The Talented Mr. Beato

I've enjoyed Rick Beato's clips on YouTube quite a bit in recent years. He is obviously an experienced and talented musician who appreciates a wide range of music. As a popular musician and producer, you wouldn't expect him to do tribute videos on Bach and Martha Argerich among others. He has taste as well as talent.

He just put up a really interesting video about how he got into university:

Ignoring the usual over-heated title, the gist of it is that he was discouraged from even applying to university by his high school guidance counselor. His SATs were really bad: 880. He found out from some other students that to get into a music program you needed to audition so he asked his non-classical guitar teacher (rock, jazz? it's not clear) to teach him enough classical guitar to pass the audition: three pieces from three different style periods. Plus the Segovia scales. That's kind of weird, by the way--scales at an audition? Anyway, he failed the audition.

Rick's experience came roughly ten years after mine. I graduated high school in 1969 with a horrific C- average. In grade 11, I think it was, we all had to write aptitude tests to see what field we should go into. I wrote the test, but when it came time to meet with the guidance counselor, I didn't even bother going, so to this day I have no idea what the results were. I'm reminded of that episode on Buffy where Zander is slated to be in "corrections"! I ended up working in physical labour type jobs after high school as my rock/blues band failed to get anywhere. Then after a couple of years I applied to university as a mature student and, amazingly, was accepted. No SATs as I don't think we even had them in Canada. I applied to the school of music and yes, there was the dreaded audition. This was in the summer of 1971. I showed up at the school of music, but somehow I was unaware that I had to pass an audition. The conductor of the orchestra was passing through the office at that moment so they asked him to audition me. He took me into a practice room and, playing a note on the piano asked me to sing it back. Then a note in a different register. Then two notes. The two notes far apart. Then he asked me to identify a couple of chords. I had been playing and songwriting by ear for years so I passed quite readily.

I'm quite sure that if Rick had received a similar audition he would have also been accepted. The truth is that some people have real musical sensitivity, even without much training, but most people don't. You can find this out with the aid of a piano in about two minutes. Rick has a phenomenal ear and great musical gifts and these things can be discerned quite easily.

Of course now the music school I auditioned for is quite different. About ten years after I auditioned, I was appointed the first lecturer in a new guitar program at that same school and I was the one doing the auditions! We didn't have published "requirements" for guitar or any other instruments, by the way. You come to the audition and play some pieces on your instrument. We evaluated everything: demeanor, musicality, choice of repertoire and so on. I think that's the case at most schools. There are always a few who are really not classical guitarists, but try to fake it anyway. That really doesn't work.

Lots of questions sparked by the clip: why did he audition on classical guitar if he wanted to enter the jazz studies program? Wouldn't he audition on jazz guitar? If he was trained on the bass, why not audition on that?

By the way, after two years at the first university, who, it turned out, did not even have a guitar teacher at the time, I dropped out and went to Spain to study with José Tomás, a true master of the guitar. That was where I learned to play, certainly not at any Canadian university in the 70s.

Rick's story exemplifies that truth that yes, persistence is really important. But it is really odd that he fails to mention that it was really sheer musical talent that got him through the two degrees: undergraduate bass major and masters in jazz guitar. My problem, if you can call it that, was that I was too focussed on being a classical guitarist and failed to take advantage of the wider range of possibilities at university.

Rick makes good points about not letting educational administrators define him and about the support from his mother.

The real problem I think is that the whole system of public education was built on a foundation of training people to be functional factory workers--and I think this came from the Prussian system? Correct me if I am wrong.

None of the finest musicians I have known, by the way, ever attended a public university. The best French horn player I know auditioned for and won first chair in the Dallas Symphony when he was seventeen. The finest violinist I know was performing on the Austrian radio network when he was nine and he was at the time a student at the Vienna Conservatory--no public school. Similarly with pianists, cellists and guitarists. It even applies to composers, at least until recently.

I have long thought that a big problem with arts programs in university is that they are a very awkward fit in public education. One learns competence in the arts under a kind of apprenticeship such as I experienced in Spain and later in Salzburg. Essentially you go sit at someone's feet. The enormous sums that are channeled into public education do little more than distort the artistic disciplines because ultimately the processes, contents and values are determined by educational administrators who, to be brutally honest, don't have a f**king clue.

Gee, maybe I'm pissed too!

This is the first half of a program that I heard Grigory Sokolov play in Bologna in 2017.

Sokolov, by the way, won first prize in the Tchaikovsky competition at age sixteen, so nope, no university for him.

Hogarth: The Enraged Musician

We often hear stories of composers isolating themselves to compose: Stravinsky in a tiny room in a village in Switzerland, Mahler in a tiny shack on the shores of a lake in Austria, Elliott Carter in the Sonoran desert, Sibelius in a house in the country and so on. Why is that? William Hogarth provides the answer:

We can certainly pick up some of the reasons just by looking at the engraving. But for the full picture William Hazlitt has provided an exegesis. The engraving shows

every conceivable variety of disagreeable and discordant sound--the razor-grinder turning his wheel; the boy with his drum, and the girl with her rattle momentarily suspended; the pursuivant blowing his horn; the shrill milkman; the inexorable ballad.singer, with her squalling infant; the pewterer's shop close by; the fish-women; the chimney-sweepers at the top of a chimney, and the two cats in melodious concert on the ridge of the tiles; with the bells ringing in the distance as we see by the flags flying... [William Hazlitt, Selected Writings, p. 300]

Even after looking at the image carefully I missed both the chimney-sweepers and the cats.

Money and Art

As frequent readers know, I am a frequent attendee at the Salzburg Festival held, for the last one hundred plus years in Salzburg, Austria in July and August. For those six weeks, Salzburg is the center of the world's classical music. Over 250,000 tickets are sold and the concerts have an average attendance of around 94%. But even with this enthusiastic support the festival needs a lot of patronage. This comes from the Austrian government and corporate support. The main sponsor is Audi and one often sees Audi cars on the street proudly inscribed with "Main Sponsor of the Salzburg Festival." However, the festival also seeks private patrons and a couple of months ago, as a frequent attendee, I received a request for a donation. Here is what I think is happening.

Austria and Germany are very strong supporters of classical music as being a central element in their national cultures. Germany has around eighty opera houses compared to perhaps a dozen in all of North American including Canada, the US and Mexico. But the strength of the Germany economy in particular is now in question. Here is a recent headline: Audi to cut 7,500 jobs amid ‘challenging’ switch to EVs.

Carmakers are slashing jobs as the industry struggles with weak demand among customers for EVs but demands by lawmakers across the UK and EU to shift to electric.

Total EV sales across Europe, including the UK, fell by 1.3pc in 2024, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association.

Audi has been hit hard by slowing EV demand. The carmaker’s deliveries of fully-electric vehicles slid 8pc year-on-year in 2024, to some 164,000. In February it closed a plant making EVs in Belgium that employed about 3,000 people.

Cuts at Audi are the latest in Germany’s auto industry, which has been hit hard by a slower-than-expected shift to electric cars, the loss of cheap Russian fuel and fierce competition from Chinese rivals. Audi’s parent company Volkswagen announced in December it would cut 35,000 jobs at its VW brand in Germany by 2030.

It's not just cars, of course, the really lunatic climate change policies being practiced in Germany are resulting in a slow but inevitable deindustrializing of the country.

A much poorer Germany means less support for things like the Salzburg Festival. I mention Germany in particular because the main patrons are all German companies. Austria, a much-smaller economy, provides much less funding.

The truth is that things like the Salzburg Festival are formidably expensive to put on. I have to research the budget sometime if I can get the numbers. But it would not surprise me if they needed between $100 and $150 million dollars annually. And that is just a wild guess.

Let's listen to some cheering music. From the 2005 Festival here is Valery Gergiev conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade.

Granted...

Music and politics are uncomfortable bedfellows no matter what your political or aesthetic theories are. But here is one writer that takes the bull by the horns: Strings attached: How politics corrupts classical music. The author is Austrian composer Rina Furano. Here is an excerpt:

For most conventionally successful classical artists, ensembles and concert halls, scrambling for subsidies is a daily reality. But before any youngsters start dreaming about state-funded stipends, let it be said that there is a major pitfall to this practice, which everyone in the industry knows, but nobody likes to talk about in public: Musicians who rely on politics for their daily bread effectively sign up for serfdom to the politicians controlling the grants — both artistically and personally. After all, he who pays the piper calls the tune. 

In my native Vienna, classical music’s supposed capital, this is euphemistically known as Freunderlwirtschaft  — roughly: murky business with friends, or less charmingly: cronyism. To see local and national politicians invited to, and courted at, events and fairs for composers is the norm, not the exception. The director of Vienna’s largest music university, MDW, even went so far as to open the Austrian Composers Association’s annual meetup a few years ago with the words: “It is our first and foremost duty as creators of music to spread a political message.” I was struck with disbelief; truculently, I had always thought the first and foremost duty as a creator of music was — to create music. The director, meanwhile, proceeded to go into detail about what the current political message was supposed to be, much to the contentment of the politicians dappling the audience. Vienna is not an isolated case by any means; indeed one would struggle to find any territory in Central or Western Europe where things are different.

I have just been reading some essays by Richard Taruskin bemoaning the aesthetic pitfall that high art classical music fell into of the myth of aesthetic autonomy, so reading this is a bit jarring. It is as if everyone read Taruskin and decided, no, we are going to be very socially engaged and as a reward, we will get lots of government stipends. I don't think that this is what he intended.

Read the whole essay for the author's solution, basically, cultivate private donors and try to do something musically worthwhile. Ah, ok!

About the only thing I am comfortable with these days is music as an entirely private pursuit. At least there are no aesthetic, economic or ideological problems.

The Symphony no, 15 by Shostakovich would seem as good an envoi as any. Bernard Haitink conducting.

Those were the days, when the worst thing Shostakovich had to worry about was Stalin.

Haydn, Symphony no. 80

 This is one of the best performances I have ever heard of one of Haydn's best symphonies:

Lost and Found

I just started re-reading the Iliad by Homer. I don't re-read it as often as the Odyssey, but every few years. I have the translation by Robert Fagles which comes with a good introduction, pronunciation guide, maps and so on.

The Iliad is around 600 pages and it is amazing that it likely started out as an oral composition, only later written down when the Greeks adopted a version of the Phoenician alphabet. That means that originally the Iliad (and the Odyssey) were performed from memory. That would be a remarkable feat. Still, there are a few people around who have large chunks of Shakespeare from memory.

The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer and the Old Testament are the foundational documents of Western Civilization and they exist today because they were faithfully copied over and over by generation after generation of scribes for the last three thousand years. We are also pretty lucky in that a selection of Greek tragedy and comedy were also copied along with pretty well everything Plato wrote and a good selection of Aristotle. Individual works by Herodotus and Thucydides also survived. But, the sad truth is that it is estimated that ninety percent of classical literature is lost. For good, unless some of it turns up in the carbonized Herculaneum scrolls.

One particularly keenly felt loss is ninety percent of the poetry of Sappho. But we can be grateful for the survival of a very large chunk of the poetry of Catullus which I just started re-reading in this edition:

Catullus is the lyric poet of Roman sexuality and the closer you look at that mosaic the more troubling it becomes! But what I want to recount is just how fortuitous the survival of much if not most of his poetry was. He was born around 84 BC in Verona and died around 54 BC. He was a friend of Cicero and other leading figures and widely renowned as a poet. After his death he was admired by later Roman poets but then disappeared from history for a thousand years. All that we now have, enough to fill two hundred pages, comes from a manuscript that had lain in the Cathedral Library of Verona since at least the tenth century. It was discovered in the 14th century and the story goes that it had been used to wedge a barrel of wine which was responsible for frequent lacunae in the text. This manuscript went missing, but not before two manuscript copies were made. They are the only sources of Catullus' poetry except for a few quotes in other writers. Poem 18 is an illustration of both Catullus' humor and his bawdy:

18

I dedicate, I consecrate this grove to thee,

Priapus, whose home & woodlands are at Lampsacus;

there, among the coastal cities of the Hellespont,

they chiefly worship thee:

their shores are rich in oysters!

Here are three contemporary settings of Catullus sung in Latin:

A great composer passes: Sofia Gubaidulina

From the New York Times obituary:

The Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina, who died on Thursday at 93, was that rare creature: an artist both fully modern and sincerely spiritual. “I am convinced that religion is the kernel of all art,” she said in a 2021 interview.

That is hardly a universal worldview these days. The era of Palestrina and Bach, who aimed to glorify God with their work, is centuries past. Music that is adventurous, religious and great is unusual in our secular time, and some of the most significant was written by Gubaidulina.

I started a long series of posts on Gubaidulina, but I never completed them. I think this is the first one: Approaching Sofia Gubaidulina. And here is the part one of the long series.

Let's end with a quotation from Gubaidulina that appears at the very beginning of the Kurtz biography:

It is not my desire to express an idea, but to give

expression to the spiritual form of an emotion

steeped in life itself.

It does not matter to me whether or not I am modern.

What is important is the inner truth of my music.

I have no doubt that women think and feel differently

than men, but it is not very important whether I am a

woman or a man. What matters is that I am myself and develop

my own ideas strictly toward the truth.

--Sofia Gubaidulina

The New York Times piece, a pretty good survey, ends with this comment:

Gubaidulina made music that manages to be both uncompromising and accessible. Its strange colors are so alluring and changeable, its sense of drama and timing so sure, its desire to communicate — even if enigmatically — so evident that it’s irresistible. She kept on writing until a few years ago; her 90th birthday was celebrated with recordings and performances around the world.

Let's end with her lovely piece for guitar: the Serenade in an excellent performance by Marcin Dylla: