Friday Miscellanea

One of the very, very few contemporary classical compositions to become a hit record was Henryk Górecki's Symphony No. 3. The New York Times has an article on the 25th anniversary:

“The first royalty check he got was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and he kept it in his wallet for a long enough time that we had to reissue it, because he wouldn’t cash it,” Mr. Hurwitz said. “It may just have been such a shock to all of a sudden go from someone who had struggled to find recognition, to someone who was at that moment as famous as any modern composer in the world.”

Even if it was notoriously trendy among Gen-Xers in the ’90s, Mr. Gorecki’s symphony holds up as an impressive artistic achievement. As in the large-scale sacred works of Mr. Pärt, the trance-like allure of slow-moving tonal harmonies has the undergirding of an elegant structure: The simple language of the first movement, a canon that expands outward from subterranean low strings, accrues a granitic weight that is sustained across the entire work. The first entrance of Ms. Upshaw in the Nonesuch recording, intoning a 15th-century Polish lament, maintains its original pathos.

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Perfect pitch is a wonderful gift, but can it be learned? Apparently it can, with the aid of a fairly uncommon drug, valproic acid. The Wall Street Journal has the story:

Relatively few people in history—even musical virtuosos—have been known to possess perfect pitch, the ability to identify or reproduce any musical note without having another note with which to compare it. Mozart was said to be one of those people. Ella Fitzgerald was another. The trait is so rare, it is estimated that only 1 in 10,000 people can tell an F-sharp from a B-flat in Western cultures, where the gift has been widely studied.

I'm not sure that it is that uncommon--I have known quite a few people with perfect pitch--but that may be just because I know a lot of musicians. None of these articles mention the accompanying problem of having perfect pitch, which is the fact that different kinds of music may use a different reference point. Historically, every town or ensemble probably had its own standard "A" which was likely different from our modern "A" at 440 cycles per second. The early music community uses an "A" that is lower than the modern one, at 415, which is the same as the modern G#. Also, different orchestras are known to use a somewhat different pitch for their "A" than the standard one. I knew one singer, a specialist in early music, who actually had two "perfect pitches", one for modern music at 440 and another for early music at 415. He could switch back and forth at need! Not having perfect pitch myself I sometimes wonder how those who do, hear. Does every note come with a little label: G5 and so on? Does this ever distract from the expressive content? What about complex textures as we might find in Ligeti or Xenakis? Does every note still come with a little label even if there are hundreds of different ones? It's funny that all these studies seem to only be interesting in seeing if ordinary people can acquire perfect pitch instead of really digging into the details of how it actually works...

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David Mermelstein writes about this years Ojai festival at the Wall Street Journal and gives it a mixed review:

...by elevating jazz to a position of primacy while re-engaging several artists prominently featured at the festival last year and the year before, Ojai’s decision-makers created an atmosphere in which much of the programming seemed either out of place or regurgitated. Mr. Iyer was a welcome new face who brought ethnic diversity as well as ample talent to Ojai. But seeing a former music director, the percussionist Steven Schick (2015), on stage more frequently than his successor undercut the message. To be fair, Mr. Iyer’s music was abundantly represented, though not always well received, throughout the long weekend.

The sense of déjà vu was furthered by the return (for the third year in a row) of members of the versatile and virtuosic International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), serving as the house band in all but name. Claire Chase, an ICE flutist as well as a flamboyant soloist, was among them, but her presence became unwelcome following a self-indulgent recital on Friday afternoon. Ms. Chase is immensely talented technically, but her showboating stage manner (silver metallic shorts over black leggings, awkward dance-like effects) and overreliance on a limited number of performance gimmicks didn’t wear well. (Enough already with the amplified lip smacks!)

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I am a great admirer of John Lennon as a musician and songwriter, but he said some remarkably silly things in his time, and this has to be the silliest:

"Before Elvis, there was nothing."  --John Lennon

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My favorite among the younger pianists is Igor Levit who just completed a journey through all the Beethoven piano sonatas at Wigmore Hall in London. The Guardian gives a well-deserved laudatory review:

Igor Levit’s performances of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas at the Wigmore Hall have stretched from early last autumn to the start of the summer. Individually and cumulatively, they have provided one of the most compelling experiences of the current London concert season. This final recital, consisting of the last three sonatas, epitomised the several that I was able to attend – boldly conceived, sometimes questionable and even uncomfortable, but full of thought and technically outstanding.

Levit is not a Beethovenian purist. He does not play with head metaphorically bowed in reverence to the canon. His Beethoven loves to surprise, and this is surely a necessary instinct. He is at one with Beethoven’s boundary-testing radicalism, a feature that was especially evident in the sometimes reckless but gloriously exciting treatment of some of the early sonatas. In the last three, of course, the stylistic boundaries are tested to even further extremes, but Levit mostly kept his repertoire of shock tactics in check.

 Igor Levit's Beethoven is not comfortable and predictable: it is challenging and fresh, just as it should be.

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I recently posted a rant about coughing in concerts and Slipped Disc has a post about a much milder instance of concert etiquette that prompted the whole panoply of different attitudes on the subject from commentators. It's worth a read.

One of the aspects of concert etiquette underscored in the comments that I think worth pointing out : most concertgoers have an expectation that the concert should be a silent and still moment (though their tolerance to this or that small disruption will vary). Any breach can then upset this balance and in the worst cases ruin the whole experience.

The important thing here is the expectation set : a tennis player can be flustered by a few people talking behind him, yet a football player will shoot penalties with an entire stadium roaring. They’re no different, but just have to concentrate in different environments, the parameters of which are defined beforehand and presumed to be accepted by all.

I happen to think the expectation of silence at a concert is a great thing and something to be preserved, especially in the noisy, shambolic world we live in.

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A really suitable envoi would be some Beethoven from Igor Levit. Here is the slow movement from the "Tempest" sonata, op. 31, no. 2: