Friday Miscellanea

Here is a lovely act of kindness: pianist Paul Barton plays for an old blind elephant who seems to quite enjoy it:

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If you like books, and why wouldn't you, then you have to go over to Abe Books' Weird Book Room for a collection of books that challenge the very notion of weirdness. Most are not music-related, but this one is:

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I would not have believed this was possible! Remember the aria that the blue diva sings in The Fifth Element, the Luc Besson film? The one where a normal soprano voice is carried up to the stratosphere and down to the depths by use of electonics? I don't know the name of the device, but it simply transposes the frequency of a pitch up or down as needed. The music of the first part is from Lucia di Lammermoor by Donizetti then it turns into a rock tune with synthesized voice. Here is the scene from the movie:

So what's not possible? Recreating this with a live soprano with orchestra and rock band. But no, soprano Jane Zhang manages a pretty fair reproduction:

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This article from The Guardian is yet another example of an unfortunate trend: 'Preserved in aspic': opera embarks on diversity drive.

Opera is shockingly white, overly traditional and too slow to change, according to the leader of one of the UK’s leading companies.

Stuart Murphy, the former TV executive who joined English National Opera as its chief executive last spring, made the damning assessment as he announced new measures to tackle its lack of diversity.

That includes positive action to recruit at least four chorus members from a black, Asian and ethnic minority (BAME) background.

Murphy recalled joining the company and and finding it “really shocking” that 39 of ENO’s 40-strong chorus were white. “We weren’t true to our values, we didn’t represent Britain,” he said. “It just felt strange to me … Young white audiences also think it is weird.”

The story is really one of a collision between two different ideologies. On the one hand there is the progressive ideology, the idea that you identify social flaws or biases and immediately create policies to correct them. Seems perfectly reasonable, right? But it is one of those slippery, dangerous ideas that can easily lead to extremes. The Soviet "new man" starting from zero is a similar idea, as was the idea of wiping history clean in the French Revolution. They even had a new calendar starting from the year zero. I can see exactly how people like Stuart Murphy are envisioning what is needed. There are many non-white people living in the UK, therefore the proportions of non-white people in, for example, the English National Opera should reflect that. But all this depends on you having absolutely no knowledge of nor respect for history. To say that opera is "shockingly white" is disingenuous at least. Opera was the creation of a small group of cultural leaders in Italy in the late 16th century. They were all white, as was the cultural milieu. The fact that this art form has been pursued with great creative energy in Western societies ever since is also not shocking. If we look at the audiences for opera we would likely see that they remain mostly white as well. Opera so far has been largely a white thing. Not shocking at all. Now if you want to add non-white members to the chorus, sure, why not? But do it for musical reasons, not ideological ones. I very strongly suspect that no-one has been blocking the door to persons of color auditioning for the ENO chorus. That would be wrong and likely illegal. But creating a quota for certain minority groups? No reason for that save ideology.

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We can add this one to the annals of technological hubris:

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Slipped Disc mentions the passing away of a very fine Canadian voice teacher, Selena James. I knew her quite well when we were both teachers at the Victoria Conservatory of Music in British Columbia. I actually met her a few years earlier when I was a young guitar student at the university. Selena had a voice student prepping for her graduating recital and decided that the student had just the right sort of voice to do the Songs from the Chinese by Benjamin Britten, written for voice and guitar. This was a radical idea at the time as voice recitals were always, 100%, accompanied by piano. It was the first time I had the opportunity to do some serious chamber or ensemble music as I had only been playing classical guitar for a couple of years. I had to do some really hard work to learn the part. It was a great experience for both of us and entirely due to the breadth of vision of Selena. A remarkable number of outstanding singers came out of her studio as we see in the obituary from the local paper: Selena James, Saanich soprano who guided the stars, was ‘like family to us all’

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Roger Scruton has some interesting things to say about conservatism and the arts: CONSERVATISM AND THE CONSERVATORY. Impossible to summarize, but:

THE OBSERVATION IS OFTEN MADE that political conservatives do not have anything much to say about the arts, either believing, with the libertarians, that in this matter people should be free to do as they please, or else fearing, like the traditionalists, that a policy for the arts will always be captured by the Left and turned into an assault on our inherited values. Of course, there is truth in both those responses; but they are not the whole truth, and in my view one reason for the precarious state of the arts in our public culture today is that conservatives – who often come out near the top in fair elections – have failed to develop a clear cultural policy and to understand why, philosophically, such a policy matters...

For many people music is simply a matter of enjoyment, irrelevant to the greater things in life, and a matter of personal taste with which we cannot argue. John likes hard rock, Mary likes bluegrass, Fred likes hip-hop, Judith likes modern jazz, and so on. Once you enter the realm of classical music, however, you realize that such simple views no longer apply. You are in the presence of a highly learned, highly structured art form, in which human thought, feeling, and posture are explored in elaborate tonal arguments. In learning to play the music of Bach or Beethoven, for example, you are acutely aware that you are being put to the test by the music that you are playing. There is a right and a wrong way to proceed, and the right way involves learning to express, to control, to respond in mature and persuasive ways. You are undergoing an education in emotion, and the skills you learn do not remain confined to your fingers: They penetrate the whole body and brain, to become part of your world.

Moreover, this kind of education is inseparable from the art of judgment. In learning classical music, you are learning to discriminate, to recognize the authentic examples, to distinguish real from fake emotion, and to glimpse both the depths of suffering and the heights of joy of which human beings are capable. Not everyone can excel in this form of education, just as not everyone can be a mathematician, a motor mechanic, or a basketball star. 

If that seems intriguing, then read the whole thing.

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Alex Ross has a new piece in The New Yorker about singer/songwriter Gabriel Kahane, Strangers on a Train: Gabriel Kahane's Wrenching 'Book of Travelers'

Gabriel Kahane, a Brooklynite singer-composer who sways between pop and classical worlds, has taken the concept of the concept album to rarefied heights. For his record “The Ambassador,” released in 2014, he created a suite of songs inspired by various buildings in Los Angeles, the title track paying tribute to the venerable hotel where Robert F. Kennedy was shot. In “Book of Travelers,” which Nonesuch issued last year, Kahane recounts an adventure he undertook in November, 2016: the day after the Presidential election, he boarded the Lake Shore Limited out of New York and racked up almost nine thousand miles riding trains across the country, talking to fellow-passengers and making songs from the stories that he heard.

Here is a song from the album:

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I think the right envoi for today would be the "Unfinished Symphony" of Franz Schubert in a performance by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Riccardo Muti. Incidentally, the name of the symphony is in quotation marks because it is just a nickname. There is no evidence that reveals why Schubert only wrote two movements (there is a third, a scherzo, complete in piano score, but with just a small part orchestrated). He wrote so much music in his short life that it is easy to imagine him stopping work on this piece and taking up some other project and just never getting back to it. Hey, if you look on my hard drive you will see many brief fragments that I never got around to turning into complete pieces. These two movements are so ravishing that many have wished that he had found the time to finish it.