Friday Miscellanea

This has been known for decades, but since Paul McCartney revealed in a 60 Minutes interview that he doesn't read or write music, the media are treating it as a big revelation. I've always been a bit puzzled by this because, frankly, it isn't that hard. I taught myself to read and write music when I wanted to include orchestral instrument parts in some songs I was writing back when I was eighteen years old. Oddly enough, one of my inspirations was, yep, songs by the Beatles. Their producer, George Martin, a trained musician, was able to provide them with notation skills when necessary. But I have often wondered what the block was. Psychological? Cultural?

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The New York Times, oddly enough, has a piece containing a critique of the trend in the arts to become a "battleground of social justice."

The real-world and social-media combat we’ve been in for the past two years over what kind of country this is — who gets to live in it and bemoan (or endorse!) how it’s being run — have now shown up in our beefs over culture, not so much over the actual works themselves but over the laws governing that culture and the discussion around it, which artists can make what art, who can speak. We’re talking less about whether a work is good art but simply whether it’s good — good for us, good for the culture, good for the world.

We have language that helps do the sorting. A person who insults, harasses or much, much worse is “problematic,” and certain “problematic” people, and their work, gets “canceled.” Recent cancellations include Bill Cosby, Kevin Spacey, Louis C.K., Roseanne Barr, Kanye West, Ian Buruma’s stewardship of The New York Review of Books, Matt Lauer, Woody Allen, Netflix’s flagrant high school satire “Insatiable” (but only figuratively since it has been renewed for a second season), the YouTube star Logan Paul, the Nation’s poetry section. People you love but who’ve misstepped are “problematic faves” — Scarlett Johansson, Dave Chappelle, Cardi B, Justin Timberlake, M.I.A. — and you don’t outright cancel so much as temporarily block them until they get their acts together. The people who know who’s who, what’s what and when’s when are “woke.” They tend not to be black, because black people are born woke; the trick for them is to stay that way.

The nomenclature is supposed to make the moral sorting expedient. The “hot or not” lists of yore have, more direly, become “O.K./Not O.K.” Individuals are not necessarily permitted a say in the cancellation — or, for that matter, in the coronation — of artists or their work. A temperature is taken and you’re advised to dress accordingly. What’s bad for some people is deemed bad for everybody, and some compliance is in order, lest you wind up problematic, too.

That leads to something farcical like the Grammys’ rumored prophylactic shunning of the popular white musician Ed Sheeran from the three biggest award categories, lest he triumph over Kendrick Lamar or Childish Gambino and cause a firestorm of upset.

I think that this is the inevitable result if you prohibit aesthetic evaluation. Without that the only way to judge art is by whether it entertains you or not, or whether it fulfills some social purpose. Art that merely entertains tends to be, well, entertainment, so that leaves social justice.

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 While we are in New York we can drop in on Alex Ross' piece on the opening of the season at the Met and the New York Philharmonic:

What made this “Aida” indelible, however, was Anita Rachvelishvili’s magisterially hell-raising performance as Amneris. The young Georgian mezzo-soprano, noted for her Carmen, has a huge, piercing voice, and she isn’t afraid to sacrifice purity of technique for the sake of intensity of expression. Not all the sounds she made were beautiful, but all had dramatic point. A sign of her charisma is that during the final tableau, as Aida and Radamès are expiring in the tomb, Amneris continues to transfix the attention: even when she isn’t singing, she dominates the stage. The Met should let her do whatever she wants: artists of this calibre are the reason opera exists.

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Ross was reasonably positive about the New York Phillies and their new conductor, but David Gelernter had a different opinion:

For years, the maniacal self-absorption of Music Director Alan Gilbert allowed the New York Philharmonic to deteriorate into a sloppy shambles and become the worst of the world’s best orchestras. This season, there is a new music director, Dutch conductor and violinist Jaap van Zweden. Van Zweden gave his opening subscription series this weekend, and the transformation was obvious: Under his baton, the orchestra is no longer sloppy. Now it is merely unmusical.

I like it when reviewers just go ahead and tell us what they think! You should go back and read Ross' comment on the premiere of the piece by Ashley Fure then compare to Gelernter's take:

The concert opened with the debut of Filament, a new work by contemporary composer Ashley Fure that sounded like a parody of late 60s experimental music. The orchestra was supplemented by three soloists in casual hipster attire on spotlit pedestals: a trumpet, a bass, and — out in the aisle — a bassoon. These were in turn supplemented by fifteen “moving voices,” singers who prowled around the audience with black plastic megaphones that resembled witches’ hats. The piece lasted 14 minutes:  roughly ten minutes of demonic possession followed by four minutes of a traffic accident in the Holland Tunnel.

Sounds, uh, exciting? He continues:

The composer’s stated goals included “to democratize proximity” and “to activate a theater for the social.” I feel compelled to note that, once the singers had finished hissing into their megaphones like a suite of deflating tires and van Zweden had turned slowly and balletically to stare at the audience as the lights were gradually dimmed to black, we were not left feeling that our proximities had been particularly democratized.

Now that's my kind of review. Not to say that I would share his opinion, I just like that he had an opinion.

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A short miscellanea today, so let's have a double-barreled envoi. For something a bit different here is Yuja Wang playing the Piano Concerto No. 1 by Brahms with the Munich Philharmonic conducted by Velery Gergiev. There are two encores. Also on the program Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky and Glinka.

And another composer I don't talk about a lot, Mendelssohn. This is his Symphony No. 4 "Italian" with the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra (who have an excellent series of videos online) conducted by Paavo Järvi.