Friday Miscellanea

Let's open with this very invigorating arrangement of the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D minor for brass quintet:

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The Guardian is doing the usual end-of-year lists: Classical CDs of the year: a year for lieder, piano recitals – and remembering. Here is critic Andrew Clement's list of top releases:

1. Stravinsky: Perséphone/Esa-Pekka Salonen

2. Rachmaninov: Piano Concertos 2 & 4/Daniil Trifonov

3. Rossini: Semiramide/Mark Elder

4. Hindemith: Das Marienleben/Juliane Banse

5. Ferneyhough: La Terre est un Homme; Plötzlichkeit/Martyn Brabbins

6. Bach: B Minor Mass/William Christie

7. Schumann: Frage/Christian Gerhaher

8. Messiaen: Catalogue d’Oiseaux/Pierre-Laurent Aimard

9. Reich: Pulse; Quartet International Contemporary Ensemble/Colin Currie Group

10. Tippett: Symphonies 1 & 2/Martyn Brabbins

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I have sometimes made the point that all the hand-wringing about the aging and just loss of audiences for classical music is more a North American phenomenon than a European one. Case in point, in the past year the Finnish Radio Orchestra, featuring series of concerts devoted to Witold Lutoslawski and Bernd Alois Zimmermann, had a 97% attendance. Slipped Disc had the report.

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Speaking of Slipped Disc, here is a post of Norman Lebrecht's top stories of the year. Follow the link for the links.

10 Gatti is fired by Concertgebouw

9 International soprano is killed in glider crash

8 Anne-Sofie von Otter is tragically widowed 

7 Principal oboe: Why I had to leave Chicago

6 Steinway to be sold to Chinese

5 Berlin Phil loses US principal horn

4 Why Peter Gelb fired Uncle John Copley

3 Top conductor breaks skull in bike crash

2 NY Phil fires two musicians

1 John Williams leaves his scores to Juilliard

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A hat tip to Slipped Disc for unearthing this rare clip of a young Pierre Boulez rehearsing with Yvonne Loriod, the wife of Messiaen. There is no mention of what they are rehearsing at the YouTube clip, but from the interview in German later on we find that it was Structures II by Boulez.

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Skipping over a zillion stories about misogyny in opera, boys choirs and which record store just went bankrupt we find an interesting article in the New York Review of Books on Bach as recycler. Apparently he was adept at separating plastics from organics and glass. No, wait, sorry, I misunderstood! What he actually recycled was earlier music into later compositions.

Around 1730 Johann Sebastian Bach began to recycle his earlier works in a major way. He was in his mid-forties at the time, and he had composed hundreds of masterful keyboard, instrumental, and vocal pieces, including at least three annual cycles of approximately sixty cantatas each for worship services in Leipzig, where he was serving as St. Thomas Cantor and town music director. Bach was at the peak of his creative powers. Yet for some reason, instead of sitting down and writing original music, he turned increasingly to old compositions, pulling them off the shelf and using their contents as the basis for new works. 

The roots of this change can be traced, perhaps, to the summer of 1726, when Bach decided to incorporate instrumental music written earlier in Cöthen into his third Leipzig cantata cycle, refashioning concerto movements for violin or oboe into a series of inventive sinfonias (orchestral introductions), choruses, and arias featuring solo organ.

 The article is a review of a new book on Bach by Daniel Melamed:

In the end, Melamed’s book is about Bach the craftsman, the astonishingly inventive but pragmatic composer who compiled monumental choral works by blending styles—old and new, secular and sacred—and by appropriating, revising, and even abridging preexisting pieces.

A while back I wrote a post about two fundamentally different kinds of composers: the innovators and the synthesists. Bach, along with Mozart, was a synthesist while Beethoven and Haydn were innovators and Stravinsky was both at different times in his life.

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Here is why I prefer CDs to digital files. You don't actually own music if it is a digital download. Slate has the story:

Ever bought a song or an album on iTunes and, after a while, decided you didn’t like it? Did you wish you could sell it somewhere, to someone, for something, the way you might have done with an old vinyl record or CD? In 2011, a company called ReDigi figured out a novel way for iTunes music purchasers to do just that. But for the past few years, it’s been tangled up in litigation. In what may prove to be ReDigi’s death knell, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit has all but shut the business down.

Follow the link for the whole story.

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 A commentator once mentioned here that a composer has to learn how to hate. I agree with this sentiment and have found myself explaining it on various occasions. Thankfully someone else has written an essay on the topic: In Defence of Hate.

We have forgotten how to hate.

This may seem like a counterintuitive—or even gallingly stupid—assertion in a world rocked by partisan political infighting, by global-scale ideological conflict, and by a renewed activity in formalized hate groups. Indeed, in 2018, the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center reported that the number of hate groups in the United States has swelled by 20 percent since 2014. On the face of things, the problem would not seem to be too little hate but far too much of it. Hate is a boom industry.

So let me clarify: we have forgotten how to hate well. We have forgotten how to hate rigorously and virtuously. This is, I believe, because we have forgotten how to distinguish between hate’s negative and positive iterations. In the former camp is racial hatred, religious hatred, and other forms of intense, frothing, violent dislike inflamed by malformed ideological doctrines and blind prejudices. The latter, more productive, form of hating is conceived as a form of rigorous, ruthless critique. Anger, says my therapist, inadvertently summoning the spirit of ex–Sex Pistols/Public Image Limited singer John Lydon, is an energy. And this energy can be productively harnessed.

Yes, exactly! Part of one's evolution as a composer is a series of winnowing distinctions that go towards forming your own style. You have to start deciding, not only what kind of music you like, but more importantly what kind of music you hate. Liking actually doesn't get you too far because what you are looking for as a composer is something new, something fresh, not something already done. And you get there partly by moving away from music you dislike which may take you into places that have not been too much explored. Call it a via negativa for musicians.

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One of the works discussed in the book on Bach is the Confiteor from the B minor Mass which was one of the few sections that was newly-composed. The conductor is Philippe Herreweghe: