One of the great tragedies of the guitar since WWII was the curtailed performing career of Leo Brouwer due to an injury to a right hand finger. Mind you, it probably resulted in a lot more compositions.
Thursday, May 29, 2025
Monday, May 19, 2025
Musical Rooms
I ran across an interesting clip on YouTube I want to share with you. Initially it was because it was the very unusual case of a classical guitarist playing a transcription of a piece by Olivier Messiaen. But while watching and listening I realized first, that I didn't really think the transcription worked that well--replacing a singing cello line with a guitar tremolo doesn't quite work--and what I really found interesting was the room where the recording took place.
Realize for a moment the profound differences between a visual artist's studio and a musician's studio. Here is a typical artist's studio:
There is a profusion of materials and workspaces and tools. Compare that with the lovely space where guitarist Edith Pageaud is recording;
(Even though I don't think this transcription quite works, her other recordings are very fine. Have a listen to her Scarlatti, for example.)
I'm reminded of the cover of a Gustav Leonhardt album from years ago. He is seated at a harpsichord in an austere white room containing only bookshelves. An ideal musician's studio is a lot like a monk's cell but with a musical instrument and possibly a chair.
Doesn't this tell us something about the nature of the musical art form versus painting and sculpture? Music is essentially ethereal, evanescent while the visual arts are material. Yes, of course, musical instruments and concert halls, not to mention musicians themselves, are material, but the music itself is nothing more than pressure waves in the air. Invisible and instantly evaporating.
Friday, May 2, 2025
Music, the soundtrack of our lives
There are things about living in Canada I miss, like hiking in the Victoria, BC area. There are a wealth of beautiful places to see, from the ocean-side to the mountains and all the forests in between. There are video clips on YouTube where you can get a bit of a sense of it. Here is a good one:
Yes, beautiful natural surroundings, but after a while I had to turn it off. Can you guess why? Yep, the soundtrack. My recollection of the pleasures of these kinds of experiences always include the silence of the forest, broken by birdcalls and the soughing of the wind in the trees. The freshness of the air, the colors, smells and textures of the woods. But here, we have this damnable, repetitive, pounding soundtrack that seems to be ubiquitous in every video like this. Why? For me, it ruins the experience entirely. Nowadays you can't venture in any public space without suffering this kind of soundtrack. It varies to classic rock sometimes, or smooth jazz, or easy listening melodies. More and more, though, it seems to default to this kind of moronic, motoric thumping.
There are certainly other music choices one could make that would be less aesthetically dissonant, but they are rarely made. Here is one without the intrusive soundtrack, but instead with have an intrusive narration--useful if you are about to embark on one of these hikes. But what's wrong with silence, or the ambient sounds?
Anyway, that's my rant for the day! You're welcome.
Sunday, April 27, 2025
Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated
Not my death! No, that's classical music talking. I just read a fascinating essay by "Ben" on substack. It's hard to excerpt, so here is a big chunk:
In addition to doing more focused listening than in the past, I often listen to classical radio in the car and try to guess what composer or era they’re playing, with uneven success. It’s a nice way to apply my knowledge that I learned from Greenberg’s course.
As with almost all music, seeing it live is better. Like I said above, I traveled for the Spoleto (mostly) classical music festival in Charleston and saw some great stuff: Haydn’s The Creation, Beethoven’s 3rd, Mahler’s 5th, plus some well-curated chamber works. Our local symphony director has a soft spot for Romantic music and he’s helped turn me around on some of it.
I do need to get better at re-listening to classical albums to let them sink in via osmosis in the way that I often do with popular music, rather than focusing and giving them one thorough listen and then moving on to the next. I realize I’m often expecting them to fully land or not in that one listen. But many of my favorite popular music albums didn’t click on the first or second listen and I need to make room for the same experience with this music.
I am, though, starting to see the benefits of giving that kind of focused attention to a canonical corpus and returning to it periodically. I’m developing a decent knowledge of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas. On classical radio, I heard a spellbinding recording of the third piano sonata, second movement by Lang Lang (below). It’s my favorite movement of Beethoven’s early piano sonatas, in the era when he still mostly sounds neat and Mozart-y. But this movement is a sort of foreshadowing of the deeper emotional territory he would mine later in his career.
I think that classical music is a small, though aesthetically powerful, niche that some as in this essayist, only discover later in life. It is fascinating to me that so many who do explore classical music keep coming to the same very short list of composers: Beethoven, Bach, Haydn, Shostakovich. True, you can broaden out in a host of directions--in my case I have been exploring Bruckner--and I was pleased to see a real tribute to Léonin and Pérotin in this essay. But Beethoven, Bach, Haydn and, somewhat surprisingly, Shostakovich, are the bread, butter, meat and potatoes.
Classical music's fortunes, based on sales statistics, go up and down over the decades but it seems that there is a 3% core audience that is always there. At the moment, however, they are not much interested in avant-garde, post-modern or other progressive musics. Some 20th century composers such as Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Bartók seem to have inched their way into the core canon and three cheers for that. Ten years ago I was saying to pianists, why don't you play the Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues? It seems this is slowly coming to pass.
Wednesday, April 23, 2025
Non-Friday Miscellanea
Church in historic Puebla |
I just got back from spending Easter weekend in Puebla, a city of 3.3 million people midway between the port of Veracruz and Mexico City. Very important historically and a center of pre-Columbian religion. Here is a very popular image of the church of Los Remedios with the volcano Popocatépetl in the background. Of course, when you are actually there it doesn't look like this due to a prevailing haze:
But it's there. And that church was built on top of a very ancient pyramid so large it covers a couple of hectares. The name of that pyramid? Tlachihualtepetl! Indeed, in contrast to where I live, all the names in the region, apart from Puebla itself, are Nahuatl.
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Here is an interesting post where economist Tyler Cowan recounts his history with philosophy:
I was drawn to the Great Books series, most of all the philosophy in there. I figured I should read all of them. So of course I started with the Dialogues of Plato, which occupied my attention for a long time to come. Aristotle was boring to me, though at the time (and still) I felt he was more correct than Plato.
I also, from the beginning, never bought the argument that Socrates was the mouthpiece of Plato. In my early view (and still), Plato was the real genius, and he upgraded the second-rate Socrates to a smarter figure, mostly to make the dialogues better. The dialogic nature of Plato shows is true genius, because any single point of view you might find in there is quite untenable.
My favorite dialogues were the classic ones, such as Crito, Apology, Phaedo, and Symposium.
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I've been engaged in a philosophical quest myself over the last year or so. I am re-tracing the history of philosophy to see exactly how we got to wherever we are now. Here is an interesting contribution: Are We Really Living in a Materialist Age?
When we look back on history, we find in almost every culture some belief or other that commanded near-universal respect—that even acquired a kind of intellectual invulnerability—despite now seeming to us absurd. When future historians look back at our age, I think they will count reductive materialism among such beliefs.
Reductive materialism is the view that all of reality can be explained by, and ultimately reduced to, the purely physical. Whatever cannot be accounted for in this way—consciousness, morality, free will, feelings—must be illusory. As the biologist Francis Crick likes to point out, this includes even you: “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”
Yes, indeed. I find the traditional gods to be implausible and I'm afraid that includes the Jewish and Christian one as well. But I also find the idea that all reality is, is the whirl of atoms in the void to be equally implausible. Reading Bishop Berkeley, he makes a plausible argument that not only cannot everything be reduced to the merely physical, in actuality, all there is, is spirit, consciousness! The problem of consciousness is not only not about to be "solved" as scientists claim, it is more monumental than ever. JMHO.
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Here's a thumbsucker from the Atlantic: Do You Actually Know What Classical Music Is? Does Anyone?
I’m a composer and conductor in the field that’s broadly known as Western classical music, a term that’s routinely applied to radically different idioms across more than 1,000 years of musical history. Within this huge array, you’ll find the engulfing sonorities of William Byrd’s choral music; the intimate revelations, too private for words, in chamber works by Franz Schubert and Anton Webern; the majestic topography of Jean Sibelius’s orchestral landscapes; and, more recently, a multitude of works by composers as different from one another as Chaya Czernowin, Tyshawn Sorey, and Thomas Adès.
The unruly and elusive entity known as classical music does not sound like any one thing, and the sheer abundance of the tradition might invite the conclusion that trying to define it at all is a hopeless exercise. But that would be a mistake, especially at this moment.
It would be more interesting if it didn't start out the way a thousand other essays on the "problem" of classical music have.
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This is one of the most positive news items I have seen recently: Wigmore Hall says it no longer requires public funding
The classical music venue in London has raised £10m to become financially self-sufficient and will voluntarily withdraw from Arts Council England’s portfolio.
Celebrated classical music venue the Wigmore Hall has succeeded in its aim to raise £10m and will no longer require Arts Council funding, its director John Gilhooly said.
In April 2026, the London venue, which will be celebrating its 125th anniversary, will voluntarily take itself out of the Arts Council England (ACE) portfolio. It currently receives £344,206 a year.
Last year, Gilhooly launched a fund which aimed to make the Wigmore Hall financially self-sustaining in “an uncertain public environment for classical music in the UK”.
Given the unreliability of all government these days, this might be a good policy for private citizens as well.
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Now for some music. All from Wigmore Hall. Here's one definition of classical music: what they play at Wigmore Hall.
Sunday, April 13, 2025
What I'm currently reading
- snools
- frokin
- schinocephalic
- oarage
- umbles
- suckets
- prinking
- sneaping
- Lapiths
- figpeckers
- hekatoncheirs
- scowring
Wednesday, April 9, 2025
Pat-Ko in the New York Times
I have raved about this extraordinary musician a number of times on this blog, and had the pleasure of seeing her perform at the Salzburg Festival, so it is nice to see a wholehearted recommendation from the New York Times:
Kopatchinskaja doesn’t always beat music black and blue. She can reduce her sound to a fragile whisper, or honey her tone into sweetness:
But she always strips away the fat, giving canonical works a breathing — indeed, panting — vitality. She grounds decorous masterpieces in the earthiness of Central European folk traditions.
She doesn’t do plush or placid. Pretty? Kopatchinskaja gives you biting wildness.
Here is the first movement of the Tchaikovsky:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbdy5Ldeo70
As long as there are artists like Kopatchinskaja around I don't fear for the continued existence of classical music.