Friday Miscellanea

Let's start with some whimsy:

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Every now and then when I am talking about aesthetics I scrounge around for an example of bad music. I am typically unsuccessful because searching for "bad music" on YouTube usually doesn't get what I am looking for. You get tunes by Lady Gaga and Michael Jackson, for example. But I just ran across a good example of bad music, pop ballad sub-category. This is "I Like Dreamin'" by Kenny Nolan and for sheer regurgitated style, maudlin sentiment and gratuitous arrangement, it rates some sort of award:

You have to listen to songs by Tom Waits, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen just to clean out your ears after.

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Here is a cool clip on the contrabassoon:

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Fellow music blogger Wenatchee the Hatchet has a lengthy and interesting post on the last Beethoven piano sonata, op. 111 (that we just heard in a recital this week):

Thousands of words have already been written about Beethoven's last piano sonata and I hardly feel like I need to write too many more, although I probably could.  Some composers are drawn to the giant variation-finale and it's a wonderful movement, too.  But I admit that as a guitarist who started by aspiring to play Pinkfloyd and Bob Dylan songs I'm a sucker for the mercurial first movement.

What makes the sonata movement so fascinating to me decades after I first heard it and read through the score listening to Brendel's recording back in college was how Beethoven seemed to have such a puny development section.  Supposedly sonata forms are supposed to have a development section that shows how much a composer can do with thematic materials.  Beethoven, so to speak, was the composer who began to "biggie size" developments and codas in sonata forms.

Keep reading as he makes a lot of interesting observations.

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The New Yorker embarks on an entirely predictable crusade: The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture. The subhead tells it all:

Greek and Roman statues were often painted, but assumptions about race and aesthetics have suppressed this truth. Now scholars are making a color correction.

Yes, and bronze statues often had painted marble eyes (usually missing), something that has been noticed forever, does that mean that race and aesthetics have suppressed this truth?

The Artemision Bronze, notice the missing eyeballs

 Just for the record, scholars have long known that Greek statuary was often painted from traces on a few surviving examples, plus innumerable mentions in literature. The Greeks also did monumental statues of gods and goddesses such as the statue of Athena, Athena Parthenos, made for the Parthenon in Athens that were quite colorful from the various precious materials used. Wikipedia describes it as follows:

The statue was 26 cubits (around 11.5 m (37 ft 9 in)) tall and stood on a pedestal measuring 4 by 8 metres.[10] The sculpture was assembled on a wooden core, covered with shaped bronze plates covered in turn with removable gold plates, save for the ivory surfaces of the goddess's face and arms; the gold weighed 44 talents, the equivalent of about 1,100 kilograms (2,400 lb); the Athena Parthenos embodied a sizeable part of the treasury of Athens.[11]

According to Ian Jenkins in The Parthenon and Its Sculpturees "Athena was portrayed as a warrior resting after successful combat. A figure of winged victory alighted on the palm of her outstretched right hand, while her left hand supported a round shield. A spear rested against her left shoulder. The goddess was draped in the simplest form of tunic, the peplos, her shoulders and chest hung with the aegis, the snake fringed, fish-scaled poncho that had been the gift of her father Zeus and had protective powers"

Myth of whiteness? You know, this might be slightly more plausible if progressive social justice warriors were not engaged in an all-out assault on "whiteness" demonstrating quite clearly that they are the biggest racists around.

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2018 being the centenary of the death of Claude Debussy, there are a lot of concerts and publications in his honor. The New York Review of Books has a review of Debussy: A Painter in Sound by Stephen Walsh.

Perhaps most impressively, Walsh has managed the rare tightrope act of describing and analyzing widely beloved music in ways that will neither seem simplistic to connoisseurs nor confuse a general audience.

Walsh also makes the astute decision to focus on Debussy’s music, rather than on his social life, precisely to the degree that Debussy himself neglected personal obligations in favor of the inner world of his work. Walsh announces in his introduction that he has set out “to treat Debussy’s music as the crucial expression of his intellectual life”; he has an understandable horror of his book amounting to “a slightly annoying series of incidents.”

Thank goodness for that.

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You may have noticed that I have a fascination for odd musical instruments and this one is the oddest of all: Back from the brink: Jean Tinguely’s beloved music machine.

A year after it was silenced, Jean Tinguely’s beloved clanging, banging, creaking, groaning music machine Méta-Harmonie II is ready to go back into action at the Museum Tinguely in Basel following a laborious year-long restoration of many of its parts.

Conceived as a kinetic sound sculpture and built by the artist with his associates in 1979, the work is one of four large-scale Méta-Harmonie machines created by Tinguely and has resided at the museum on permanent loan from the Emanuel Hoffman Foundation since 1996. Made of scrap metal and musical instruments held together by hundreds of screws, bolts, belts and springs, the work also consists of playful objects like a plastic Disney figurine and a child’s shoe.

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And while we are on the subject, an old friend of mine dropped by this week to show off his 9-string guitar which he designed himself:

Click to enlarge

 In the middle are the standard six strings tuned EADGBE. Above this is a high A string and below this are two extra bass strings, the lowest of which is a low F#. The idea is to enable the playing of more complex contrapuntal music.

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And on a sad note, the last classical record store in Vancouver is shutting its doors: "For the sake of a couple of bucks, they deserted us": Vancouver's last classical record store to close.

For decades, Sikora's Classical Records has been the go-to place for classical music lovers in Vancouver — but now, after 40 years, the beloved downtown business is closing its doors.

The store houses a remarkable number of titles — roughly 15,000 albums and thousands of CDs. To get a sense of just how expansive their collection is, they have 16 bins of Bach CDs alone, and 13 of Beethoven. They also have an impressive jazz collection.

The shop wasn't only a place to buy records; it was also a focal point for the classical community, and in addition to the many regulars, Sikora's drew classical-loving travelers from around the world, as well as artists from Ben Heppner to Marc-André Hamelin to Elton John.

But in today's music landscape, online monoliths such as Spotify and Amazon rule, and now even the small independent retailers who have managed to stay afloat through two decades of change are vanishing.

I remember visiting Sikora's on a number of occasions when I lived in the area. It was close to an excellent music store, Ward's Music, where I spent hours browsing through scores. I wonder if it has survived?

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Tomás de Sancta Maria was a 16th century organist and theorist and I mention him because my friend with the unusual guitar has been studying him for quite a while. Tomás wrote an authoritative text on how to improvise and ornament fantasias (which I used freely to ornament some fantasias by Luys Milan) and my friend has been transcribing examples from the treatise. He is playing one of his own glosses in the photo. Here is a fantasia played on the organ of Salamanca Cathedral, parts of which date to the 16th century: