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."

* * *

 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. 

* * *

 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.

* * *

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

* * *

 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.

Performing Bach

I attended an all-Bach performance yesterday and I am left with a host of nagging questions. On the one hand, I think that kindness is a virtue and criticism can often be mean-spirited. On the other hand, honesty is also a virtue. So, yes, there were issues with the quality of the performance, But there were political and cultural issues as well. Let me set the scene.

A classical guitarist with whom I was previously unacquainted is doing a series of concerts in which he presents all the music that we can legitimately (more or less) perform on guitar. This includes all the so-called lute suites as well as the solo suites and sonatas for solo violin and the six suites for solo cello. The performance was on eight-string guitar. Those two things in themselves were a powerful motivation for me to attend the concerts. There will be six concerts, but I only became aware of the series after the first two had already taken place. So yesterday was the third concert, held in the central patio of the local library. These concerts are all to benefit scholarship programs of the library. The series as a whole is titled "A Peace Musical Offering" as it is dedicated generally to "peace" and references Bach's A Musical Offering.

In the introductory remarks there was no mention of peace between which parties, nor which party might be favored so it was just nebulous virtue-signaling. But that nebulosity also extended to the performance itself. As a long-retired guitar instructor I was troubled by the casual sitting position with the guitar resting simply on crossed legs. Mind you, Thomas Dunford, an extraordinary lutenist, uses the same position. But no professional classical guitarist does, choosing either a footrest or a guitar rest. The guitar itself was quite reasonable with a good resonant sound. The problems started with the first note. I think I can describe the effect as being very like an intermediate guitar student trying to sightread Bach and only partially succeeding. The analogue in prose might be like this:

ok,   here we go ... with the ... first phrase of.... the pre. lude to thethirdcello  suite uh the third ... cel. lo. suite...

I have taught at two universities, two conservatories and a two-year college and this kind of performance would have failed the audition for acceptance to the program at all of them. I'm not sure what to call the basic failing: complete lack of discipline? If you sit down to learn a piece by Bach, you have to take it in small sections and work on each section at a very slow tempo until all of it is in your fingers. It was as if he had never encountered this idea. He didn't lack technical skills because there were passages that came off relatively complete. But then the next phrase would be interrupted by a forest of missed notes, incorrect bass notes and frequent hesitations.

One of the best master classes in Bach on guitar I attended was that of Oscar Ghiglia at The Banff Centre. I'm pretty sure that if this kind of playing had been offered there, Oscar would have stopped him after the first couple of phrases and made him repeat them over and over and over again until they were smooth and consistent. This performance was like listening to someone with a hopeless stutter try and recite Shakespeare.

What was puzzling was that the performance was not unmusical as such. Nor did he play Bach as if he hated it like some otherwise professional guitarists do. No, the timbre was nice and there were even some phrases that were well-delivered. But the whole was hopelessly sloppy, as if the concept of a minimal professional standard of accuracy just didn't exist. Perhaps what was needed was a little less peace and little more anxiety about simply playing the right notes.

I am reminded of attending a recital of an up-and-coming young Canadian cellist years ago. My flautist friend and I were just leaving at the end when we ran into Paul Kling, a truly great violinist. We sort of shrugged as the concert had been rather frothy with a lot of throwing about of the hair. Paul, in his delightful Czech accent simply said: "you were expecting Rostropovich, maybe?"