Friday Miscellanea

This is almost as cruel as the cartoon I once saw depicting a thuggish looking bruiser holding a sign saying "Kill the street musician of your choice: $5."

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The Internet is cursed with cat videos and lists, but this one is a bit more interesting than most: 10 Times Musicians Were Banned From Playing In Certain Countries.

Frank Sinatra played a string of music performances in Mexico during the early 1960s. However, with no small degree of irony, he was banned from entering the country in 1966. In other words, he could no longer play South of the Border.Sinatra starred alongside Deborah Kerr in the 1965 film Marriage on the Rocks, in which the lead married couple get divorced by mistake in Mexico. The film was perceived by the Mexican government as offensive because the country was displayed as a place people could get “quickie” marriages and divorces. Marriage on the Rocks was also deemed offensive for its portrayal of Mexican officials, which was viewed as detrimental to Mexico’s “national dignity.”The film was promptly banned in Mexico, and even Sinatra’s songs were pulled from the Mexican airwaves. However, the Mexican government took it one step further and actually barred Sinatra from entering the country.

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The Guardian has an article on an adventurous music festival that combines Baroque musicians and contemporary repertoire: Baroque at the Edge.

This weekend-long festival mines a fertile seam, inviting experimentally minded performers to take 17th- or 18th-century music and run with it into the present day. For some this is their stock in trade. Viol player Liam Byrne has inspired many new works for his old instrument; spotlit next to his laptop in LSO St Luke’s, he showcased several in his afternoon concert. Composers included Nico Muhly, Edmund Finnis, Alex Mills, whose Suspensions and Solutions created hulks of sound through different reverb processes, and Samuel Milea, whose Unvoiced examines dementia in the way its phrases move in and out of lucidity. Byrne is an unassuming performer but his glee in the sonic potential of his instrument is infectious; he was mesmerising building up a Tudor consort work line by line, the music changing shape with each addition. His unamplified playing was just as spellbinding, especially in his encore, a gorgeous Vivace by Karl Friedrich Abel.

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Somehow I missed the first list, but here is the second:  10 More Works that have been Dumped from Concerts.

1 Berlioz, Roman carnival overture

2 Honegger 3rd symphony

3 Prokofiev 5th piano concerto

4 D’Indy, Symphony on a French Mountain Air

5 Goldmark violin concerto

6 Henze 7th symphony

7 Birtwistle, Endless Parade

8 Irving Fine, Notturno

9 Kancheli 6th symphony

10 Schnittke, concerto grosso 4.

As always at Slipped Disc, the comments are the most entertaining part. Some of these were barely part of concert repertoire in the first place. But the inclusion of the Prokofiev piano concerto is certainly a mistake.

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Critic Allan Kozinn has a piece about what we might call the new tonality:  Tonal Evolution: Great New Music That Makes Room for Tunes.

It is only natural that the fiercest arguments are engendered by music that sets aside the old rules and looks in new directions: that there are always those who react to avant-gardes of all kinds with suspicion, as either puzzling or fraudulent, even when the music they prefer was once greeted similarly.

But through it all, there have also been composers who stood aside from the aesthetic battles, because they prefer evolution to revolution and cherish what was once thought of as the “common practice,” or musical language rooted in tonality, as it has developed from the 17th century onward. Usually, we hear their music, decide whether it more closely resembles the streamlined style of the Classical or the more broad-boned Romantic approach (or occasionally, earlier styles), and then slap a “neo-” label onto whichever conclusion we’ve reached.

But the best of this music is almost always more than a prefix suggests. Composers of neoclassical and neo-Romantic works may prize aspects of 18th- and 19th-century composition — typically, the structural and syntactical coherence that makes it accessible to listeners who prize such traditional values — but their music invariably embraces contemporary elements that keep it from being mistaken for Mozart or Mahler.

The whole article is well worth reading as it discusses in some detail a plethora of new music.

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 Here is Bachtrack's survey of the statistics for classical music for the past year. Top ten composers:

1. Beethoven

2. Mozart

3. Bernstein

4. Bach

5. Brahms

6. Schubert

7. Tchaikovsky

8. Debussy

9. Schumann

10. Handel

I might do a separate post on some other of their statistics, some of which I am very suspicious of. For example, Grigory Sokolov typically plays some seventy-five recitals in a given year, but he doesn't even make the list of busiest pianists, whereas most of the ones on the list play far fewer concerts. Hilary Hahn is also omitted from the list of busiest violinists! Are they determined to ignore all my favorites?

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The Daily Beast has a piece on the plummeting of enrollment in history at universities: History Majors Are Becoming a Thing of the Past, Except in the Ivy League. This seems to me to imply that being a music major would be a good antidote as college music departments are still unable to ignore the fact that most of the best classical music is, ahem, historical.

According to a new analysis by the American Historical Association, the number of students choosing to major in history at the nation’s colleges has plummeted. Undergraduate history majors have fallen by more than a third in less than a decade, declining to their lowest levels since the ’80s. The evidence indicates that the vanishing history major is not a short-term response to the Great Recession’s lousy job market. If anything, the trend is accelerating. The undergraduate history major seems to be on the way out.

 I suspect that the primary reason for this might be that much of history has to be suppressed because it runs contrary to everything social progressives would have us believe.

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The most egregious entry on the list of works "dumped" from concert programs is the Piano Concerto No. 5 by Prokofiev, which gets a lot of performances. I would love to find a clip of Grigory Sokolov playing this, but one is not available on YouTube. Listen to Sergei Babayan instead: