Friday Miscellanea

Here is something you don't see too often, not if you live where I live--it's a mob of sitars!

Click to enlarge

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You know, when I saw this, I just thought it was perfect for the Friday miscellanea, that part of the week when the Music Salon, normally a place of genteel classical restraint and grace, lets down its hair and releases a pack of ravenous wolves:

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The British composer Max Richter has done some interesting things, including writing a piece for Hilary Hahn's encores album and recomposing Vivaldi's The Seasons, but this new piece seems a bit, well, soporific:

Here is an article on a recent performance in Berlin.

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Here is another article about that crisis in psychology--you know, the one where they are discovering that a great deal of the "settled science" is in fact, just wrong? The article is "Many scientific “truths” are, in fact, false." We tend to think that the arts are all fuzzy and subjective while the sciences, even the social sciences, are all objective and truthy. Turns out not to be so. In fact, I think there is considerably more objectivity in the arts than you might think. It is just that a lot of powerful people benefit from pulling the wool over our eyes!

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Could this be the reason no-one has invaded Switzerland for, oh, a thousand years or so?

You just don't want to mess with guys with this level of discipline...

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This is turning out to be a bad year for musicians: after seeing Nikolaus Harnoncourt and George Martin pass away in recent weeks, this week British composer Peter Maxwell Davies died. Here is a tribute by Simon Rattle. And here is a lovely piece for guitar by Davies. This is "Farewell to Stromness" played by Matthew McAllister:

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The art rock musician Keith Emerson also passed away recently and here is a brief note in Slipped Disc with a clip of a performance of his three string quartets!

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NewMusicBox, one of my bêtes noir, beats the drum for diversity: "Pursuing Diversity: New Voices, New Sounds."

Conversations about diversity are happening everywhere these days. The changing face of America is increasingly bringing what used to be a dodged or back-burnered dialogue to the forefront of the national debate. The visibility of this issue has grown in recent years due to highly publicized police incidents, national grass-roots protest and advocacy movements, and the resignation of university presidents. Talking about diversity can be difficult and potentially fear provoking, and can often leave people feeling defensive, shamed, or angry. But the discussion is happening. In a recent @musochat Twitter conversation, Gahlord Dewald led a fearless and poignant exchange about diversity in new music. Without presuming to have any answers, I want to expand the dialogue and rearticulate the pressing need for us to cultivate an atmosphere of active diversity in our music and projects. Not just because we should but also because the studies are clear: people thrive when surrounded by others who are different.

What I dislike about this kind of writing is that it reveals a mode of thought that is deeply unreflective, enslaved to every fashionable conceit and mired in cliché. Sadly, these folks, while following in lockstep every plank in the progressive platform, think they are speaking truth to power or something. I have news for them: the cultural Marxists ARE the establishment, firmly ensconced in the mass media, political offices and academia. Read the whole thing for a compendium of clever and innovative ways new musicians are finding to distract themselves from, you know, writing good music.

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Here is an interesting article on the mystery of Sibelius' Symphony No. 8.

From 1904 until his death in 1957, the composer Jean Sibelius lived some 20 miles north of Helsinki, in a rural villa built of timber and stone on the shores of Lake Tuusula. He called the house Ainola, after his wife, Aino. Surrounded by fields and birch forests, it befitted the isolation of Sibelius’s later years, when Finland’s most revered musician became a withdrawn, reclusive figure. From about 1933 onward, he published no music of any significance, nothing but a few trifles and arrangements. Yet he continued to wage a turbulent artistic struggle with himself as he attempted, over the course of several years, to write his Eighth Symphony.

Sometime in the 1940s, the struggle was seemingly lost. One day, Sibelius carried a laundry basket filled with his manuscripts into the dining room at Ainola and began feeding the pages into the raging fire in the stove. Aino, who would recall the event after her husband’s death, could confirm the identity of only one of the pieces her husband burned—the early Karelia Suite—but it is now considered a certainty that the Eighth Symphony was destroyed as well. Afterward, a strange calm descended upon the composer. His mood lightened. He appeared strangely optimistic, no longer depressed, as if the fire had brought on some magnificent catharsis.

I have my own theories about what went wrong, but read the whole article.

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I was thinking about putting up a major work by Peter Maxwell Davies for the envoi today, but I think I will save that and do some stand-alone posts on his music. So instead, let's listen to Sibelius' last completed symphony, the 7th. This the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, Osmo Vänskä, conductor: