Steven Watson: Creative Guitar

I often complain about popular music, claiming it is dull, repetitive industrial product. But the classical music world also has its dull, repetitive aspects (and not just Philip Glass). A few decades ago, classical artists mostly had their own individual character. Nowadays, one wonders if the distinguishing feature, of women soloists at least, is their choice of costume.

Pianist Yuja Wang

Pianist Khatia Buniatishvili

When I was trying to advance my career, the older artists such as Narciso Yepes and Julian Bream each had very much their own personality reflected not only in their phrasing but also in tone color. But even with my generation there was starting to be a sameness rigidly enforced by the need to win competitions. The robotic repetitive industrial aspect of the music 'industry' comes out in biographies that all read virtually the same with just different names. Interpretations are standardized. Tone color is very similar. And the same narrow repertoire is everywhere.

But occasionally one runs across a genuinely individual artist outside of the usual haunts. That brings us to the English guitarist Steven Watson whom I have been following for a few years. He is a committed no-nails guitarist. At first his clips on YouTube were short pieces, often off the beaten path. Then he started putting up performances on unusual instruments like banjo, lute, and ukulele. Here are a few of those clips. Tarrega on gut strings:

Paul McCartney's Yesterday arranged by Toru Takemitsu:

Telemann on 7-string banjo:

Machaut on lute:

And lurking out there somewhere is his cover of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer theme.

But his latest is so unusual it forces us to consider him from an entirely different angle: as a truly creative musician and composer. This is all 1 hour and 20 minutes of Ad Infinitum, which I strongly encourage you to listen to in its entirety--you won't want to miss the moment of stagecraft where he adjusts his glasses around the one hour mark.

This seems to breathe the influence of Morton Feldman's very long pieces of chamber music like his six hour String Quartet or Violin and String Quartet (2 hours). But the texture also strongly reminds me of one of the strangest pieces by Bach, his Canon per Augmentationem in Contrario Motu from The Art of Fugue where the comes arrives after four measures, in double note values, down a fifth and in inversion. The austere effect is very similar to Steven's piece. It might also share some musical DNA with Eric Satie's Vexations, a short piano piece with a lot of tritones which is to be played, if I recall correctly, eight hundred times...

Making the rent!

I'm sure I have written about this before a few times, but it is only possible for a very few musicians to make a decent living. And here is an illustration:

At 43, opera singer Andrew Potter has finally made it. His voice is at its peak. He's making more money than ever, booking lots of gigs. But in an open letter to the opera industry last month, he announced he's retiring from the stage.

POTTER: We just have to start telling the truth, and that is that unless you're in the top 1- or 2% of singers in the world, this is not something that you'll be able to sustain a family with.

ATKINSON: Potter is good but just outside that 2%. Last December, he sang in a metropolitan opera production. And for him, that's when it became clear he could barely afford to do this work.

And opera singing is probably, along with orchestral conducting, the most lucrative niche in the classical music world. If you are a classical guitarist, the odds are much, much worse. Out of a few hundred thousand classical guitarists in the world, how many make a good living? Back in the 80s when times were much better for classical guitarists, about five. Not five percent, no, five people: John Williams, Julian Bream, Pepe Romero, Narciso Yepes and maybe Christopher Parkening. I don't think the top five now are doing nearly as well. I could speculatively estimate that Pepe Romero might have made $500,000 US a year, which is a darn good living for a musician. The others perhaps a bit more or a bit less. But that is five artists out of, well let's conservatively estimate the world classical guitar population at 100,000, so that is 0.005%. If I had known those were the odds I would have done a degree in philosophy instead.

Γνῶθι σεαυτόν!

Divergent Paths: Music and Literature

Let's start with something that caused me to rethink the history of literature over the last one hundred years:

Hilary Layne is an incisive critic of literature with many worthwhile videos. But this one is on another level. She uncovers a massive and long-standing project to redefine and therefore dilute the meaning of the word "classic" in literature. In so doing she re-evaluates the whole "middle-brow" project where publishers issued many older works in new accessible formats for the masses. Watch the video for her detailed argument. What I want to do here is compare the parallel history of classical music.

One comment on the clip: Hilary is brilliant in uncovering the clever way that publishers finessed the use of the word "classic" in order to promote modern authors as "classic." Which they are not. The true definition of the classics are those works from the ancient world that truly form the foundation of Western Civilization such as the philosophers, playwrights, historians and poets of Ancient Greece and the poets and historians of Rome. The Lord of the Rings, while a fine work, is not a classic. Nor is Madame Bovary or Crime and Punishment. These are modern novels. She also included Dumas and Cervantes in this category. My question is, where do the classics end? Is St. Augustine classic (probably yes). How about Dante? Or Shakespeare (I'm guessing probably not). But a few comments on where the dividing line is would have been helpful.

But the big question here is how different the history of music has been from the history of literature. Mind you, one thing they have in common is the financial support of the CIA and other US agencies for the avant-garde post-WWII.

The crucial difference between the history of modernism in music and in literature seems to revolve around the commercial aspects. Modernism in literature was supported by publishers because there was real money to be made once they marketed it as "classic." In music, however, the term "classical" has a quite different application, namely to the lighter, more transparent musical language of the Viennese composers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. However, in recent years the term "classical" in music has come to refer to any of the composed music dating from around the year 1,000 AD to the present as opposed to popular, folk or world music. The least profitable niche in the music "industry."

Apart from a few isolated promoters like Diaghilev, there was no-one who saw modernist music as being exploitable for profit and that has pretty much remained the case for the last 100 years. Instead, there were lots of critics who condemned the new dissonant music of the 20th century. It took the efforts of many composers, historians and scholars to install the avant-garde in all the musical institutions even though the music was largely ignored by the general public. And still is. Contemporary masterpieces like The Rite of Spring or the symphonies of Shostakovich or the music of Arnold Schoenberg has become well-loved among the cognoscenti, but still doesn't make any money.

The music world has no "classics" in the literary sense. The music of the ancient world, along with perhaps 90% of the literature, has been lost. The notation to enable the composed music of Western Civilization has only been available for the last thousand years and for the first five hundred it was awkward and inefficient. So what do we have that could be considered classic, that is, works of incontestable, objective aesthetic value? Given the historical differences, perhaps we could make a strong case for from the music of Léonin and Pérotin up through Machaut, Josquin, Du Fay, Monteverdi and so on up to Bach. And one would strongly want to include Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. From then on, the music begins to resemble the modern novels by people like Dostoevsky that Hilary Layne admits to liking, but not admitting them as classics with objective value. I guess I would be ok with that.

Comments? Objections?

What I'm reading now

I just finished this one yesterday. I first read the Tao Te Ching forty or fifty years ago and at least once more since then. But this relatively new edition is far superior to those plain translations. This edition has the original Chinese text, a new translation taking into account some new discoveries of different versions of the text, plus a selection of 2,000 years of Chinese commentary. Wonderful book.

I'm about two-thirds of the way through this book, a collection of excerpts from John Ruskin's enormous output. His Modern Painters is in five volumes and he wrote about many, many subjects. Primarily an art critic he was a tireless advocate of Turner as the greatest landscape painter of all time. Lots of very detailed commentary on culture and society.

This is a mammoth undertaking--a thousand pages of rhyming iambic pentameter in archaic English. It is actually easier to read than James Joyce. I'm just a few cantos in, but really enjoying it. Never read anything like it. Hugely influential on all English poetry since it was first published in 1590.

Next up will be The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro and Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar.

 

What Beauty Is

We live in a very confused and profoundly hypocritical time in which nobody seems to be clear about anything. So sometimes it is a very good policy to look back at the foundation of civilization to see what was thought then. Of course that means Plato or Aristotle. For Aristotle beauty was essentially "harmonious order." These days we seem fixated on the idea that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" or "beauty is subjective." But of course, "harmonious order" is not subjective and while it is perceived by someone it is not in that someone. Beauty is not subjective. It is objective. Harmonious order.

Of course what constitutes harmonious order is intricate, complicated, viewed differently at different times in history and involved with what is trying to be expressed, not to mention its relationship with the Good and the True. So what might seem simple is actually not. But Beauty is definitely not ugly, bad or some kind of lie. I suppose it is unnecessary to point out that current aesthetic practice is antithetical to beauty which is unfortunate because it means that instead of being surrounded by beauty in our daily lives, we are surrounded by ugliness.

Sculpture at Trafalgar Square

That's not a current vision of beauty, that's just aggressive ugliness. It harmonizes well with current architecture, but not so well with the traditional architecture that surrounds it. It would go well with this kind of architecture:

Obama Presidential Center

We seem to have completely lost any intuitive aesthetic sense.
 

This Summer at Salzburg

Yuja Wang at Salzburg

Sadly I wasn't able to attend the Salzburg Festival this year, but we have a pretty good overview from Jay Nordlinger at the New Criterion.

The playing of a late Schubert sonata by Arcadi Volodos is almost as regular at the Salzburg Festival as Jedermann, the play by Hofmannsthal. Hugo von Hofmannsthal was one of the founders of the festival, in 1920. Every year, his Jedermann—a treatment of the medieval English morality play Everyman—is staged.

Volodos, the Soviet-born pianist, does not play a late Schubert sonata every year, but almost. Does it make any sense to refer to “late Schubert,” given that the composer died at thirty-one? I think so. These are profound, transcendental works in the final stage of a brief but magnificent composing career.

In the very first Salzburg Festival I atttended, as a student, Alfred Brendel played all the Schubert sonatas in several recitals.

In recent years, Teodor Currentzis, the Greek Russian conductor, has become a fixture at the festival. This summer, he led his Utopia Orchestra, and its associated choir, in a concert, which included the Brahms Requiem. He also led them, and other forces, in an opera: Bizet’s Carmen. Was it Bizet’s? That is probably a matter of dispute.

The overture, I have never heard better. The music exploded off the instruments—in a stylish, agreeable way. Unrushed, it had exceptional verve and allure. Currentzis is a conductor like few others. He wakes a person up, and shows the hidden possibilities of the music at hand. (Leonard Bernstein did much the same.) Currentzis goes without a baton, sometimes fluttering his fingers, in the Furtwängler manner. In the opera pit, he had some of his players stand, when they were playing solos.

One of the finest concerts I have ever seen at Salzburg was Currentzis conducting an all-Rameau evening.

Like András Schiff, Yuja Wang, the Chinese pianist, did not announce her program in advance. She wanted to allow for spontaneity or to create mystery—or something. Unlike Schiff, she never announced her program at all—from the stage or anywhere else. She simply sat down at the piano, looked at the computer tablet on her music rack, and played one piece after another. She played twenty-one pieces in all, over the course of an hour and forty-five minutes, with no intermission. She might as well have been at home, playing through some of her favorite things.

The pieces came in no discernible order. They certainly did not come in the chronological. To begin, she played pieces by Satie, Chopin, Scarlatti, Glass, Gubaidulina, Ravel, and Adès.

Unlike in North America, nobody chats with the audience at Salzburg, something I am grateful for. 

 One of the operas in concert this summer was Der Prinz von Homburg (The Prince of Homburg), by Hans Werner Henze, composed in the late 1950s. Henze was a German who died in 2012 at the age of eighty-six. His opera is based on a play by Heinrich von Kleist, written in about 1810. The story involves war, honor, clemency. Henze meant his opera to be a statement against militarism, but interpretation is up to the individual. Der Prinz von Homburg is a political drama, a family drama, and a psychodrama.

Henze’s score is an outstanding example of his musical intellect. The music sounds like the story, from singers and orchestra alike. It is composed in “tonal-sounding atonality,” to borrow a phrase from Lorin Maazel, the late conductor. It is often fantastical, dreamlike. Every page of the score is marked by intelligence.

These are little bits from four concerts in the Festival. When I go for three weeks, I go to fourteen or fifteen concerts. This is still just a mere sampling of the Festival which comprises some one hundred and sixty concerts. The Vienna Philharmonic is the "house" orchestra for all the opera productions but they also do five concerts of which the last time I was there I attended a transcendent Bruckner 8 conducted by Ricardo Muti. There are several guest orchestras, including this year the Berlin Philharmonic, Le Concert d‘Astrée, Budapest Festival Orchestra, ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien, Utopia (Currenzis' personal orchestra), Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. There were also nine opera productions. Recitals included Yuja Wang, but also Grigory Sokolov, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Evgeny Kissin, Arcadi Volodos, Alexander Malofeev, András Schiff, Igor Levitt and a violin and piano recital by Isabelle Faust Violin and Kristian Bezuidenhout Harpsichord. Pretty much all the A-list pianists in the world.

There are lots of other things as well, lieder recitals, a whole Mozart series every weekend by the Mozarteum Orchestra, some very creative chamber music, choral concerts, live theater and so on. You can't possibly attend them all.

The schedule for the 2027 Festival comes out in December.

What I'm Reading Now

I haven't done one of these since July when it seems I was reading a host of books. Lately, just a few, but lengthy ones. First up the book that some have called the greatest novel of the 20th century:

Including the annotations, about 1,200 pages of fairly difficult prose with occasional bits in Latin, Gaelic, French, Italian and German. A parody of all literature since Homer. Honestly, the only novel that is even vaguely like this one is Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman that I read last year. And I have to read Ulysses again pretty soon. Wow.

Including the endnotes, just under 1,300 pages. A few years ago they released a movie with the same title about two hours long. That is a kind of aesthetic fraud--to do proper justice to this long and intricate narrative you would need a movie 50 hours long! A fine and enjoyable story of adventure and 19th century society.

At only 200 pages a mere wisp of a novel compared to the others. This is the third book by Ishiguro I have read and each one impresses with its lapidary clarity. But at the same time, I feel I have to re-read them because there is so much below the surface.

The only American novelists I really enjoy are Tom Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway. I had a terrific professor for the English Literature course in first-year university and he assigned The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber which, along with Franz Kafka's In the Penal Colony, has stuck with me ever since.

Let's have a little musical envoi. Despite all the compositions he has written in recent years, some of my favorite pieces by Leo Brouwer are the early ones like Elogio de la Danza. Here played by the young Spanish guitarist Mabel Millan. (But yes, she does end with the wrong chord!)