I just spent a few days in Mexico City over Easter and I enjoy it more each time I visit. It is such a large city--around twenty-three million people--that it takes a while to get comfortable with it. I guess I am slightly comfortable with a few colonias in the centre: Polanco, Condesa, Roma and Chapultepec. With Uber it is dead easy to get around. A car will pick you up in three or four minutes and take you anywhere in the central part in fifteen minutes for about 120 pesos.
Mexico City has some fine, world-class museums like the National Museum of Anthropology which has important artifacts from all the important civilizations of Mexico: Olmec, Maya, Teotihuacan, Toltec, and Aztec. Alas, apart from a few codices from late in pre-Columbian times, we have no written records, no Herodotus, so the innumerable stone sculptures and temples remain mute. The Museum of Anthropology is huge with an enormous fountain in the forecourt:
Here is a particularly famous item, the so-called Aztec calendar stone which is actually a sacrificial altar.
But there are many other museums like the Frida Kahlo residence, the Soumaya museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art and so-on, something like a hundred in total. In recent years Mexico has become more and more well-known for its gastronomy and there are several Michelin star restaurants in the city. But since there are roughly fifteen thousand restaurants all together, there is something for everyone. And no, that doesn't count the street-food a favorite of Anthony Bourdain. I had a lovely lunch in a Chinese restaurant on Presidente Masaryk, surrounded by flowers:
A very famous shopping Mecca is the Palacio de Hierro which has nearly every luxury item you can imagine from Hermés scarfs to Russian food:
Yes, they have an entire floor devoted to gourmet food, not quite as good as the KDW in Berlin, but pretty good. An entire floor devoted to men's fashion--I was there to buy some Florsheim shoes:
And many floors devoted to women's fashion. I stayed in a modest hotel in Roma Norte, venturing out of Polanco where I usually stay. Roma Norte has become a destination for many American digital nomads who can be found clustering in lovely little coffee shops where you can sit for hours with a single latte.
That was I think the best iced latte I have ever had. It even came with tasting notes. Right in front of my hotel was a lovely small park, frequented by dog-walkers at all hours. It had an interesting fountain with hundreds of jets of water that acted like an outdoor air-conditioner.
The hotel offered a pretty good breakfast, though not to be compared to the huge buffet one finds at the Hyatt Regency in Polanco:
This is about the sixth or seventh time I have visited Mexico City and it is a favorite destination. It doesn't have the incredible art museums of Madrid or Paris, or the wealth of music performances of Vienna or Berlin, or the architectural beauty of Florence. But it has a bit of all those things in its own unique way--and at a fraction of the cost!
From reading people like R. G. Collingwood (The Idea of History) and Northrop Frye (Anatomy of Criticism) I have the sense that trends in history and the arts are often a fusion of the old and the new. Look at Neo-classicism in music, for example. So when I encounter something so radically new as the Quebec group Angine de Poitrine that I put up this week (and that everyone and their dog seems to have posted a reaction to), after noticing what is new: the costumes, the quarter-tone guitars, the intricate looping, the irregular time signatures and so on, the next thing I notice is that there are historical precedents for all this. The illustration above is meant to show that their costumes might be influenced by the commedia dell'arte costumes (just add polka dots); the use of quarter tones goes back a hundred years or so, I recall using tape loops in a 20th century performance practice class in 1976, fifty years ago; and irregular time signatures go back at least to the Rite of Spring composed in 1913. I'm also intrigued that their looping structures might have some relationship to the medieval isorhythmic motet! But what we might most deeply admire is that Angine de Poitrine have managed to make quarter-tone music addictive!
AMSTERDAM (AP) — From the stage of Amsterdam’s historic concert hall, violinist Hyunjin Cho and cellist Efstratia Chaloulakou look out over row after row of young faces illuminated by the glow of laptop screens.
The plush red seats of the Concertgebouw’s main auditorium are occupied by students cramming for upcoming exams and finishing dissertations as classical music fills the hall.
The students aren’t being rude by ignoring the musicians. At this event, they’re meant to be studying — and the music is intended to assist rather than distract them.
The study sessions were first organized during the COVID-19 pandemic by Entree, the youth association of the Concertgebouw, to help students improve their concentration and introduce them to the charms of classical music.
AP correspondent Karen Chammas reports a well-known classical music venue in Amsterdam has found a new way to attract a younger crowd.
They have been a hit ever since.
Seems like a great idea. My only quibble is that this encourages passive listening, which I'm not a fan of.
What do we even need music critics for, anyway? Do they add anything of importance to the musical landscape, or are they just arrogant, carping malcontents who exist to take potshots at the great artists of the day? Wouldn’t things be better if the entire enterprise were to simply disappear?
These rhetorical questions, and the embittered perspective underlying them, have been around for a very long time — for all I know, since the modern practice of music criticism began in the early 19th century.
Sure, read the whole thing.
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I am, inescapably, a critic myself which trait came to the fore a few days ago. I had attended a charity benefit and was seated next to an attractive and intriguing woman with whom I had a brief conversation. A few days later I asked a mutual friend about her. As she was single, my friend mentioned an event that the woman was going to be the star of in a few days. So we arranged to go as a group. It was some sort of St. Patrick's Day event so I was unclear as to what was going on. It turned out that the woman, let's call her Patricia, was the singer for a blues band with violin, guitar, saxophone, electric bass and drums. Ok, could be good. I'm actually quite fond of the blues. Alas, it was not so good. The drummer was a brutal, insensitive sadist, smashing his drums with great violence, plus his snare was tuned to the wrong note, something I hadn't previously realized was possible. The violinist was a non-entity, the saxophone, guitar and bass were generic. But the singer, Patricia, was the real show. She's not actually a singer, more of a poser. She poses as a singer, and offers many poses on stage, wriggling her fingers at us, adjusting her fashionable hat and, most alluring, displaying pelvic thrusts to show her female strength. Alas again, the second song they chose to massacre was The Thrill is Gone by B. B. King, a truly great blues artist. That song has a unique nostalgic sadness, unusual in the blues. I massacred it myself when I recorded a version of it some fifty-five years ago! The excessively loud drummer really killed it, but he was aided and abetted by the singer, whom I doubt even knew all the words. This is what it should have sounded like:
I had the great privilege of hearing him perform this song in concert in Montreal in 1990 and it brought the house down. I'm afraid that in future I will be unable to even look Patricia in the eye, let alone have a conversation.
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Rather thin pickings this week, so let's move on to some envois. First up, if you haven't listened to Angine de Poitrine five times yet, you really should:
Here is the String Quartet no. 3 by Alois Haba, in quarter tones:
What makes the Angine de Poitrine use of quarter-tones so effective is the rhythmic energy and stepwise motion, among other things. Speaking of rhythmic energy, let's listen to Eight Lines by Steve Reich:
And that's it for one of the odder Friday Miscellaneas.
The only place in Canada this band could have come from is Quebec. The name means "angina of the chest". Rick Beato, to stop people emailing him, just did a video on them. Yep, this is the music of the future all right. They call this "math rock" and if we had such a thing as a mathematically-trained rock musicologist, I'm sure she could spend many happy hours figuring out just what they hell they are up to. In the meantime, I find I can listen to anything presented with sincerity and conviction, as this is.
Opera singers and ballet dancers found themselves at odds with a strange enemy recently after the actor Timothée Chalamet, in the final stretch of a hotly contested Oscar race, said that “no one cares” about the two art forms.
Read the whole thing for details and for counters from opera and ballet folk. I had to chuckle though because I think Hollywood is also looking down the barrel of nobody cares. The only Timothy Chalamet movie I have ever watched, I turned off about halfway through because, yep, I just didn't care. I am a movie lover, but I have very little interest in current movies. As I have expressed here before, to general agreement, my favorite move star is Bill Murray.
Really you have to feel sorry for all these young people in the culture business who, because of our flawed education systems, have almost no knowledge of the cultural riches of the past. If you know nothing about opera and ballet, of course you are not going to think much of them.
In one of my favorite episodes of Angel he takes his whole crew to see a performance of Giselle, thereby introducing not only his fellow characters, but the audience as a whole, to a romantic ballet. Knowing the history of art enriches everything you do. And vice versa.
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.
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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.
