Miscellanea

I have stopped doing the Friday Miscellanea so there are a number of items worth mentioning the foremost of which is

Vast Trove of Arnold Schoenberg’s Music Is Destroyed in Fire

An estimated 100,000 scores and parts by the groundbreaking 20th-century composer Arnold Schoenberg were destroyed last week when the wildfires in Southern California burned down the music publishing company founded by his heirs. The company rents and sells the scores to ensembles around the world.

“It’s brutal,” said Larry Schoenberg, 83, a son of the composer, who ran the company, Belmont Music Publishers, from his home in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles and kept the firm’s inventory in a 2,000-square-foot building behind his house. “We lost everything.”

No original scores were lost as they are all kept in an archive in Vienna. But performing parts and scores will be in short supply for a while. The fires in Los Angeles were a terrible disaster for everyone. Wishing a complete recovery to those who lost their homes and businesses.

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How Spotify is ruining music

From the perspective of a music fan, streaming is, unfortunately, a spectacular product: the universal jukebox! If some have a twinge of discomfort about the ethical compromises that enable its convenience — as when they use Amazon, or Uber — the uneasiness can be ambient and unspecific enough to keep them from changing their usage: Are the alternatives really any more righteous? For musicians, though, Spotify has been a more existential threat than the file-sharing revolution that spawned it, because it has the veneer of legitimacy. Meanwhile, says Liz Pelly, the company leaches profits from working musicians while preparing the ground to replace those musicians with AI-generated neo-Muzak. 

The broad strokes of the indictment — the neo-payola promotional schemes; the minuscule royalties paid to artists, not to mention the royalty-free “ghost artists”; the designation of huge swaths of artists as royalty-ineligible “hobbyists”; the investments in podcasts, military technology and aural wallpaper repackaged for wellness culture — may be familiar to those interested in the issues confronting musicians in the 21st century. But it’s invaluable to have the brief for the prosecution in one place, narrated in plain language with a sense of righteous outrage.

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Selling Schoenberg?

It would be hard to come up with a more radically divisive major composer than Arnold Schoenberg, who was born in Vienna in 1874 and died in Los Angeles in 1951. It would be equally hard to come up with a more radically inclusive composer, who remade European music in his image and then came here and did the same for Hollywood. Or a more devotedly progressive — you could even say obsessively progressive — composer who honored the past yet paved the way for a kicking-and-screaming future.

We still don’t quite know how to sell Schoenberg. There is the scary modernist Schoenberg — inventor of the 12-tone system, replacing traditional harmony with the democratic notion that all notes are equal — who reputedly drives audiences away. But there is also the Schoenberg who carried on from the 19th century Romantic tradition in his lush early scores like the massive post-Wagnerian and post-Brahmsian “Gurrelieder.”

This next one sounds a lot like my post on Artisanal Music:

Analogue revival

From the dumb phone trend to a vinyl revival, analogue has been back on the rise in the cultural zeitgeist. This could shake up the digital ecosystem and unlock potential opportunities for entertainment –– but the 'why’ behind the trend needs to be better understood to action the opportunity to its full potential. This report explores the extent of the analogue revival, with insights from companies and organisations operating at the heart of it, dives into what is driving the trend, and what comes next –– looking at longevity, threats, and the next set of opportunities.

Tár finally appeared on Amazon Prime so I tried to watch it last night. Didn't make it to the fifteen minute mark. I usually have a problem with movies about music--with the exception of Amadeus and A Hard Day's Night--and this was very much not an exception. Watching the opening interview was painful as an unconvincing and embarrassing portrayal of a famous conductor. Nope.

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‘Experiencing Sound’ Review: Hearing Is Believing

In “Experiencing Sound: The Sensation of Being,” Lawrence Kramer captures all sorts of heard moments, and in superb prose. He has assembled 66 brief chapters on music and sound, ranging from a couple of paragraphs to four or five pages. His aim, in part, is to make us intensely aware of the sounds that surround us and how they orient us. As he puts it: “Sound directs our passage through time. It shapes our orientation to the future moment and also to the moment when the future stops.”

What Adorno Can Still Teach Us

The normative ideal of happiness or human flourishing has its origins in classical philosophy—in Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics such as Seneca. In Kant, it gained a central importance in the thought that in moral reasoning, we must postulate an ultimate convergence between our virtuous conduct and our just deserts. Kant thought of this convergence as the summum bonum, or the highest good. The implication is that the demands of morality and the natural expectation for happiness do not in principle conflict. Of course, Kant believed that to conceive of this convergence, we must presuppose an afterlife. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno draws upon Kant’s reasoning but sharply rejects the inference that the highest good would lie beyond mortal life. As he explains, the essence of Kant’s philosophy is the “unthinkability of despair,” but the demand for happiness can be retained without appealing to Kant’s postulate of eternity. On the contrary, Adorno says that we can affirm the postulate of happiness if and only if “metaphysics slips into materialism.” I find this conclusion fascinating. Adorno is sufficiently realistic in his social criticism to acknowledge that we do not possess any certain or perfect conception of what our happiness would consist in. His basic view is that in a damaged world, all of our ideals are likewise damaged; this reflects his Marxist reluctance to fill out any pictures of utopia. This is why all current intimations of happiness are (in his words) “precarious” and interlaced with despair.

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Let's have some music! First Alexandra Dovgan with the Partita No. 6 by Bach:

At age 17 she is just beginning her career. Grigory Sokolov is one of her fans. Next, Stravinsky, L'histoire du Soldat:

Finally, the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with Hilary Hahn:

Salzburg 2025

 

This is the cover of the 2025 Salzburg program, which, oddly, is the first program book I have ever seen as I usually go online. The reason I have it is that the Festival, without my asking, just mailed it to my office. Probably because I have attended three festivals in recent years. I'm in the process of planning and building a house for myself, so I was rather planning on not attending this year. BUT!

The program is a hefty 156 page book which heralds what seems to be a renewed approach to the festival programming. I have mentioned before some differences between current programming and what was done in the late 1980s when I was a student there. Back then they had two prominent living composers in attendance with their music: Karlheinz Stockhausen (whom I met) and Witold Lutosławski (his new violin concerto was being premiered). But in recent years, no living composers, instead they had a "focus" on a 20th century composer. Last summer it was Arnold Schoenberg. And most of the festival programming was core repertoire. But for the coming festival they have changed the approach considerably. For one thing, instead of seven opera productions, there are twelve and it looks as if five of them are by living composers. There are also some premieres of new dance projects. And instead of a focus on one 20th century composer, they honor two: Dmitri Shostakovich and Pierre Boulez. Finally the chance to hear concert performances of Boulez, rare in recent years. There are also performances of major works by Hans Werner Henze and Luigi Nono and of two major works by Igor Stravinsky: L'Histoire du Soldat and Oedipus Rex. From Shostakovich we have not only the Symphony No. 10 in the version for piano four hands and the orchestral version, but also a piano concerto and the whole of the 24 Preludes and Fugues for piano. Oh, and three string quartets and an evening of chamber music.

In a real tour-de-force, pianist Víkingur Ólafsson is playing the last three piano sonatas by Beethoven in the first half of his recital and the Art of Fugue by Bach in the second half. And don't despair, there will be a lot of Mozart--five concerts entirely devoted to his music.

I've just skimmed the surface as there are loads of other concerts devoted to a long list of composers. For example, there are five concerts by the Vienna Philharmonic under various conductors and ten guest orchestras including the Royal Concertgebouw and the Berlin Philharmonic. Also ten piano recitals including, of course, Grigory Sokolov.

I really can't afford to attend this year, but maybe I will find a way. We have until January 21 to apply for tickets at the festival site:

https://www.salzburgerfestspiele.at/en/tickets/programme?season=9

Artisanal Music

From Wikipedia:

An artisan (from French: artisan, Italian: artigiano) is a skilled craft worker who makes or creates material objects partly or entirely by hand. These objects may be functional or strictly decorative, for example furniture, decorative art, sculpture, clothing, food items, household items, and tools and mechanisms such as the handmade clockwork movement of a watchmaker. Artisans practice a craft and may through experience and aptitude reach the expressive levels of an artist. 

The adjective "artisanal" is often used in describing hand-processing in contrast to an industrial process, such as in the phrase artisanal mining. Thus, "artisanal" is sometimes used in marketing and advertising as a buzz word to describe or imply some relation with the crafting of handmade food products, such as bread, beverages, cheese or textiles. Many of these have traditionally been handmade, rural or pastoral goods but are also now commonly made on a larger scale with automated mechanization in factories and other industrial areas.

I've been away from the blog over the holidays, but I'm back and it feels like a new phase in culture so let's talk about it. I've made critical comments about a lot of the trends in popular music such as miming in concerts, industrial production, songwriting by committee and just generally a decline to repetitive mediocrity that we can see in rhythm, harmony, melody and lyrics.

In classical music the criticism clusters around accusations that it is elitist, obscure, outmoded and just generally irrelevant. And when artists like Yuja Wang try to make it more relevant by, frankly, dressing like a hooker, it becomes a caricature of itself.

So it feels like time to refresh and renovate both popular and classical musics. Before I start sounding like a caricature of Ted Gioia (who by the way did an interesting post recently on Anna Akhmatova) let me get to the specifics. The fine arts and the marketplace always have an awkward relationship. I genuinely believe that producing music for entirely commercial purposes is a mistake--at least I am quite certain that it holds no interest to me whatsoever. This is why my career as a concert guitarist was never entirely successful. Careerism, the single-minded focus on advancing one's career, never seemed to have anything to do with music as such.

Of course, musicians live in the world just like everyone else and they have to pay the bills. So one does need some financial security as an artist. In the past, patronage was common, but today, apart from the unreliable support of government, artists find they have to enter the marketplace or an educational institution. For many, it seems this results in a kind of endemic mediocrity.

What still attracts me to classical music over popular music is that so much of it is still artisanal. Aspiring musicians still have to, in nearly all cases, apprentice themselves to a maestro to learn the trade. Often these maestros are found in musical institutions though those are also inhabited by many careerists as well. Playing your instrument is a lifelong hands-on task as is being a scholar or historian. Composers may find themselves seduced by the myriad technologies of music production available today, but that feels to me very like the deal Mephistopheles offered Faust: infinite knowledge and magical powers at the cost of your soul.

A musical experience is for me is one where one hears a performer playing an instrument with no technological processing. This rules out nearly all current popular music, which is ok with me. The reason one wants to exclude technological processing is that it reduces (almost to nothing in some cases) the actual human agency of the artist. A music performance, in order to be aesthetically valuable, has to involve all the subtle shades and nuances that come directly from the artist. Popular music also used to be largely like this.

I feel that one of the strongest urges behind the growth of early music performance is precisely this: it puts the individual human artist at the center, playing instruments that are themselves handmade. The total opposite of this, of course, is the use of Artificial Intelligence to compose and perform music. For human listeners, let's have human performers and composers.

Speaking of Anna Akhmatova, years ago I set this poem of hers:

Music

There is a magic burning in it,

Cutting its facets diamond clear,

And it alone calms me in minutes

When others do not dare come near.

When my last friend cast down his eyes,

It was at my side at the grave,

It sang as thunder in spring skies

As if all flowers started raving.

Here is one of my favorite examples:

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.