Friday Miscellanea

It seems that nearly every cliché about art and artists gets to be tested by some study or other. This one is an examination of the idea that "my four-year-old can make something as good as "abstract" art!" The Wall Street Journal has the report: Could Your Child Really Paint That?

we told participants that in each pair one painting was by a famous abstract artist and the other by a child or animal. Their job was to pick the one by the artist. Guessing at random would yield a rate of 50% correct answers. As it turned out, the average score was 63%, which closely matches the average score obtained by people in the first study. We got the same results when the images were presented unpaired.

Of course, whether you consider this a vindication of abstract art or a blow to its pretensions depends on the beholder. While people could tell the difference between professional and child- or animal-made art at a rate significantly higher than guessing, they did still confuse them about a third of the time.

So, participants were able to notice differences between the random scrawlings of a child and the work of an established artist and do so at a rate slightly better than random? I don't think that indicates a huge aesthetic gulf between the two, do you?

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It has often struck me just how terribly different the worlds of contemporary art and contemporary music are from each other. Here is an article on the materialism and marketing of the art world:

The lush new art-world documentary The Price of Everything shows us a system so waist-deep in hypermarketing and excess that it’s hard to look at art without being overcome by money, prices, auctions, art fairs, celebrities, well-known artists, and mega-collectors who fancy themselves conquistadors. 

The Price of Everything is a portrait of this damaged system — a place where big-ticket art made by only a handful of people — maybe 75 mostly male artists — appears in high-end galleries, auction houses, and art fairs before being sold off at astronomically inflated prices. Art and money have always slept together; they’re just doing it more profligately now than ever. The patter of the high-enders in Price is so imperious and spiteful that it’s no wonder the public — and many art-world insiders — have grown cynical about it all. I left the premiere feeling sick to my stomach and ashamed. 

Cut to Simon de Pury, the so-called “Mick Jagger of auctioneers” (who was once suspended zooming over a room full of rich bidders calling out bids) purring, “It’s important that good art be expensive.” This is a perfect and ridiculous echo of Sotheby’s former Worldwide Head of Contemporary Art, Tobias Meyer, who once chirped, “The best art is the most expensive because the market is so smart.” 

The thing is, much of the work on these trading floors is great. Most of it, however, is either middling, iffy, or bad.

Contemporary composers however, live in world singularly lacking in money. The choices are stark. You either find yourself an academic sinecure where you lie fallow in a protected environment your whole career with the occasional performance, or you live a life of perpetual struggle eking out the very rare commission (Philip Glass drove cab and worked as a plumber well into his forties), or you have a career outside of music and compose in your spare time like Charles Ives. Even a successful film composer like John Williams makes a good deal less than you would expect.

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 Jessica Duchen has a piece by Jeremy Dibble on a composer I have never really gotten to know: Charles Villiers Stanford.

Born in Dublin in 1852, Charles Villiers Stanford was born into a community of brilliant Anglo-Irishmen in the mid-nineteenth century. A student of classics and an organ scholar at Cambridge, he was mentored by Sterndale Bennett and Joseph Joachim which led to further musical training in Leipzig and Berlin. An apprenticeship in the organ lofts of St Patrick’s and Christ Church Cathedrals in Dublin were also formatively important for his appointment as organist of Trinity College, Cambridge, a position he held from 1873 until 1892.

Stanford’s great originality as a composer of church music undoubtedly owes much to this time. But by the time he was appointed Professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music in 1883, he was already the accomplished author of an opera performed in Hannover, two symphonies, chamber music, choral music and songs, and by 1888, when he became Professor of Music at Cambridge, he had composed two further operas, his ‘Irish’ Symphony Op. 28 (much admired by Hans Richter) and an oratorio for the 1885 Birmingham Festival.

The first performance of the entirely of his Mass ‘Via Victrix 1914-1918’ Op. 173, will be Oct. 27. BBC National Orchestra of Wales perform the first complete performance of the Mass on 27 October at BBC Hoddinott Hall, conducted by Adrian Partington. It will also be recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in early November.

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Canadian composer Anthony Genge once told me about the viva voce exam required for his PhD in composition from Stony Brook University where he studied with Morton Feldman. He was required to answer one simple question: what was the influence of Claude Debussy on 20th century music? The more you know about music, and specifically the history of music in the 20th century, the larger and more daunting this question will loom! Alex Ross takes up this theme in his latest piece for the New Yorker: The Velvet Revolution of Claude Debussy.

It is best to start where Pierre Boulez said modern music was born: with the ethereal first notes of the orchestral tone poem “Prelude to ‘The Afternoon of a Faun.’ ” Debussy wrote it between 1892 and 1894, in response to the famous poem by Mallarmé. The score begins with what looks like an uncertain doodle on the part of the composer. A solo flute slithers down from C-sharp to G-natural, then slithers back up; the same figure recurs; then there is a songful turn around the notes of the E-major triad. Yet, in the fourth bar, when more instruments enter—two oboes, two clarinets, a horn, and a rippling harp—they ignore the flute’s offering of E. Instead, they recline into a lovely chord of nowhere, a half-diminished seventh of the type that Wagner placed at the outset of “Tristan und Isolde.” This leads to a lush dominant seventh on B-flat, which ought to resolve to F, but doesn’t. Harmonies distant from one another intermingle in an open space. Most striking is the presence of silence. The B-flat harmonies are framed by bar-long voids. This is sound in repose, listening to its own echo.

As I mentioned somewhere else recently, this is the kind of thing Alex Ross does well: basic research into repertoire that is established and about which there is critical consensus.

Debussy had the prejudices typical of his time, and never thought too deeply about the cultures that he sampled. Nevertheless, he knew to look outside the classical sphere for nourishment. At the Paris Exposition of 1889, he heard a gamelan ensemble, which made Western harmonies sound to him like “empty phantoms of use to clever little children.”

This along with the intriguing information that Debussy chose a woodcut by Hokusai for the cover of the score to his orchestral score La Mer, twigs us to the fact that he was influenced by Asian aesthetics, something I was talking about just the other day.

Ross mentions a new anthology of scholarly papers, Debussy's Resonance. I just saw a copy of this on the desk of my old friend, Steven Huebner, when we met for lunch in Montreal recently. Steven was a contributor to the volume.

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A somewhat bitter consolation for composers might be found in the news that writers are just as badly off: Canadian writers make on average just $9,380 a year, survey finds.

Canadian writers are making less money than ever — with incomes from writing dropping 78 per cent from 1998, according to a report released Monday by the Writers’ Union of Canada.

The numbers, accounting for inflation, have been undergoing a steady drop. According to the report, writers made $9,380 in 2017, down from $12,879 in 2014 — a 27 per cent drop in just three years. 

Similar findings were released in the U.K. by the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) in June, which found that earnings for writers in that region fell from 12,300 pounds in 2005 to 10,500 pounds in 2017.

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At least the Canadian Opera Company is in good health, financially: Canadian Opera Company stays in the black despite falling attendance.

According to the numbers released by the COC on Thursday, rising revenues from the bar, special events and the underground parking garage at the Four Seasons Centre have surpassed contributions from the box office. Last season, bar, special event and parking sales brought in $8.89 million.

The COC does not release comparative figures for previous years, but a look at past annual reports shows that box office revenues slipped from a high of $13.4 million for the 2009-10 season to $8.23 million for 2017-18. The number also represents a 13 per cent decline from 2016-17.

So, in terms of actual revenue, perhaps they should re-name the institution the "Canadian Opera Bar and Parking Garage?"

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And finally, the kind of article I always find fascinating: The mysteries of the bow at the rue de Rome in Paris.

For musicians in Paris, the rue de Rome is a legendary place, at the same level as Tin Pan Alley or 42nd Street in New York. Sheet music shops and luthiers’ workshops are packed in like sardines. Amidst a delicate choreography of the musicians who are the street’s regular denizens, a few tourists wander from one shopfront to the next with jaws dropped, stopping here and there in front of a window, sometimes daring to push at a door to gawk in genuine wonderment at the violins and cellos stacked to the ceiling. Behind the instruments, a badly lit glass case is a less obvious draw: the bows. As any professional musician will tell you, these magic wands can change everything, from technical comfort to sound level, from warmth of timbre to the articulation of a sautillé. Some artists spend a lifetime searching for the rare pearl that will create their best chance to shine on stage. Others collect them by the dozen, each bow suited to some specific corner of the repertoire. It’s a place to inquire into these mysterious objects, whose secrets are unknown even to most musicians.

Be sure to keep reading as there is a fascinating discussion of bow re-hairing, one of those esoteric musical topics that I love to read about.

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There are two obvious candidates for our envoi today, so let's have both. First the Requiem by Charles Stanford:

Then, of course, La Mer by Claude Debussy, one of the earliest pieces for orchestra I fell in love with in my journey from pop to classical: