Yesterday, Sept. 11, was Arvo Pärt's 90th birthday and the New York Times has a fine article on him, except for the headline.
THERE IS ALWAYS an element of mystery to fame, but Pärt seems to have tapped into a kind of ur-expression in music that has a profound effect on people regardless of how much they know about it. (The effect of that has been double-edged; his works have been embraced by a New Age audience, then criticized by some cynical specialists as New Age or “holy Minimalist.”) Its spirituality is broad, recalling elements of multiple religions. Its harmonic language would be as at home in the 15th century as the 21st. This is a sound, Michael Pärt said, “without boundaries.”
The music isn’t cloyingly populist, either. If anything it is personal, devotional, a product of composing, what he called his way of “breathing in and out.” He has also been guided by the belief that “art should concern itself with the eternal and not just the current,” perhaps another source of his mass appeal.
For all its accessibility, though, Pärt’s music is difficult to perform. He has said that “it is enough when a single note is beautifully played,” but in works so stripped down and fragile, that can be a challenge to sustain, whether over a few minutes or an hour.
Interpreters have described it requiring a kind of selflessness. His works, in their clean construction and economy, resist over-expression. “We don’t want to hear the performer perform,” Hillier said. “Just doing the music is enough.”
Describing someone like Arvo Pärt as having a kind of pop star status is a typical aberration of our current culture. No, he has nothing like pop star status though a few well-known popular musicians love his music. Taylor Swift sells millions of tickets and makes billions of dollars. Arvo Pärt has a centre in Estonia devoted to him and there is a focus on his music at Carnegie Hall this season. See the difference?
Things are looking pretty bad. Just listen to Rick Beato:
Well, yes, it sounds pretty bad, but just don't listen to that AI crap. Instead I play Bach every morning. I'm just memorizing the Siciliano from the First Violin Sonata. Gorgeous!
And then there is the Wall Street Journal which I used to rely on. But these days they are just predicting doom like everyone else. Some headlines today: Lumber Prices Are Flashing a Warning Sign for the U.S. Economy, Is the U.K. a Canary in the Coal Mine for a Heavily Indebted World?, Trump’s Risky Game With the Fed. Gosh, you would hardly suspect that the markets are hitting new all-time highs.
Cassandra, by the way, was a princess of Troy, daughter to King Priam and sister to Hector. She made a deal with Apollo to gain the ability to predict the future, promising him her favors. When she went back on the promise he cursed her by ensuring that no-one would believe her prophecies. Ouch!
I just want to point out that while Rick Beato hits the nail on the head, most of what we see and hear every day is crafted to make us fearful, anxious in order to sell us newspapers, magazines, jeans and makeup. We can simply ignore all of it. And no, the oceans aren't rising.
So, really, there is no need to feel anxious or fearful or just glum. Hell, we have the antidote in Vivaldi:
On Tuesday, the Los Angeles Philharmonic announced that Salonen would be its first creative director, starting in fall 2026. Simultaneously, the Philharmonie de Paris announced that he would hold its inaugural creativity and innovation chair starting in 2027, while also taking on the role of principal conductor of the Orchestre de Paris.
“One morning, I realized that I had been a music director or something to that effect for 40 years,” Salonen said in an interview. “And I thought, maybe that’s not the only option.”
Now there's a serious commute: Paris to LA every few weeks. Mind you, less grueling in First Class.
When pop groups and rock bands practice or perform, they rely on their guitars, keyboards and drumsticks to make music. Oliver McCann, a British AI music creator who goes by the stage name imoliver, fires up his chatbot.
McCann’s songs span a range of genres, from indie-pop to electro-soul to country-rap. There’s just one crucial difference between McCann and traditional musicians.
“I have no musical talent at all,” he said. “I can’t sing, I can’t play instruments, and I have no musical background at all.”
McCann, 37, who has a background as a visual designer, started experimenting with AI to see if it could boost his creativity and “bring some of my lyrics to life.” Last month, he signed with independent record label Hallwood Media after one of his tracks racked up 3 million streams, in what’s billed as the first time a music label has inked a contract with an AI music creator.
For those who think that this is the future of music, all I want to say is, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha and refer you to the Saint-Exupéry quote.
There is something a bit funny, at any rate, about pop-music criticism, which purports to offer serious analysis of a form that is often considered (by other people, who are also, in a sense, critics) rather silly. In 1969, Robert Christgau, the self-proclaimed Dean of American Rock Critics, began writing a Village Voice column called “Consumer Guide,” in which he assigned letter grades to new albums. He took pleasure in irritating the kinds of rock-loving hipsters who “considered consumption counterrevolutionary and didn’t like grades either.” He described the music of Donny Hathaway as “supper-club melodrama and homogenized jazz” (self-titled album, 1971: D-), and referred to George Harrison as a “hoarse dork” (“Dark Horse,” 1974: C-). In 1970, in Rolling Stone, Greil Marcus, another pioneering rock critic, began his review of Bob Dylan’s “Self Portrait” by asking, “What is this shit?”
Music criticism lost its way in my view, when it became no longer possible to offer reasons why something was good, bad or simply ridiculous and when the idea of aesthetics was lost.
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How about some music? I mean, the real stuff, not artificially generated and autotuned. Here is some Archangelo Corelli.
Like most composers and composers manqué, I am very sensitive to sound. Reading this New York Times article was like a vision of hell.
Block parties are how many New Yorkers escape the drudgery of the city in the summer. On a Saturday in August, music and the scent of barbecue lured people out of their brownstones onto a street in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, where kids pranced in the path of a bubble machine. Behind them, a dancers circle opened in a thicket of jubilant adults.
Ping-ponging around the makeshift dance floor was a bearded man in flamingo pink joggers carrying a laptop. Karl Scholz, 41, was using the computer to tune the sounds coming out of each of the six hulking stacks of speakers along the street, each painted the same bold pink as his pants.
Watching what is going on in Europe, particularly the UK, and Australia, I reflect on my own personal history. My family were from Nottingham, England. In the 1740s one branch was caught poaching the King's deer and transported to Canada, an alternative destination for convicts other than Australia. We lived in Ontario, Saskatchewan, Alberta (where I was born), and British Columbia for some fourteen generations until I moved to Mexico.
Mexico, certainly in comparison to Canada, Australia and the UK, is quite a patriotic country. Every September the whole country is festooned with the Mexican flag:
Something Mexico has in common with the US is the use of an eagle as a national symbol. The American eagle on the national seal is depicted clutching, in one taloned fist, an olive branch, symbolizing peace and in the other, thirteen arrows, symbolizing war. The eagle on the Mexican flag is perched on a cactus clutching a rattlesnake. Come September the flag is seen everywhere, even flying from every taxi.
In Canada the rather insipid national flag is rarely seen except on government buildings. Patriotism is very much suppressed in Canada.
But in England and to a lesser extent in Australia, there has been a recent upwelling of displays of St. George's Cross, the national flag of England:
So as I sit, musing on the history of my family, I munch on the food of my people, English Breakfast Tea and an English muffin with marmalade, and observe with interest the upwelling of patriotism in England called "Operation Raise the Colours":
I suppose the underlying truth here is that who you are and where you are from flows as a subtext underneath the surface of your life, no matter where you are now.
The two best courses I took at McGill were a graduate seminar on the symphonies of Shostakovich and the gnomically titled: "Fugue."
Pretty much everyone who has an interest in classical music knows about the symphonic form, and likely many know something about fugue, but what a fugue is and how it works are fairly obscure topics to even classical music lovers, though they certainly know what they sound like.
When I returned to McGill as a doctoral candidate in musicology they required that I make up for not having taken an honours undergraduate degree by taking two graduate-level courses in music theory. The course called "Fugue" is offered to both graduate and undergraduate students and never has a very numerous enrollment.
Here is the first extraordinary thing to know about fugue. It is a type of musical composition that dates back to the Renaissance with roots in even older music and appears under various names like fantasia, ricercare, and in later years, fugue. One also finds fugal sections in many other forms such as the mass, oratorio, requiem and so on. So, one would expect that a course called "Fugue" would take a broadly historical approach. Not so. The first thing the professor said was "while many composers have written fugues over the last four hundred or so years, we are only going to look at pieces by J. S. Bach."
With the possible exception of Chopin and the mazurka, nothing like that could be said about any other music genre. Bach dominates the fugue like no other composer dominates any other form. Imagine a course in opera that only covered operas by Verdi.
So what I would like to do is a few posts on fugue that will take you inside the kinds of things that happen in fugues. Fugue isn't a form or genre or style--it has often been described as a texture, but you could also think of it as a process or collection of related techniques.
My main reference will be an excellent book by Joseph Kerman published in 2005 entitled The Art of Fugue.
The book comes with a CD of many of the pieces discussed. I'm going to follow Dr. Kerman in his choice of the first fugue in the Well-Tempered Clavier to begin with. The reason that fugue is not a form, genre or style is that each fugue differs in fundamental ways. There is no common rhythmic structure, phrase structure or even contrapuntal structure even though the fugue is typically referred to as a contrapuntal composition. Let's look at how the C major fugue from Book I of the WTC exemplifies these characteristics.
One of the techniques associated with fugue is the stretto. To explain what that is I have to back up a bit. A fugue, particularly a fugue by Bach, has a subject or theme which may consist of anything from four whole notes to a whole bunch of sixteenth notes. Because of their role, subjects often have a distinctive rhythmic character that enables them to stand out in the texture. Of course, Bach sometimes conceals this by just stating a fragment of the subject, known as a "false entry" to fool the listener. The subject is answered by another version of itself, usually at the fifth. When this answer begins, the subject often continues with contrasting material called the "counter-subject" which may serve an important thematic function--or not! Stretto is the technique of coming in with another statement of the subject before the first is finished, a piling on effect which often results in an increased intensity.
This fugue is a stretto fugue par excellence because in its twenty-seven bars, the fairly extended subject appears no fewer than two dozen times. This fugue consists of almost nothing but strettos. Compare this with the next fugue, in C minor, that has absolutely no strettos! One begins to see why I say that fugue is not a form or genre or style, but rather a family of musical techniques and processes. Let's have a listen before we dig into the details.
As this is the first fugue in the WTC, Bach took the occasion to sign his name: B (2), A (1), C (3), H (8) = 14. The subject, ending on the E on the third beat of the second measure, has fourteen notes. We know this is not just a coincidence because Bach used number symbolism in a number of places in his music.
The fugue begins in methodical fashion by stating the subject four times, once in each voice. Here is an annotated score. I show each entry with a blue bracket. Each stretto, i.e. overlapping entry, I show with a red bracket. As you can see the strettos come spaced one beat later, two beats later and three beats later at a variety of intervals.
I hope you can see my blue and red brackets. Just click to enlarge.
UPDATE: The color wasn't coming through, so I redid the scans.
For those who don't know, Grigory Sokolov only performs on the European continent. And his own piano travels with him to every concert in a big, black Steinway Concert Services van. He also travels with a piano technician and tuner. Here is some footage of them getting ready for a concert which involves virtually dismantling the piano and adjusting every key. A perfect pianist needs a perfect piano.
Later scenes show the Herbert von Karajanplatz and the exterior of the Großes Festspielhaus. Later, during the concert, we see that this is the famous evening where there was a heavy rainstorm and the roof of the Festspielhaus began leaking. After the leak was stopped, the concert resumed and Sokolov commemorated it by playing Chopin's "Raindrop" prelude as one of his encores.
These days all Sokolov does is play solo recitals--pretty much in any hall in Europe. He does not do studio recordings so Deutsche Grammophon has begun releasing live concert recordings.
