat? Some more description:
Straight players have significant strengths and virtues. At their best (and they come, just like crooked players, both good and bad, and in various shapes and sizes), they display really solid and reliable all-purpose purpose technique at the service of a very scrupulous musicianship, and they work very hard at ensemble. You can sit back and relax with them, confident that every jot and tittle will be perfectly executed and in place.
Richard Taruskin. Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Kindle Locations 4035-4038). Kindle Edition.
Crooked players are harder to define:
most performances of early music - of any music - consist of matching the nearest template to the music at hand. But the crooked performers ... are forever bending the templates out of shape, struggling against ingrained habit in quest of a really exact, and therefore authentic, rendering of what it is that makes this piece this piece and not that one. Struggles do not make for relaxed listening.
Richard Taruskin. Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Kindle Locations 4056-4058). Kindle Edition.
This helps me to understand things about how I always approached music. I am, I confess, a bit of a crooked performer. I was always struggling to find the heart of the music, to wring out the last bit of expression, to find the unique nature of each piece. But at the same time I was always wondering why I could never achieve the technical perfection of someone like John Williams. Once he decides how a piece is to be played, and resolves the technical problems, he will play the piece exactly the same every time. That was something that I just couldn't do. Partly that was because I did not quite have the same technical command, but it was also very much because the exact repetition of one version of the piece every time, while it does make the job easier, seemed to me to be to be just wrong. It elevates the surface over the depths. Another quote from the Taruskin essay:
the really big reputations in any field of musical endeavor are always likeliest to be made by straight musicians. Only an unchallenging approach can ever be popular.
Richard Taruskin. Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Kindle Locations 4059-4060). Kindle Edition.
And how true that is! The world is always going to prefer Lang Lang to Sokolov. Taruskin's example of the archetypical "straight" performer is, as he terms him, the "profoundly uninteresting" Christopher Hogwood.
The business side of the music world is always on the side of the profoundly uninteresting and easily marketable which is likely one reason why classical music is having such difficulties today. It is only in places where there is a deep well of educated and sophisticated listeners that classical music is still thriving.
I mentioned John Williams above as an exemplary "straight" performer on guitar. The exemplary "crooked" guitarist is Leo Brouwer whose recordings from the 1970s, particularly his highly ornamented Scarlatti recordings, are the model of "crooked" performance. I played some for the very accomplished and very straight guitarist Manuel Barrueco and all he said was that they were "sloppy." Well, sort of! Also brilliant. Here is the Sonata in E major, K. 206:
The Netherlands Bach Society is embarked on an excellent project: informal video recordings of performances of all the Bach repertoire. What is particularly and refreshingly different is that while they are choosing very good performers, none of them are celebrities and there is no "marketing," the curse of the 21st century. As a sample, here is the Cello Suite No. 3 played by a young, but accomplished cello student, Reinier Wink. Blogger won't embed so just click the link.
They often choose more seasoned players, but again, with no marketing fuss. Here is the Prelude and Fugue, BWV 855 played by Frédérick Haas in what looks like his living room:
There are simply a host of very fine musicians that are just not part of the international celebrity virtuoso set.
Here is a headline designed to provoke: In praise of cultural elitism. The subhead explains that "We have become so tolerant of each other’s taste that taste no longer matters."
At present we have a series of ‘culture wars’ over a wide range of issues — race, gender, sexuality, power and privilege. But the one culture war we don’t have any more is over culture.
Yes, we fight about the ideological messages of literary texts, but not about matters of personal taste. We scrutinise and interrogate works of art for their latent — or blatant — sexism and racism. Often what matters is what the work in question says about marginalised groups — not what it says about us as cultured individuals.
It hasn’t always been so. There was a time when we judged people, labelled them, loved them or hated them because of their taste in literature, art and even pop music.
Yep, and here at the Music Salon we still try to evaluate music and musicians with musical criteria only. Read the whole thing for more disquieting but truthy statements.
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Last week was the 50th anniversary of the release of the Abbey Road, the Beatles last album. Hard to believe. The Wall Street Journal has a nice piece on it and the release of a new deluxe version of the album with remixes and previously unreleased outtakes.
The pity is, “Abbey Road” captures the Beatles on the cusp of a new maturity in their music-making. Their playing is more fluid than ever, with probing, contrapuntal guitar lines, and some fresh timbres, including those of a primitive but inventively used Moog synthesizer. Their vocal harmonies, always a hallmark, had become both more sophisticated and more playful.
All four contributed songs that covered vast musical ground—from Lennon’s soulful, proto-Minimalist “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” and his otherworldly fantasies, “Sun King” and “Because,” to Ringo Starr’s child-friendly “Octopus’s Garden” and Mr. McCartney’s popsy but sociopathic “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” George Harrison’s “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun” are among the best of his Beatles contributions.
This occurred during the second movement of the Beethoven violin concerto. Anne-Sophie Mutter said that she could not perform while watching someone illegally film her entire performance from feet away (not an exaggeration). The individual filming did talk back, though English was not their first language and there was some confusion. They would not put down their phone or leave (even after the audience booed). The president of the Cincinnati Symphony eventually stepped in to escort this person out. After all of this ASM told the audience that they could enjoy the beautiful introduction by the winds a second time.
Today’s video games feature electro/symphonic scores by composers like Austin Wintory (the first composer to receive a Grammy nomination for a video game score); Andrew Skeet (who has released two albums of his video game music recorded with the London Philharmonic Orchestra); Jeremy Soule (who has composed the scores to more than 60 video games); and Chad Seiter (who has scored games from Tabloid Tycoon to Pokémon: Symphonic Evolutions. There are worldwide concert tours of video game music that attract audiences large enough to fill the 17,000 seats of the Hollywood Bowl.
Fritz Reiner, a 20th-century Hungarian autocrat, famously conducted with gestures so restrained and small that once, a musician in the back of the orchestra brought in a pair of binoculars. (Reiner responded by writing “You’re fired” on a piece of paper and holding it up when he saw the binoculars come out.) Leonard Bernstein, by contrast — who was one of the most beloved conductors of the Vienna Philharmonic — leaped around the podium, gesticulated and thrust his pelvis in Elvis-worthy contortions. Yet there’s also a video of Bernstein conducting a movement of a Haydn symphony while standing, his arms folded, using his eyebrows and flicking motions of his eyes.
That video, which I have posted here, was Bernstein's tribute to the Vienna Phillies.
Protesters say the funder’s draft strategy “neither addresses the urgency of the climate and ecological emergency, nor grasps the chance to trumpet boldly the pivotal role arts and culture play in bringing about societal changes”.
“There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm,” they note. “We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050.”
“If better approaches emerge, and they certainly will, we have ample time to reflect and adapt. The aim of international policy should be to provide reliable and affordable energy at all times, and throughout the world,” they state.
In particular, the scientists criticize the general-circulation models of climate on which international policy is currently founded as “unfit for their purpose.”
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The ideal pair of envoi today, I feel, would be Become Ocean by the very environmental John Luther Adams:
Followed by "Here Comes the Sun" by George Harrison from Abbey Road:
As those of you who read the biography in the right hand column know, I have lived in Mexico for quite a while now. Sometimes, as recently, there are disturbing news stories about Mexico concerning violence, civil unrest and so on. But the truth is that I have greatly enjoyed living here. Sure, if I want to see the very best concerts I take a little trip to Europe, but there are lots of compensations.
The weather is one reason I relocated here from Canada. I recall that song by a famous Quebec singer: "Mon Pays C'est L'hiver." "My Country Is Winter." Sadly true. Montreal gets six months of snow every year. Mexico is pretty much the land of summer. Where I live, at 6,400 feet altitude, the climate is excellent year round. The Mexican people are warm and welcoming.
Sometimes I am asked about healthcare, but my experiences there have been good. Mexico is known as a healthcare destination for dentistry and plastic surgery. When I lived in Montreal a friend of mine with some dental issues would fly to Mexico City, have work done and fly back and it was still a lot cheaper than Canada. My experience with Mexican dentists is that they are often better than Canadian ones.
Recently I had a couple of issues. A couple of months ago I woke up with a headache and with the loss of some peripheral vision on the right side. Then, on my trip to Europe, as we were landing in Frankfurt, I had a pain in my right ear as if there was a pressure gradient that did not want to 'pop'. The funny feeling in my right ear stayed for quite a while and only recent returned to normal.
So I decided to see the doctor that a good friend recommended. She turned out to be ethnic Chinese, born in Toronto, grew up in Mexico with excellent English. She went to McGill for med school and interned at the Royal Victoria hospital in Montreal. An appointment, which for me included a more or less complete physical, cost $1,000 pesos or about $50 US. Because of the peripheral vision thing, she said I needed an MRI. Turns out there is a new clinic about four blocks from where I live that provides this service. The cost? Just under $3,000 pesos or $150 US. Results available immediately. (And I should add that when I called for an appointment I was given one the very next day.)
Turns out that I do not have a brain tumor, which is often the cause of the vision thing. She thinks it is something vascular and we are going to wait to see if it goes away on its own. Surprisingly, it is the ear symptom that is more important. The MRI revealed that I have mastoiditis which is an infection in the area of the mastoid bone next to the ear. I have to go on two antibiotics for a month! The cost of those, plus a daily pill to prevent possible gastric upset came to about $75 US. So that's Mexican healthcare: quick, accessible and inexpensive.
And yes, private health care insurance is available for a modest cost. The much bally-hooed Canadian health care is, in my experience, not so satisfactory. It is hard to get a doctor's appointment, very hard to see a specialist and there is a long wait for an MRI and treatment. But it's "free." Meaning that the average family pays, last time I checked, about $4,000 CN a year in taxes to support the system.
Plus, I really like my doctor who is full of enthusiasm and has a good sense of humor. She was testing my hearing with a big, overgrown tuning fork. As soon as she twanged it and held it up to my ear I said "ah yes, 440 cycles per second. What next?" She said, "tell me when you can't hear it any more." As it was decaying quite slowly I said, 'we're going to be here a while..."
I do have one beef: the MRI is horrible if you are a musician. You lay on this movable table and before they slide you into the machine, they trap your head inside this plastic cage so you can't move it. They also stuff some ear protectors in and hand you a "panic button." Nothing like a panic button to encourage panic! I asked and he said, yes, the machine is quite loud. Which it is, but even worse, it is like being trapped inside the worst piece of electronic music ever composed. I was tempted several times to hit that panic button. Hey, I never was given a panic button before, not even during rehearsals of extreme experimental avant-garde music!
So, for our envoi today, let's have some electronic music. This is a scary piece by Edgard Varèse: Déserts:
UPDATE: Déserts is the wrong piece by Varèse. The one I actually had in mind was this one: Poème electronique from 1958.
