Rick Beato is a real musician and his videos are often surprising. Like this one, a tribute to Bach and Glenn Gould:
One of the joys of growing up on Vancouver Island in the 60s was that on CBC TV on Sunday afternoons you would often find Glenn Gould playing Bach on piano, or Orlando Gibbons on harpsichord or telling us remarkable things about music as in this video. Yes, all that is gone from television.
Now let me share a few out of the way cultural things. First of all, a couple of poems. No-one reads poems any more, let alone writes them. One exception was Spike on Buffy the Vampire Slayer who in his pre-vampire days was a rather feckless poet. Here is the first part of a poem by Sir Thomas Wyatt (1502 - 1542)
They flee from me that sometime did me seek,
With naked foot stalking in my chamber:
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild and do not once remember
That sometime they have put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change.
Written when he was in prison. This is from a wonderful anthology The Oxford Book of English Verse, the New Edition of 1941. This is an excerpt from a song lyric by Leonard Cohen:
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom for
trying to change the system from within. I'm coming
now, I'm coming to reward them. First we take Man-
hattan, then we take Berlin
I'm guided by a signal in the heavens. I'm guided by the
birthmark on my skin. I'm guided by the beauty of our
weapons. First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.
Next, from a famous poem by Wallace Stevens, The Emperor of Ice-Cream:
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are use to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
How about a couple of books? One of the most enjoyable books I have ever read is The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein. Not only is it a great science fiction adventure, but it is the first book that I know of that has an artificial intelligence as a protagonist. It is also a libertarian novel and, that rarity, a tragedy. Master and Commander is perhaps the finest historical novel ever written, by Patrick O'Brian--and it starts with a string quartet concert on Minorca. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis is probably the funniest novel ever written, and a quick read.
Wow, the day after I said I was going to cut down on blogging, I already find something I want to share. This is a video about the dark side of being a concert pianist by Denis Zhdanov:
Whew! If you got through all that you will be asking yourself why would anyone ever want to be a concert pianist. From my own experience, everything he says is absolutely true. Yes, apart from that tiny fraction of superstars, all concert pianists struggle with poor pay, exhausting schedules, brutal competition requirements, demanding travel schedules and all the rest. Now here is the kicker: if you are a concert guitarist it is ten times as bad! Because, guess what, the opportunities are far fewer and the pay is even lower.
Let me do a quick comparison: one of my best fees as a concert guitarist was to be the featured soloist in a gala CBC concert in honor of Brazil. I was given three months to learn the Villa-Lobos Guitar concerto (and at the last minute was asked to play a couple of Preludes as a filler). This performance took place in the Orpheum Theatre, the largest concert venue in Vancouver and was broadcast nationwide on the CBC. Big deal, right? Oh, and the orchestra was the CBC Vancouver Orchestra, a very fine ensemble. Guess what the fee was for this?
$1,250 CDN. At current exchange rates that comes to $903.90 US. Better than a slap in the face with a wet mackerel, right? Ah yes, but you have to count in the four hours a day for three months I had to spend learning the concerto. From memory. That's 360 hours of practice time. So I actually only made $2.50 an hour. Also, bear in mind that this was a well-paying gig!
In my current job I am in real estate and am paid by commission. The amount varies according to the value of the property of course, but the smallest commission I will receive this year will be for $1,560 US and it will involve no more than ten hours work.
Honestly, being a concert guitarist is not an actual job. I'm not even sure it even qualifies as a hobby. It is more like charitable volunteer work. No matter how much you love music, it is hard to imagine actually wanting to spend your life doing something that offers virtually no rewards and, these days, very little public appreciation.
A couple of weeks ago I put up a post wondering if it was time to wrap up The Music Salon. That provoked a number of interesting comments. Some suggested I take more breaks and maybe do some indexing of past posts. Others suggested that I make the blog more focussed, not so general. Another suggested that I put together some book-length collections of related posts. That's a pretty interesting idea that has occurred to me. But my favorite comment by far came from Craig K:
There's a quote from Montaigne that I often think of as it is very relevant to our world today. And that you are, in your own way, in the musical realm, "lending them a shoulder to raise them higher":
"I see most of the wits of my time using their ingenuity to obscure the glory of the beautiful and noble actions of antiquity, giving them some vile interpretation and conjuring up vain occasions and causes for them. What great subtlety! Give me the most excellent and purest action, and I will plausibly supply fifty vicious motives for it. God knows what a variety of interpretations may be placed on our inward will, for anyone who wants to elaborate them.
The same pains that they take to detract from these great names, and the same license, I would willingly take to lend them a shoulder to raise them higher. These great figures, whom the consensus of the wise has selected as examples to the world, I shall not hesitate to restore to their places of honor, as far as my ingenuity allows me to interpret them in a favorable light. But we are forced to believe that our powers of conception are far beneath their merit. It is the duty of good men to portray virtue as being as beautiful as possible; and it would not be unbecoming to us if passion carried us away in favor of such sacred models."
- Montaigne
Craig captures exactly what I have tried to do in this blog: celebrate what is truly magical in classical music and distinguish it from the routine, the kitschy, the opportunistic and the mediocre. Along with Richard Taruskin, I have often come to realize that the true enemies of classical music often come from within.
The true engine of the blog has always been the commentators who have often filled in the gaps, adjusted the compass and provided necessary pushback. Alas, to my last post, the Friday Miscellanea, there was not a single comment. So it seems that items of interest to me are of little interest to others. Or perhaps I have just taken up the same topics too many times. In any case, it seems there is less need for The Music Salon in these days of Swiftian triumph and naked roller-skating nuns.
So while I won't draw a line to indicate the end of The Music Salon as I may post something from time to time, I doubt I will make an effort to post on a regular basis.
Thanks to you all, it has been a deeply rewarding journey.
The University of Victoria is facing criticism on social media after posting a job vacancy in the school of music with an unusual requirement: The candidate must be Black.
The job posting for a full-time assistant professor specifies that “selection will be limited to members of the following designated group: Black people.”
On social-media site X, unrelated posts by UVic have received a deluge of responses by users calling the hiring criteria discriminatory and questioning whether it’s legal. Many of those commenting appear to live in the U.S.
The job posting cites the university’s equity plan and the B.C. Human Rights Code. The latter allows organizations to treat people from disadvantaged groups differently in order to promote more equitable workplaces, said Kasari Govender, B.C.’s human rights commissioner
“It is very important for our human rights system to allow for this kind of progress to be made,” Govender said in a statement.
B.C.’s human rights law is designed to identify and eliminate persistent patterns of inequality, she said, and that can’t be done unless employers are allowed to proactively address systemic discrimination in their workplaces and institutions.
Organizations apply for a special program designation, which is official recognition that the organization is trying to improve conditions for a particular group protected under the human rights code.
UVic has a special program for preferential hiring of self-identified Indigenous people, women, Black people, members of a visible minority and people with disabilities, Govender said. The program applies to all employee positions, including faculty, librarians, leadership and staff.
Cassbreea Dewis, executive director of equity and human rights at UVic, said the university has had a special program designation for at least 10 years.
“In order to achieve equity, it’s sometimes necessary to treat people differently and this might mean we’re advantaging a marginalized group over a more dominant or over-represented group in a particular focused area,” she said.
This hits home for me in a number of ways. First of all, I founded the guitar program at UVic and taught there for a number of years. I remember a heated discussion with a friend of mine who was chair of the math department when they were proposing to enforce gender quotas in hiring. I was all in favor, but he was not. In retrospect, I had not thought it through. My own experience, and the reason I left, was that the music department was always pursuing political goals, often disguised, over objective ones. For example, despite the fact that I was a prominent performer compared to my colleagues, I was never going to be placed on tenure track because the guitar is not an orchestral instrument. Why this was the determining factor was never up for discussion. My successor in the position had a long and unhappy time in the department as, despite his worthy efforts, they slowly trimmed down his teaching to two students from the eight I had.
Out of a host of possible criticisms of the above global "equity" policy I will just mention a few. First of all, black people have never been disadvantaged in Victoria. They have always been a very tiny percentage and when I was there, that percentage included the conductor of the Victoria Symphony. And the whole notion of equity--the elevation of equal results over equal opportunity--is itself philosophically flawed, one of the many deranged products of post-modern thinking. If you are hiring an assistant professor in music then there are surely a considerable number of things you are looking for: someone whose expertise fills a gap in the department, someone with a track record of accomplishment, someone with a high level of academic achievement, someone who has some connection with the musical traditions of Western Canada and so on and on. Being black has nothing to do with any of that. The music department at UVic was at the beginning staffed with people from the Eastman School of Music and for a long time had a rather "alien" feel to it that made it distant from the surrounding community.
It makes me very sad to see that the University of Victoria, along with the community of which it is part, has fallen prey to the most dreary and mediocre of intellectual fads.
In the first part of the evening, 16 brass players and 4 percussionists from the Dresdner Sinfoniker will perform works by Markus Lehmann-Horn, Konstantia Gourzi, and Wieland Reissmann under the baton of Magnus Loddgard.
After the intermission, the conductor will hand over the baton to his mechanical colleague, who will take on the difficult challenge of conducting the world premiere of "#kreuzknoten" by Wieland Reissmann. Two of its three arms will lead the orchestra safely through the overlapping tempi. One section of the musicians starts slowly and accelerates, while the other half slows down. Due to its rhythmic finesse, "#kreuzknoten" could not be conducted by a human being.
On the plus side, we may finally have found the perfect conductor for the Symphony No. 4 of Charles Ives.
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For a necessary bit of frivolity we go to Slipped Disc: YUJA WANG’S LONDON ROADIES. Is it the case that Norman Lebrecht only puts up items on Yuja Wang if they include a sexy photo? No, of course not!
Florentina Holzinger’s Stuttgart production of Hindemith’s Sancta Susanna has hit the British tabloids after audience members complained of sickness and fainting at the sight of rollerskating naked nuns and an actor pulling down Jesus Christ’s loincloth on the cross.
In an earlier scene, Jesus spanks a nun’s naked bottom.
A representative of the opera company said those who suffered adverse symptoms were sitting in the front rows.
Holzinger is a notorious Austrian audience shocker, who gave her production a first run in remote Schwerin four months ago. Stuttgart’s state opera restricted its production to over-18s.
Gee, the things a neglected composer like Hindemith needs to do to get some press...
Anton Bruckner’s symphonies are some of the most self-consciously monumental in the classical canon. It can be hard to imagine – let alone hear – those murmuring openings and vast, brassy climaxes without the precision and power of a modern symphony orchestra. But to mark the composer’s 200th birthday, the period-instrument Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment continued its unhurried foray into the late-Romantic repertory with Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony.
If “historically informed performance” suggests holier-than-thou small-scale, think again: this one featured eight brass players, with six double-basses as the formidable engine of a hefty string section. The big tunes surged. In the relatively intimate acoustic of the QEH, the breakthrough chorales verged on deafening. There was little information about the instruments themselves – simply “closer to those that would have been used in Bruckner’s day” – but such quibbles fade to meaningless in the face of results this thrilling.
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I'm sure that we will be reading articles about the upheaval in the music business caused by the internet for years and years (and some of them not by Ted Gioia!): How the Music Industry Learned to Love Piracy
History is written by the winners, and Eminem, Iovine and the rest of the plutocrats involved with “How Music Got Free” are clear victors in the aftermath of the piracy wars. What is left unmentioned, of course, is the surrounding blast crater, which has functionally erased a once-thriving ecosystem of middle-class musicians. Those artists survived on the old model of physical sales and mechanical royalties; now they have been almost completely excised from the profit pool of the streaming economy. Perhaps you have read the numbers and wrangled with their penurious abstractions. Per the Recording Industry Association of America, streaming currently accounts for 84 percent of revenue from recorded music. One estimate had streaming platforms paying an average of $0.00173 per stream; more recent numbers have it as $0.0046. Either way, a majority of that princely sum is typically captured by record labels, while the artist is left to make do with the remainder. I will save you the trouble of getting out your calculator. What this means is that it is essentially impossible for all but a glancingly small number of musicians to make meaningful income from their recordings.
The problem isn’t just the ever-decreasing viability of even established, popular artists keeping food on the table. There is also a cultural poverty that attends the streaming economy. There is the ruthless profit maximization and the constant steering of listeners toward the same music. There is the lock-step social engineering and manufactured consensus. There is the escalating — and demeaning — sense of music being treated as a utility that need not be meaningfully engaged with. There are the Spotify playlists peppered with songs generated by fake artists that Spotify owns the rights to, allowing the company to recapture its own royalty payments. And at the same time, there is the fact that nearly every space where consumers could once interact with music unsupervised by corporate gatekeepers — record stores, mail order, merch tables — has been put on life support.
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I tend to find pop music these days formulaic, mediocre and contrived. But PJ Harvey provides a salutary alternative. I can't think of anyone who can walk out there with a guitar and do straight ahead rock and roll better:
One of the most astonishing pianists of the 20th century was Sviatoslav Richter. Here is his Well-Tempered Clavier by Bach.
Hindemith, Mathis der Maler, Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester conducted by Herbert Blomstedt
It is written somewhere that modern composers can't write a good melody. This is obviously wrong, but still it hangs around like an unwelcome dinner guest. This is one of the best counter-examples. The melody at the opening of Prokofiev's First Violin Concerto is lovely:
Just too many other things this week, but I would like to share a lovely piece from a new recording by the Danish String Quartet. The CD is titled Keel Road and it is a collection of tunes from Northern Europe by Turlough O'Carolan, traditional authors, and some contributions by the first violinist Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen and Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin, the cellist.
Here is a traditional English tune "As I Walked Out":
That is about as delicately refined as traditional folk music gets.
