Friday Miscellanea

Under the spell of a great tradition full achievement is possible

even to a minor artist, because the living art brings him

in touch with his task and the task with him.

--Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

I guess this was inevitable. Alex Ross weighs in: The Fashionista Modernism of Yuja Wang

Given this gaudy lineage, it is curious that any controversy should attend the thirty-seven-year-old pianist Yuja Wang, who seldom speaks during performances, presents programs of wide-ranging seriousness, and plays with flawless technique. The debate, such as it is, is confined to her taste in clothes. She favors spangly, skintight ensembles from high-end designers, such as Hervé Leger and Akris, and clomps across the stage in Christian Louboutin stilettos. The late Janet Malcolm, in a 2016 Profile of Wang for this magazine, devoted considerable space to the pianist’s couture, arguing that it is less a contradiction than an accentuation of her athletic performance style: “The sense of a body set in urgent motion by musical imperatives requires that the body not be distractingly clothed.”

All the same, a number of people find themselves distracted. “She’d fit much better in a night club” is one of the politer complaints to be found on Wang’s Facebook page. Ironically, such concern trolling is symptomatic of the very superficiality that it purports to condemn. If you hold music to be a pure, transcendent, anti-physical medium, your attention shouldn’t be meandering to a player’s physique.

Still, one does have the feeling that part of the intense competition between Yuja Wang and, say, Khatia Buniatishvili might come down to who has the sexier presentation. I'm just saying.

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For tragic/comic relief we have this item: DISASTER: CONDUCTOR’S BATON KNOCKS VIOLIN OUT OF SOLOIST’S HANDS

The Czech violinist Pavel Šporcl was playing the Mendelssohn concerto with the Mlada Boleslav Chamber Orchestra when a sideswipe from the conductor’s baton knocked his precious blue violin out of his hands.

Only a swift leg movement by the soloist stopped the instrument smashing onto the floor. Pavel picked up the violin and carried on playing, to the conductor’s evident relief.

Some conductors are more dangerous than others! 

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I don't read On An Overgrown Path nearly as often as I should. Here are two recent, interesting posts: A tale of two new audiences

According to his PR spin, Norman Lebrecht’s blog Slipped Disc is the world’s #1 cultural news site, drawing 2 million readers every month. Central to Norman's strategy for building an audience is the use of  controversial techniques alien to the predominantly conservative classical music world. These include salacious headlines, innuendo, gossip, and deliberate provocation. 

Meanwhile the new CEO of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra Emma Stenning has embarked on a strategy for building an audience using controversial techniques alien to the predominantly conservative classical music world. These include multi-media concerts, photography during concerts, and drinks in the auditorium.

Slipped Disc's use of  alien audience-building techniques draws not a whisper of disapproval. But Ms Stenning's use of  alien audience-building techniques prompts howls of disapproval from the same predominantly conservative classical music world. Moreover the howls of disapproval are gleefully expressed on Slipped Disc, thereby reaching the impressively large readership created by alien audience building techniques.

And the other: For young classical audiences the sound is the message

In David Hepworth's recommended history of EMI's Abbey Road studios he makes an observation that may just hold the key to unlocking the new younger audience that classical music has sought for so long in vain. Writing about the increasing importance of pop music in late 1950s Hepworth explains that "whereas the people working in classical music wanted to record music, the people in pop increasingly wanted to record sounds". The ultimate example of studio-created sound taking priority over music culminated in the seminal “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band" which took five-and-a-half months of sound-shaping at Abbey Road for the album's13 tracks to be completed. 

Classical dogma dictates that the music takes priority - note perfect interpretations, historically informed performances, pedigree of the musician, concert hall etiquette etc. In the classical world sound is the servant of music, as in the never-ending search for the acoustically perfect concert hall. By contrast popular non-classical music is improvised, has no original score for the performance to be judged against, and the character of the performance is heavily influenced by electronic sound-shaping. Recent scientific research has started to identify the important role played by infrasound vibrations in the 35 to 75 Hz range - gamma rhythms - in human consciousness and perception. The preponderance of these frequencies in popular music compared with classical may well explain why the classical genre struggles to engage with younger audiences.

 Read the whole thing for some very cogent observations.

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On the occasion of an important premiere, the New York Times reviews the growth of interest in Native American composers: Amid Orchestral Waves, the Sound of Cultures Conversing

Native American composers and performers are slowly gaining more visibility after having long been largely ignored by institutions associated with the Western classical tradition. Raven Chacon, a Diné composer and visual artist, won the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2022. In March, the New York Philharmonic premiered an orchestral version of the Chickasaw composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate’s “Pisachi.”

And yet Native music, kaleidoscopically varied across the country and its many tribes and heritages, remains only rarely heard, and so only vaguely understood and appreciated, by non-Natives. This is hardly surprising, given the country’s more general neglect of a full, sustained reckoning with its history with — and its often stunningly cruel treatment of — Native Americans.

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Getting any reviews at all these days is difficult. But assuming you do, this offers some good advice: Handling Bad Reviews

Can you identify the composers who were the subject of the following reviews:

“His second symphony is a crass monster, a hideously written wounded dragon, that refuses to expire and thoroughly bleeding in the Finale, furiously beats about with its tail erect.”

“The Finale [of his fifth symphony] is riotous beyond endurance. Instead of applying local color with a brush, [the composer] emptied the paint pot with a jerk.”

“His music which professes to dismiss all elements of melody, appears strangely futile, vacuous, and non-existent.”

The whole piece is worth reading. And at the end it names the composers who were the subject of the above reviews.

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Let's have pieces by the composers criticized above. The first was Beethoven and here is his hideously written Symphony no. 2:

Here is Tchaikovsky's riotous Symphony no. 5:

Because of the missing audience and the socially-distanced orchestra we know this was recorded during the pandemic madness.

Finally, the pieces reviewed in the last quote are not named, but the composer is Debussy. Here are the vacuous Nocturnes for orchestra:

One of the pieces mentioned in the New York Times article is Pisachi by Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate.

Today's Listening: Scarlatti

D'Addario Pro Arte must have the best marketing department because they seem to be endorsed by most of the classical guitarists on YouTube. And they are darn good strings. I've used them for years and years. But I think that Hannabach makes the best classical guitar strings.

What I really love about that package is that it says "AIR-SEALED IN BAVARIA." Not just in Germany, but in Bavaria, because you know that Bavarian air, coming right off the Alps, is the best.

Here is the young Italian guitarist Cristina Galietto playing Scarlatti and yes, she uses Pro Arte strings.

Today's Listening: Feldman

If music is a window on the mystical, then one of those windows has to be Morton Feldman. His later works tend to be very leisurely:

Avant-garde goes Retro

I recently came back to reading some serious literature after a hiatus. I just re-read Serotonin by Michel Houellebecq. I think this qualifies as a serious contemporary novel, i.e. it features spiritual malaise and social fracture. Though with moments of dark humour, it is rather depressing as most recent serious fiction is. So when I ran across this newish genre of ergodic writing, I was surprised and delighted to find quite a different mood. Picking up the novel "S" by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst, once you get it out of its outer sleeve, you are astonished to find what seems to be an old-fashioned hardcover novel that looks as if it were stolen from a college library. It even smells like an old book. Everything about it, the design, typefaces, layout, everything is a perfect reproduction of a book published in 1949--there is even an old library catalogue sticker on the spine. It is also heavily marked up with multi-colored pen and pencil scribblings on nearly every page--a dialogue between two students exchanging comments. There are also random insertions, scraps of paper in English and other languages, post cards, photos and even a napkin. This is a post-modern production that is actually retro. There is nothing to reveal that this was actually published in 2013. There is a dual narrative: one the surrealistic adventure story of the novel, which is titled Ship of Theseus by V. M. Straka and the story of the margin scribblings between Jen and Eric, the two students who are trying to deal with academic politics, their own personal relationship and the mystery of who is V. M. Straka. It is really a great read and kind of fits with my recent project to de-digitize as much of my life as possible. There is no possible way to publish this as a Kindle book.

Some samples:

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The pleasures that come from reading this are those of trying to sort out what is going on in the various narratives, plus the sensual pleasure of holding a substantial old-style book, plus the smell of old paper (don't know how they did that), plus the colors and textures of the inserted scraps--rather like a collage now that I think of it. This is a fun serious read.

The closest musical equivalent I can think of is the Sinfonia by Luciano Berio that incorporates all sorts of quotations include an entire movement from a Mahler symphony. But really that is a very different idea. I can't quite imagine what a musical equivalent would really look like...

Friday Miscellanea

I've said a few times that pop music these days is an industrial product, coming out of music factories so here is some evidence for that. First the New York Times: How Big Is Taylor Swift? It's a very long article, impossible to summarize, but it looks as if the Beatles still hold the record for no 1 hits and top 10 hits--and they did it in an amazingly short time. Rick Beato has an interesting take on this:

What we learn from that is that behind Taylor Swift is a whole musical production line with a dozen writers, a host of musicians and god only knows how many producers and engineers. Taylor Swift is more of a corporate brand than a solo artist. The Beatles, in comparison, were a cottage industry. Three people wrote all the songs, four people with a few guests did all the playing and there was one producer and one engineer. I'll leave you to speculate on the possible effects of this on the aesthetics of the final product, the songs.

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Why is Slipped Disc the only place I saw this news? RATTLE, MUTTER, ARGERICH AND BYCHKOV SHOUT OUT AGAINST CULTURAL BULLYING

We, the undersigned, wish to express our strongest indignation at the decision to cancel the Jerusalem String Quartet’s two performances at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.  The Hall’s management has yielded to the threats of the demonstrators for fear that the performances might be disrupted and potentially endanger the public, staff, and artists.  The rationale behind this is fundamentally flawed.  The responsibility for public safety lies with the police and security services and is not then remit of a cultural venue. 

We are fortunate to live in a world where freedom of speech and expression exist; where plurality of views are not only tolerated but encouraged.  These freedoms are not selective and, must be applied to all and respected by everyone in totality.

It is not the Jerusalem String Quartet’s performances that put our freedom in danger, but those who threaten public order unless their demands are met.  Surrendering to those threats is not only an act of weakness, but a clear signal that we are not willing or prepared to defend our democratic values and our way of life. This is not acceptable and is highly dangerous for it undermines the very foundations of our society.

Is this how our security and protection will be achieved? By appeasing the bullies? By not wanting to be disturbed? By hoping that this will blow over and we can get on with building bridges to a better world?

The freedoms that so many lost their lives for are not guaranteed forever unless we protect them and continue to fight for them.

SEMYON BYCHKOV, SIMON RATTLE, MARTHA ARGERICH, ANNE-SOPHIE MUTTER, MISCHA MAISKY, LAHAV SHANI

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 The music biz: How copyright is killing creativity — except Taylor Swift’s

After peaking in 1999, record sales revenue had fallen to only $8.6 billion in the United States by 2015 a level not seen since the 1960s and less than a third of its peak. Pundits proclaimed the death of the music industry. 

Yet, precisely the opposite happened. Less money meant more and better music. From the late 1990s, when music revenue peaked, to the early 2010s, when music revenue was at its lowest in decades, the number of albums released in the United States annually more than doubled. And if we measure music quality by how often people choose to listen to a song, quality increased significantly as well.  

It is easy to mistake copyright for a system designed to support musical artists. From that perspective, more copyright means more money, and if more money is the whole point of the system, then more copyright is always the right answer. 

But now, with streaming revenue creating another peak in industry profits, many musicians are — quite rationally — making less music. Since Taylor Swift released her first of 11 entirely new albums in 2006, Justin Timberlake has managed a measly four. Lorde has produced only three albums since 2013 to Swift’s seven new albums.

To get the whole argument you should probably follow the link and read the whole thing.

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Why Corruption Plagues Chinese Conservatories

In April, Xue Wei, a former professor of violin at the Central Conservatory of Music (CCOM) in Beijing, posted on Weibo, a popular Chinese social media channel, to accuse Tong Weidong, the current dean of the orchestral instrument department at the same conservatory, of sexual abuse toward students and corruption in the entrance examination process. Xue, who wrote that he learned how to use Weibo “in order to collect allegations from others supporting his accusation,” offered 500,000 yuan—approximately $70,000—for victims of the alleged abuses to come forward. Tong denies the allegations.

The CCOM is China’s flagship conservatory: Lang Lang and Yuja Wang both graduated from its affiliate Middle School, while Tan Dun graduated from its composition department.

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Wow, times really have changed: ROYAL COLLEGE REPLACES HEAD OF STRINGS WITH GUITARIST

The Royal College of Music this morning named Gary Ryan as Head of Strings.

He has been acting head of department since Mark Messenger was suspended seven months ago.

Gary Ryan joined the RCM in 1996 as a guitar and academic professor.

There was a time, decades ago, when the Royal College refused to allow Julian Bream to bring his guitar into the building. (Or was it the Royal Academy?)

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Finally, Apple has come out with a list of the 100 best albums of all time (popular music albums, of course, though it includes jazz, so maybe everything non-classical?): Apple Says These Are the 100 Best Albums. Even If You Think Different. I'm linking to the Wall Street Journal article because they do an interesting comparison to the Rolling Stone list a few years back. Here are the top ten:

APPLE  MUSIC RANK	ROLLING STONE RANK	ALBUM	ARTIST
1	10	The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill	Lauryn Hill
2	12	Thriller	Michael Jackson
3	5	Abbey Road	The Beatles
4	8	Purple Rain	Prince and The Revolution
5	79	Blonde	Frank Ocean
6	4	Songs in the Key of Life	Stevie Wonder
7	–	good kid, m.A.A.d city	Kendrick Lamar
8	33	Back to Black	Amy Winehouse
9	6	Nevermind	Nirvana
10	32	Lemonade	Beyoncé

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Well, I'm really stumped to find envois that reflect the items today--because I'm not going to put up Taylor Swift, or Billie Eilish or even the Beatles. Hmm, ok, free choice then. First up a famous passacaglia by Biber played on Baroque lute by Nigel North:

We just heard the Jerusalem Quartet play the String Quartet no. 13 by Shostakovich a little while back. Let's hear them play no. 9 in E flat:

The Quintet op. 16 by Beethoven for piano and wind instruments is not heard a lot. But it is quite nice:

Today's Listening: Balinese Gamelan

The New York Times has a piece on a US-based Balinese Gamelan group: Gamelan Dharma Swara Finds Its Authentic Self

There are more than 100 gamelan groups in the United States. Some perform the music and dance styles that developed on the Indonesian island on Bali; others take up those from the nearby islands of Java or Sunda. Some hew closely to the traditions rooted in gamelan’s 1,300-year history; others mix in, either subtly or liberally, Western and modern influences.

Dharma Swara is firmly situated in the Balinese branch of the music, which has a generally faster tempo — think wind chimes more often caught up in a glorious gale than riding a contemplative breeze — and uses fewer gongs and more gangsa, a type of ornate bamboo-and-brass metallophone with keys that are suspended above the instrument’s body. But as much as the members embrace gamelan and its origins, they are also mindful of their own.

Have a listen:

 

Ergodic Music

After all the excesses of the last seventy years, many are suspicious of experiment in the arts. Honestly, there are artists who are not out to bamboozle anyone, but just interested in exploring and going beyond the boundaries of the medium. One interesting example is what is known as "ergodic literature." The term dates from 1997, but it is much older than that. One example familiar to musicians is the Chinese I Ching, a text used for divination and by John Cage to compose music. I read a really interesting text published in in English in 1988 by Milodan Pavić called Dictionary of the Kazars which purports to be an historical account of the conversion of the Kazars to Judaism in the 8th century CE. The thing is that it is in the form of three, sometimes contradictory, books, each written from the point of view of a different Abrahamic religion: Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Very interesting book!

As you can see from the Wikipedia article, the idea has really taken off in recent years. I've just discovered some recent examples I am going to have a look at. What characterizes ergodic literature is that the reader has to make a non-trivial effort to read the work as it may be fragmented, displayed on different levels or made convolute in various creative ways. A very cool idea! My guitar technique book, which never caught on commercially, is actually an example, which may be why it didn't catch on. In order to get a large number of technical exercises into a few pages, I presented them as a kind of technique kit. Abel Carlevaro, in his right hand exercises writes out dozens and dozens of possibilities all using the same diminished seventh chord up and down the neck. This seemed ludicrous to me so my right hand exercises are all on one single page, where I show all the right hand fingerings followed by three or four pages of left hand possibilities. Probably 100,000 exercises in three or four pages. No redundancies.

In my compositions I have "aleatory" sections where short musical moments are shown that may be combined in different ways. It is the same as the idea of ergodic literature: the player has to put together certain aspects of the music themselves. Of course John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and others were doing this fifty or sixty years ago.

Anyway, as John Cage might have said, this is one sure way of ensuring that you will not have to worry about falling into the slough of despond of commercial success!

Here is a John Cage piece written using the I Ching: Music of Changes for piano. The interesting thing is that it still sounds like John Cage.