Friday Miscellanea

 Ur music?

The Italian-born composer-pianist Ferruccio Busoni was a clairvoyant who will never cease to magnetize a coterie of adherents. In his Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music (1907), Busoni proposed the notion of “Ur-Musik.” It is an elemental realm of absolute music in which composers have approached the “true nature of music” by discarding traditional templates. Sonata form, since the times of Haydn and Mozart a basic organizing principle governed by goal-directed harmonies, would be no more.

An example?

Encountering Adams’s Become Ocean on a 21st-century symphonic program is so fundamentally enthralling that it risks cliché. It is the proverbial oasis in the desert. The Sahara here is contemporary American concert music inscribed in sand. The ocean Adams supplies is equally physical and metaphysical. Its tides heave and recede. In place of tunes, it proposes shifting modulations of texture, pulse, and harmony. The harmonies are triadic but barely directional; they shimmer atop anchoring brass choirs.

Read the whole essay which covers a lot of ground 

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 A remarkable concert on the river Thames:

Travelers coming to London by sea were sometimes surprised when their sailing ships anchored at the mouth of the Thames and then simply waited—not for a shift in the wind but for a change in the water. Depending on the hour, the river flowed either forward or backward, pushed along by the estuarial tide, carrying lost boots, schools of pike and carp, occasionally corpses, and just now royals and nobility headed toward supper and an evening’s entertainment at a garden villa upstream in Chelsea. Early the next morning, with the water returned to its normal state, George floated back home and allowed everyone finally to retire to bed.

Two days later, when a newspaper gave an account of the outing, the most remarkable thing was reckoned to be not the king and his mobile court, swept along by a reversible river, but rather “the finest Symphonies, compos’d express for this Occasion,” and the German who had written them. He was thirty-two years old, graced with a royal pension, and comfortable in four languages. He was said to have survived a sword thrust when an opponent’s blade landed on a button. He had attached himself to dukes who became princes and princes who became kings. It would take the better part of a century for other people to rearrange his latest work, composed in bright major keys built for the outdoors, and drag it into a concert hall. Its title, Water Music, would forever carry a whiff of cow parsley and river mud. But chroniclers were already calling him “the famous Mr. Hendel,” and on this splendid July evening, a few months into his thirty-third year, he had every reason to believe one obvious thing: the right river, taken at the flood, could work miracles.

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Painting ancient statues:

Ancient Greek and Roman art tends to look really good today. 

This is not a universal rule. The Greeks weren’t always the masters of naturalism that we know: early Archaic kouroi now seem rather stilted and uneasy. As in all societies, cruder work was produced at the lower end of the market. Art in the peripheral provinces of the Roman Empire was often clearly a clumsy imitation of work at the center. Even so, modern viewers tend to be struck by the excellence of Greek and Roman art. The examples I have given here are far from exceptions. Explore the Naples Archa­eological Museum, the British Museum, the Louvre, or the Metropolitan Museum and you will see that they had tons of this stuff. Still more remarkable, in a way, is the abundance of good work discovered in Pompeii, a provincial town of perhaps 15,000 people.

Here is another Roman statue, this time depicting the Emperor Augustus. It is called the Augustus of the Prima Porta after the site where it was discovered. Something interesting about this statue is that traces of paint survive on its surface. This is because, like most though not all ancient statues, it was originally painted.

You really have to read the whole thing for a fascinating argument that the reason that our attempts to paint ancient statues come out looking so horrible is because we are doing it wrong.

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Bachtrack’s Classical Music Statistics 2025

Just picking out some interesting tidbits:

In 2025, Yannick Nézet-Séguin tops our list of busiest conductors, with an amazing 120 listed engagements – and looking back over the last decade of data, Nézet-Séguin has been a consistent presence among the busiest.

European orchestras are similar in their distance travelled. The Berliner Philharmoniker, Wiener Philharmoniker and Budapest Festival Orchestra all visited 11 countries in 2025. Their raw number of total listed performances are notable too – 137, 132 and 100 respectively, including concerts in their home bases, though the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester outpaced them with 187, visiting 8 countries outside Germany.

In the last decade, we have seen a steady rise of Maurice Ravel in our listings. 2025 marked the composer’s 150th anniversary, so it is no surprise to see his pieces in among the most performed concert works, La Valse and the Piano Concerto in G major both placing within the top five.

I didn't see statistics for most active soloists which would have been interesting.

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Now let's have some musical envois, Let's start with Become Ocean and work up from there.

Now some water music by Handel:

And here is Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting Tchaikovsky:

Finally Maurice Ravel:

 

 

Tasting the Lees

The 19th century is like a giant duffle bag stuffed with art, literature, music, culture, exploration, science and really big symphonies. Just coming to grips with how rich and deep the cultural soil is, would be itself a daunting task. And they did it all without AI! The century really extends from the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815 (amply chronicled in Victor Hugo's great 19th century novel, Les Misèrables) to the onset of The Great War, later known as World War I, in 1914. In between was a century of relative peace under the umbrella of the Pax Britannica. Incidentally, a great narrative that sums up WWI rather well is Robert Graves' Goodby to All That recounting his experience as a line officer in the trenches.

Between those two events, the century glows with prosperity, peace and cultural exuberance mixed with an underlying sadness that perhaps all this will not last--as it did not. Two symphonies from the very beginning of the century sum up both the exuberance and the misgivings and both are by Franz Schubert. First, the Great C Major, is a paean to exuberance:

And for the misgivings, the bittersweet depths of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony:

As a musician, I tend to look to music to illustrate history while others might choose art or literature.

The musical wealth of the 19th century is unsurpassed by any other era. The emotive beauty of Chopin, the brilliance of Liszt, the depth of Brahms, the rustic grace of Dvořák, the magnificence of Bruckner and the host of other talents. And when you consider literature, the harvest is even greater. I'm not qualified to say anything about 19th century painting and sculpture, but I suspect the same is true there.

The obvious causes of this efflorescence would include the unprecedented prosperity brought to Europe by the Industrial Revolution when for the first time in history the masses began to experience true prosperity. The end of the Napoleonic wars were the end of centuries of sectarian violence among a host of religious and cultural divisions. So, peace, a bit of material prosperity and, most important, some leisure to devote to the arts and science.

I'm not sure I can explain why it all came to an end, perhaps we might consult The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler or From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun. In any case, it did come to an end and all that expansive and glorious art and culture was replaced by something smaller, colder and more bitter: modernism. I love modernism in music and art, but I think we have to accept that it is a decline. For a musical illustration we could pick an example from Bruckner:

And for comparison, one from Bartók:

Both great works, but one is a kind of pinnacle and the other is a descent, though a wonderful one.

This is more of a sketch than an argument. I tend to come up with ideas that would really require a full-length book to fully illustrate and defend. But I don't have time for that, so mere hints will have to do.

We can hope that the next stage will be some kind of renaissance...

What I'm Reading Now

 I just finished the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio this morning, a pretty hefty read of some 900 pages, so I thought I would share what I am reading right now.

Apart from a couple of excessively long and turgid stories, this is more entertaining and an easier read than one would think. For me it plugs a rather large gap in my reading as (apart from Dante) I have read virtually nothing from the 14th century. I wish I had read it when I was twenty as it would have been quite helpful.

I purchased this a few years ago, but never got around to reading it. Now I am doing so with great pleasure and learning things like the difference between the madrigal style of Ferrara and Mantua. The late 16th century madrigal is one of the great repertories of the world and should be better known. Alongside the book I am enjoying listening my way through this fifteen CD collection:

Excellent performances with all-male singers and extensive use of instruments.

This novel by Thomas Mann, while lengthy, is a fairly easy read and a profound exploration of the fortunes of a German family in the 19th century. The Everyman printing, manufactured in Germany, is of superb quality.

I just started this one this morning and again, the quality of the printing, binding and editorial matter is excellent.

I started this serious reading project a couple of years ago in an effort to substitute quality reading for the junk one finds on the internet every morning. In the beginning I sought out challenging recent experimental fiction, critical commentary on the arts and poetry. But now I find I have gravitated to longstanding literary classics.

Philip Glass Buys a Loaf of Bread

 This should brighten up your day:

Then have a listen to this, composed in 1932:

Now contemplate a piece titled "Anton Bruckner Buys a Loaf of Bread"!

Let's Have a New Renaissance

Adam Walker is a YouTube figure I have. been following for a while and he has many interesting things to say:

The Music Salon was not founded with any of these things in mind, but actually it functioned for a number of years as a nexus of self-learning. I think Adam is correct that we may be seeing the first faint glints of a renaissance in the humanities and we are certainly in need of one.

Friday Miscellanea

...basic impulse underlying education is willingness to continually revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty...

--Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

Orchestral color:

James Zimmermann was the principal clarinetist of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra (NSO) for more than a decade until he was fired in 2020 over accusations of "racial harassment." As the Washington Free Beacon reported at the time, Zimmerman had reportedly "insulted, intimidated, and even stalked his black colleagues, going so far as to menacingly drive by their homes."

None of that was true, as six of Zimmermann's colleagues and the Orchestra's own documents showed, the Free Beacon reported. Instead, they correctly called Zimmermann an "early victim of the ideological cold war that turned hot in the summer of 2020."

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 And speaking of orchestral color, the oboe is one of the orchestra's most important wind instruments, specifically for its unique timbre: If You Think This Instrument Is Hard to Play, Try Building One

Frank Swann, administrative director of the International Double Reed Society, also known as the International Double Nerd Society, agreed that the oboe is the most difficult woodwind: “really awkward technically, fingering-wise, every-wise.”

The “double reed” in the name of Swann’s organization is part of the problem: You basically blow air at high pressure through tightly pursed lips into a tiny lentil-shaped opening between two pieces of dried grass to make them vibrate. And if doing that doesn’t mark you as an outcast — or give you a stroke, as has happened more than once — the confounded reed-making process, which involves scrapers and thread and takes more years than there are in life to master, is even worse.

The New York Times has a lovely and lengthy piece on one person's quest to revive a renowned American oboe manufacturer. It is a most curious and most difficult instrument, both to play and to build. The article reveals much about the complexity of the instrument. I was good friends with an oboist years ago and one of the biggest challenges is the making of one's own reeds, a complex and lengthy process, but something every professional oboist spends half their life engaged in. 

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 Also in the NYT: Bach Doesn’t Need a Glow-Up

For classical music to endure, we need to demonstrate to a new audience that the form is not similar to modern music but actually very different in important and — once you acquire a taste for it — enjoyable ways. In execution, this theory works very simply: Don’t change the music; change the way you deliver it. Do the opposite of what institutions are doing when they offer radically shortened operas or watered-down symphonies.

Of course, the value of classical music lies precisely in not being like other kinds of music. Recently Rick Beato had a clip in which he said one of the weaknesses of pop music these days is its lack of expressive dissonance. I think what he was trying to get at was that while pop music has lots of rhythm (though little rhythmic nuance) and even lots of harmony, what it does not have is counterpoint and it is through counterpoint that classical music creates and controls dissonance.

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I'm a long-time fan of Esa-Pekka Salonen, both as conductor and composer, so this was a welcome tribute to his artistry: Old Is New Again: Salonen Returns to the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

His first program assembled rarities by Sibelius and Debussy, as well as a brilliant recent work by Gabriella Smith and the delightfully outrageous Scriabin tone poem “Prometheus.” Far from a typical orchestra evening, it called for two vocal soloists, a choir and a pianist (a splendid Jean-Yves Thibaudet). As if that weren’t enough, there was also a light installation by Grimanesa Amorós that hung benignly in front of the hall’s organ, with an opening around the console made of tendrils that draped and curled like plants at the mouth of a cave.

Salonen premiered the Smith piece, “Rewilding,” with the San Francisco Symphony last year, near the close of his short-lived music directorship there. Plenty of conductors look like they’re simply keeping time when leading contemporary works. But, as is often the case with Salonen, you could sense the same interpretive care he would have given a classic by Beethoven.

That helps for a score like “Rewilding,” whose 25 minutes contain a lot of openness and freedom in pitch and tempo. At times, the music evokes a field recording, with erratic chirps and natural sounds conjured through dull plucks, scratched strings and mallets hitting the spokes of spinning bicycle wheels.

But there is also a broad architecture to “Rewilding,” a steady but subtle journey to a blossoming apotheosis that Salonen shaped with steady control

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 Let's have some envois. First some Schumann for oboe and piano:

A spectacular Monteverdi madrigal, "Ah dolente partita" from Book 4:

Hey, why not a Bach oboe concerto?

Finally, Elsa-Pekka Salonen conducting Berlioz:

The Marvelous Mr. Monteverdi

Was there a fabulously talented musician in late 16th century Italy akin to today's Taylor Swift? Discounting the cultural, social and economic differences (no-one in 16th century Italy could make a billion dollars touring), there sure was: Claudio Monteverdi, born in 1567. He published his first book of madrigals at age twenty in 1587. But this was not his first publication, no, three years earlier, at age seventeen, he published a volume of Canzonette. Here is a a sample from that book:

Yes, pretty simple stuff, but on the other hand, early Taylor Swift is pretty simple stuff too--and this has a bit of counterpoint. Now let's hear something from his first book of madrigals:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBTnGyAtzhc

Featuring expressive shifts to capture the emotion of the text, this shows the influence of Luca Marenzio and Luzzasco Luzzaschi. But Monteverdi's second book of madrigals from 1590 contains his first masterpieces, skillful development of musical gestures reflecting the rhetorical elements of the texts as well as unusual rhythmic stratification--something not available in poetic forms.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nsr9CH1CI9M&list=RDNsr9CH1CI9M&start_radio=1

By 1592, when Monteverdi's third book of madrigals appeared, he had matured considerably. He had left his birthplace of Cremona and was now in the service of the Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua. The amorous triflings of book two are now the more heroic passions influenced by fellow Mantuan composer Giaches de Wert.

I'll stop here for now and continue this another day. One final remarkable thing about Monteverdi is that after perfecting the madrigal he went ahead and invented opera--not singlehandedly, but his L'Orfeo of 1607 is the earliest opera to be a part of the operatic canon today.