Friday Miscellanea

Philip Glass, one of our most prolific composers, is premiering a new symphony, a homage to David Bowie, in May 2019. The Guardian has the story:

London Contemporary Orchestra and organist James McVinnie will perform Glass’s Lodger symphony, a work the composer had discussed with Bowie before his death, but only now has been realised. Based on Bowie’s 1979 album of the same name, it completes Glass’s reimagining of Bowie’s Berlin trilogy, following 1992’s Low symphony (Glass’s Symphony No 1), and 1996’s Heroes symphony (Glass’s fourth). 

The two musicians were friends and mutual admirers for many decades. “The two symphonies were of course originally intended to be part of a trilogy, just as Bowie and Eno’s Berlin albums are,” Glass told the Guardian in 2016, shortly after Bowie’s death. “We talked, years ago, about doing the third symphony based on Lodger, and the idea has not totally disappeared.”

* * *

Slipped Disc has an item on the classical awards at the Grammys.

* * *

Speaking of the Grammys, one winner was pianist Daniel Trifonov and the Globe and Mail has a profile of him:

Trifonov's postvirtuosic playing has its capacity to surprise, though. Listeners blown away by brilliant passage work in one section aren't prepared for the sensuousness of the next. The repertoire chosen for his Toronto concert – much of it taken from his new Chopin Evocations album on Deutsche Grammophon – heads deep into the heart of the Romantic Era, allowing for about as much heartfelt playing as can be imagined.

Yes, maybe this does represent a turn back to the romantic repertoire. But channelling Chopin is in itself sending a signal – rather like those newer, smarter businesses encouraging their employees to get plenty of sleep – that slow and soft may be the new fast and furious.

I want to take the opportunity to point out that the Globe and Mail last month decided to kill their comments completely until further notice. As I see it the problem was that every time the Globe published an obviously biased or simply false item they were repeatedly lambasted in the comments by people who were better-informed. This happened with such a high number of articles and opinion pieces that I guess they just couldn't take it any more. They could either strive for a better newspaper or simply suppress all the comments and, to their shame, they chose the latter. This frees them up to be even more biased and vicious, of course. There is an excellent example today. Jordan B. Peterson is pretty much a nightmare to every member of the Canadian establishment, whose voice is the Globe and Mail, so the more famous he becomes, the more pressing the need to smear him at every opportunity. The thinly veiled conceit of this item is Peterson's "paradox": The Jordan Peterson paradox: high intellect, or just another angry white guy?

Where other academics rise on the strength of their ideas, Peterson's fame has crested on their sheer proliferation. As with his online lectures, his new book is rangy and digressive, addressing a wide range of subjects (history, theology, critical theory, evolutionary biology) well outside his realm of professional expertise. He can skip from the journals of the Columbine shooters to Goethe within three sentences; and within three pages skips to Tolstoy, to Cain and Abel, to Christ Himself, and back to "the Columbine boys." If psychology has always been the smorgasbord of soft sciences, Peterson's brand of profundity is the sprawling, all-you-can-eat Mandarin buffet – a medley of undercooked ideas warmed under the heat lamp of his own faintly flickering intellect.

I would pay good money to witness a debate between this nonentity, John Semley, and Prof. Peterson. In days past a transparently biased article like this in the Globe would have been pummeled and slashed to ribbons by dozens upon dozens of commentators, but no more. They have solved their problem at last! In Canada, this is how we roll.

* * *

Finally classical music finds its niche in the 21st century: Classical Music on the London Underground. It is used to control anti-social behavior on the London subway:

The use of classical music to deter anti-social behavior began on the District Line in 2003, which over the next 18 months saw a reported reduction of 25 percent in assaults on staff, and a 37 percent reduction in graffiti within the station. Subsequently, the scheme was rolled out to over 40 stations in 2008, and has been subtly altering moods ever since.

* * *

And finally, the Atlantic has a think piece about the question of the universality of musical language. The first problem is that music, while it has some language-like properties, isn't really a language.

Imagine that you’re a researcher who has unlimited time and resources, and a time machine that can travel anywhere in the world. You use these wondrous gifts to get a recording of every song that has ever been sung, whether by people in big cities or those in small hunter-gatherer groups. You play these recordings to random volunteers, and ask them to guess the behaviors that were associated with each tune. Was the song used for dancing? For soothing a baby? For healing illness? Could people guess what songs are for by their sound alone, without any knowledge about their cultural context?

Yep, that's the question all right. The researchers did what I would call begging the question by severely limiting the song-types to just four out of a huge number of possibles:

Their collection—the Natural History of Song discography—represents music of four types: dances; lullabies; expressions of love; and healing songs intended to cure the sick in ceremonies.

Let's compare these categories to the songs on a CD of Nootka music we were listening to the other day: Canoe Paddle Song, Entrance Song, Medicine Man Song, Whale Song, Farewell Song, Echo Song, Welcome Song, Warrior Song, Wolf Song, etc. The only one that looks like it might fit in one of their categories is the Medicine Man Song, and that might not even be a "healing" song. So, right away, we see how the categories chosen map very poorly on at least one body of traditional music. Musicologists have tended to be skeptical of this project for different reasons:

“While music is universal, its meanings are not,” adds Anne Rasmussen, an ethnomusicologist at the College of William and Mary. And those meanings are created both by the people making and hearing the music, and by the entire cultural package that surrounds it. A Bach cantata that was composed to celebrate God, for example, means something very different when played in a 21st-century concert hall or in a New York deli. The meaning of music, in other words, “is not something you can perceive while listening through a pair of headphones,” says Rasmussen. 

Yes, musical meaning is really only comprehensible within a particular cultural context--in the absence of words, that is.

* * *

YouTube has just about everything, including Machaut's tour-de-force rondeau, "Ma fin est mon commencement" that is a crab canon over a palindrome, meaning, well, that its beginning is its end. This video clip of the score shows exactly how that works:

The best description I can find on the web of what Machaut is up to with this piece is in the Wikipedia article on Retrograde Music.