The quote I put up the other day comes from this collection:
I'm just about to start the last story, Death in Venice. After running across Molière mentioned in a hundred places it finally dawned on me that I should read him. He is rather like a French Shakespeare, roughly a hundred years later. And he only wrote comedies. I like comedies. The thing is that, in this translation Richard Wilbur sticks as close as possible to the poetic structure of the original, which means hundreds of pages of rhymed couplets in iambic pentameter. It is particularly fun when they are split between different characters. Like Cher or Madonna, Molière goes by one name.
And finally, I have returned to The Histories of Herodotus in the marvelous Landmark edition:
I set this aside for a few months, but I am glad to be back. Herodotus is the source of lots of delightful stories. For example, a Persian lord, in order to send a message with complete secrecy had a courier's head shaved and the message tattooed on his scalp. The he grew the hair back. He simply carried the message "shave the head of this courier." Another story is of a man given an important message that said simply "kill this man."
But the average tree-ring sequence for a sizable fraction of the violins in their sample correlated well with tree rings from near Trentino in northern Italy, and specifically the high-altitude reaches of the Val di Fiemme. And interestingly, those violins tended to have been produced during Stradivari’s so-called “Golden Age” from roughly 1700 to 1725, a period noted for particularly high-quality Stradivarius instruments. Perhaps Stradivari produced his best work when he found a source of wood in the Val di Fiemme and stuck with it, Dr. Bernabei said.
This strikes a chord with me because Robert Holroyd, who built my guitar, sought out wood for the soundboard from high-altitude spruce in British Columbia.
The wood that goes into making a violin — particularly the front surface, known as the soundboard — is critical. Parameters such as wood density and stiffness all affect how a violin ultimately sounds. “The wood choice is very, very important,” Mr. Beare said.
Stradivari is known to have favored spruce, but where exactly he sourced his wood has long been steeped in mystery. That’s where the study of tree rings — dendrochronology — comes in.
Most trees produce a ring of growth each year, and the widths of those rings depend on environmental conditions. High levels of moisture tend to result in wider rings, for instance. So a sequence of tree rings is like a bar code that records the conditions experienced by a tree year after year.
What they don't mention in the article is the particular benefit of using wood from high-altitude trees. The growing season is short so the growth rings are very narrow, which gives a more even acoustic response.
3 February 1967 is a day that belongs in the annals of music history. It’s the day that Jimi Hendrix entered London’s Olympic Studios to record a song using a new component. The song was “Purple Haze,” and the component was the Octavia guitar pedal, created for Hendrix by sound engineer Roger Mayer. The pedal was a key element of a complex chain of analog elements responsible for the final sound, including the acoustics of the studio room itself. When they sent the tapes for remastering in the United States, the sounds on it were so novel that they included an accompanying note explaining that the distortion at the end was not malfunction but intention.
Hendrix’s setups are well documented: Set lists, studio logs, and interviews with Mayer and Eddie Kramer, then the lead engineer at Olympic Studios, fill in the details. The signal chain for “Purple Haze” consisted of a set of pedals—a Fuzz Face, the Octavia, and a wah-wah—plus a Marshall 100-watt amplifier stack, with the guitar and room acoustics closing a feedback loop that Hendrix tuned with his own body. Later, Hendrix would also incorporate a Uni-Vibe pedal for many of his tracks. All the pedals were commercial models except for the Octavia, which Mayer built to produce a distorted signal an octave higher than its input.
Speaking of a 100-watt Marshall stack, when I was asked to play an obligatto guitar part in a contemporary piece for orchestra I found I had to double on electric guitar so I asked the concert office to get me a guitar and amp as I hadn't played electric guitar for years. What they got was a Stratocaster and a hulking Marshall stack that I never managed to turn up to more than 3. The whole viola section shuddered as I wheeled in the amp behind them.
Where is this devotion to interpreting a singular new contemporary composer these days? Deep musical friendships between well-established pianists and composers seems to have disappeared. Is there no time for long-term collaboration? A composer writing music who sees you especially in mind, for your unique musical fingerprint, is a magical thing. You don’t take it for granted. And it’s true the other way. Composer colleagues of mine always feel awe in how the right musician brings their music to life, or even to a place where they thought not possible in their heads.
Perhaps established musicians are playing it too safe. Commercialisation of their albums are top of the agenda, hoping that another Beethoven or Prokofiev Sonata cycle will keep the sales in the green. Or even that professional musicians simply don’t have the time to devote to curating life-long musical friendships with other established composers on the stage.
Several times during his hourlong performance of Beethoven’s “Diabelli Variations” at Carnegie Hall last month, the pianist Igor Levit made the same nonmusical gesture. At the end of a variation he would briskly swipe the flat of his hand horizontally above the keys as if clearing a whiteboard of the previous idea’s scribbles.
The motion seemed to be a mental reset — as if Levit were reminding himself to return to the blank slate of the theme, just as Beethoven had done, so as to ask the same question anew: What else might this music become? It was a reminder that variations are not merely a decorative form but also a kind of problem solving, in which each new section challenges the composer, the performer and the listener to approach the same material with a beginner’s mind.
Human beings have what’s called the serial-order effect: The longer we spend thinking about something, the wilder and more unusual our ideas tend to get.
Gen A.I. is constrained to the most statistically likely solutions. It’s fast, but it stays within a very small sphere of possibilities. Human beings go to edge cases. Time gives us the opportunity to diversify ideas and to see how well what we’ve made holds up.
* * *
Let's have some musical envois. Of course we have to start with Purple Haze:
And of course, the version by Kronos:
The Critic article also talked about the Piano Sonata no. 6 by Prokofiev and there was an article I didn't put up announcing that Yuja Wang got Norman Lebrecht fired from the BBC for sending her a snippy email. So here is Yuja Wang with the Prokofiev Sonata no. 6:
And finally, of course, the Diabelli Variations by Beethoven played by Grigory Sokolov:
For Christmas this year a friend of mine sent me a beautiful Everyman edition of Buddenbrooks and a collection of short stories, both by Thomas Mann. I have known Mann for quite some time--I read Doctor Faustus many years ago--but I didn't realize just how great a writer he is. One of the short stories is Tonio Kröger and the last chapter (it is quite a long short story) contains this remarkable paragraph:
I stand between two worlds, I am at home in neither, and this makes things a little difficult for me. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois feel they ought to arrest me... I don't know which of the two hurts me more bitterly. The bourgeois are fools; but you worshippers of beauty, you who say I am phlegmatic and have no longing in my soul, you should remember that there is a kind of artist so profoundly, so primordially fated to be an artist that no longing seems sweeter and more precious to him than his longing for the bliss of the commonplace.
I'm still working on a Monteverdi post, but in the meantime I ran across a quote in an Ann Althouse post that sparked some recollections:
Everybody was really competitive, even though there was nothing to win.
That was a reference to living in Manhattan, but it applies to the Canadian music business as well. I struggled for years as a concert classical guitarist in Canada and, by Canadian standards I was actually "successful". I made a living as a classical guitarist playing concerts, doing radio broadcasts on the CBC and teaching at conservatory and university. Successful! My most prominent concert was a performance with the CBC Vancouver Orchestra at the Odeon theatre in Vancouver, the largest concert hall in the city. This was broadcast live across Canada. I played the Villa-Lobos Guitar Concerto and a couple of solo pieces. The Brazilian consul was an invited guest. For this, which involved three months of hard work learning the concerto, I was paid the magnificent sum of $1,250 Canadian. My typical annual earnings were between $23,000 and $25,000. Sometimes I wouldn't open my mailbox for a month because I knew that it would contain only bills. One summer I got hired to do a summer course for a splendid $3,000 and because it was earned in a short amount of time about half of it was taken in taxes.
But yes, we were all very competitive even though there was nothing to win. In 1986 Vancouver was the site of a spectacular international exhibition with pavilions from countries around the world. In conjunction they held a classical music competition for solo artists. First prize was $700. This isn't a joke it is an insult. So yes, in the classical Canadian music business there is nothing to win. Canada has very little regard for classical music apart from a few square blocks in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.
Of course, for classical guitarists in the world as a whole, the situation is not much better. When I was a young guitarist dedicating decades of my life to the hard work of becoming an accomplished soloist it would have been of immense value to me if I had had a consultation with a vocation specialist. He might have told me the following: there are perhaps a million classical guitarists in the world of whom perhaps 50,000 are striving for a serious career. Of these the ones who are actually successful are five. No, not five percent, five individuals. (I could name them, but the list would be out of date. Of the five I met four and studied with two.) One quite successful artist kept a large Mercedes sedan in Frankfurt and every year he would fly there and tour around Germany and other European countries. He also had a recording contract with Philips. He earned perhaps $500,000 a year. That is a successful career.
Here is a clip of a performance from the heydays of my career.
This is one of those posts that does not fit comfortably into any particular category, so I should start with a definition. By a large repertory I mean a large collection of works by a single composer in a specific genre. The locus classicus might be the five hundred and fifty-five single movement sonatas for harpsichord by Domenico Scarlatti. Another prominent example is the one hundred and four symphonies by Joseph Haydn. A lesser-known collection would be the three hundred and seventy-one symphonies by the Finnish composer and conductor Leif Segerstam.
Of course we would want to include the three hundred some cantatas by J. S. Bach. And there are some smaller collections that are also well worth looking at such as the two hundred and thirty some pieces for harpsichord by François Couperin gathered into twenty-seven suites or Ordres. Another spectacular collection is that of the two hundred and fifty-two madrigals of Claudio Monteverdi, collected in nine books. Mind you, over the course of the composition, Monteverdi made radical changes in the very nature of the genre and from Book 7 on there is a wide variety of versions of the form using different kinds of poetic texts, different vocal combinations and especially different instrumental combinations to the extent that some of the longer examples are like miniature operas--a long way from our basic conception of the madrigal.
What fascinates me about these large repertoires is the astonishing creativity involved. Imagine sitting down year after year and composing over and over again short sonatas for harpsichord, overwhelmingly in binary form and each time coming up with something new and fresh. Or doing the same with the symphonic form, though there you have instrumental variety as well as contrasting movements to work with.
What is required for these repertories to flourish is not only the creative genius of the composer, but also the availability of musicians to play the works and a venue and sponsorship to support performances. Of course Scarlatti could count on the patronage of Philip V, the King of Spain and Haydn that of the wealthy Esterhazy family. Bach was employed by the city fathers of Leipzig and Monteverdi by the Gonzagas and the Serene Republic of Venice. So what you really need is decades long support of some wealthy patrons, something we don't really have these days.
How could I possibly introduce these repertories in the context of a blog? Not very easily, I'm afraid. The topic is not only too big for a blog, it is also too big for a series of hefty books. Because of the extensive nature of these repertories, many of them have not even been examined in a thorough way in monographs. And when they have, as in the massive three-volume book on the Italian Madrigal by Alfred Einstein, they are often many decades old. So, basically, it can't be done! So what can I do? Well, I can certainly give little tastes of them, call it a "repertory sampler" which might encourage you to explore this music. I think it is really worth your time because here we tend to have pure creativity unaffected by commercial or ideological considerations--and wouldn't that be a relief!
So I'm going to pick up on a post I put up not long ago and delve into the Monteverdi madrigals to start with. I'm going to pick one madrigal from Book 3, one from Book 5 and one from Book 7 that I hope will enable me to illustrate the shift from Renaissance style to Baroque style in one composer in just a few years.
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.
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.
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.
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.
* * *
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:
