Friday Miscellanea

The best news this week is that the organ in Notre Dame was unharmed by the blaze. Not currently useable due to dust and soot, but intact in all particulars. Jessica Duchen has the story: Notre Dame: an organic tribute.

Notre Dame's Cavaillé-Coll organ was inaugurated in 1868 and built using pipes from the previous instrument - which originates far earlier than the French Revolution, from which it bears some scars. Indeed, early mentions of the organ go back to 1357, and François Thierry constructed a new one in 1730-33, which was then renovated and extended by Cliquot in the 1780s before Cavaillé-Coll transformed it 80 years later. Successive restorations and reworkings have taken place across the intervening years, translating the instrument's power according to the capabilities of modern technology; most recently, in 2010-14, Bertrand Cattiaux and Pascal Quoirin gave it an overhaul which included a new computer traction. It still has 33 pipes from the pre-Revolution instrument and around 50 by Cavaillé-Coll.

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A little out of our usual purview, but this account of the discovery, restoration and sale of the painting recently attributed to Leonardo da Vinci reveals a great deal about the current art market: The Invention of the ‘Salvator Mundi’ Or, How to Turn a $1,000 Art-Auction Pickup Into a $450 Million Masterpiece.

On April 27, 2005, at 2 p.m., Simon wrapped a trash bag around the Salvator Mundi and took it to the apartment of Dianne Dwyer Modestini, a research professor at New York University and a lauded art restorer. As Simon waited, Modestini placed the painting on her easel. She was unimpressed. Christ’s face, which she’d later learn had been repainted in the 20th century, looked to her like a “clown’s mask”; as for the overall condition of the picture, she told me recently, “it was bad, even allowing for its age.”

“I could recommend a student restorer at NYU,” she said to Simon.

“I think this needs a grown-up,” the dealer shot back.

Read the whole thing!

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Here is a review of a new volume of the poetry of Leonard Cohen: The Dying Light:

Leonard Cohen’s The Flame: Poems, Notebooks, Lyric Poems.

The self, like every life, is always an unfinished business, and it’s one of poetry’s great deceptions to present itself in books, with stiff dustproof covers and self-important colophons. Cohen, for all the fame and fortune—much of which, anyway, was stolen from him by an unscrupulous manager—evinces more humility than a thousand lesser scribes, and all his love songs have the aching sorrow of failure and truth. He will go down as a romantic of the twentieth century, a troubled troubadour, a truth-seeker who fell back on love, and then got that wrong, too. As he puts it himself, in an untitled, unsung, dateless, unfinished “poem” toward the end of this final collection:

I’m standing here

          in the blinding light

& I don’t know what to do

the blinding light

     of what I lost

when I walked away from you.

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The Times Literary Supplement has an interesting review of a couple of books on music. The review wanders around to a number of interesting places:

Writing about food is hard; writing about perfume must be even harder; but writing about music is difficult enough. Not only are musical patterns and effects hard to put into words, but because music flows in time, they are evanescent, never standing still long enough to be focused on – “in the air, and then it’s gone”, as Eric Dolphy said. One solution far too often relied on by programme note-writers is to fall back on technical description: “X’s use of a surprising sub-dominant chord to transition back to the minor key …”, which is exasperating enough for a musician, let alone the common listener who is supposed to learn something from it.

The thing is that if you want to talk about how music makes you feel, that's one thing, but if you want to talk about how music makes you feel, that is quite another!

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Alex Ross has a new piece up at The New Yorker: The Shape-Shifting Music of Tyshawn Sorey: A defiant identity on the border between classical music and jazz.

There is something awesomely confounding about the music of Tyshawn Sorey, the thirty-eight-year-old Newark-born composer, percussionist, pianist, and trombonist. As a critic, I feel obliged to describe what I hear, and description usually begins with categorization. Sorey’s work eludes the pinging radar of genre and style. Is it jazz? New classical music? Composition? Improvisation? Tonal? Atonal? Minimal? Maximal? Each term captures a part of what Sorey does, but far from all of it. At the same time, he is not one of those crossover artists who indiscriminately mash genres together. Even as his music shifts shape, it retains an obdurate purity of voice. T. S. Eliot’s advice seems apt: “Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’ / Let us go and make our visit.”

At this point, before reading any further, I really want to hear some of his music--this is out of curiosity of course, but also because, as always with Ross, I want an immediate check on his claims. "Sorey’s work eludes the pinging radar of genre and style" is a lovely phrase, but it is the kind of statement that is so often made that it begins to seem perfunctory. Oh yes, this new musical artist has blurred the boundaries/broken the rules/escaped the ordinary/eluded the radar/etc, etc, etc. Has he really? This is a new piece titled Nebulae premiered in New York in 2018:

What I have often found when I read about some new musician working in the zone between classical and jazz is that the music is pretty much jazz with exotic overlays--not in this case! This is definitely not jazz. What is it? For the first several minutes it is a soprano sax playing two notes a semitone apart while three other saxophones play tone-clusters. After a while they are joined by occasional pointillist notes from the xylophone. I found it tedious and directionless. The clip has garnered a very modest 960 views on YouTube. As the piece progresses it becomes quite irritating. Your milage may vary, of course. But at this point I rather lost interest in both the music and Alex Ross' discussion of it.

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Our snark quotient is nicely filled with an item from Slipped Disc on a memoir by Nicolaus Harnoncourt:

You realise how few conductors are interested in the music. For most conductors, the concert hall is just an arena where they perform masterly dressage as tamers.

Or, in some cases, an interpretive dance version of the composition.

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The Toronto Globe and Mail occasionally has quite good primer articles on classical music, something that used to be a lot more common than it is now. Currently there is one on Bach's St. Matthew Passion which saw four performances in March by Tafelmusik, Toronto's excellent Baroque orchestra, in this case conducted by Bach specialist Masaaki Suzuki. John Ibbitson, one of the Globe's editorial writers, talks about how he got hooked by classical:

One day when I was about 12, Dad came home from a trip to the city with an LP called Beethoven’s Greatest Hits. (Why he bought it remains a mystery.) I was upstairs playing Monopoly with some friends when he put on one of the tracks: the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the Ode to Joy.

I bounded downstairs. “What is that?!” Classical music has been embedded in my life ever since. Opera when cooking. Haydn when reading. Brahms chamber music after some minor eye surgery. And Bach, OMG Bach, at night, when everything is quiet and the lights are low. If I had to choose between giving up writing and giving up listening to music, I’d give up writing.

But there aren’t many like me left, at least in the Western world, for several reasons. For one thing, classical music failed to renew itself. After Brahms died, composers struggled to find ways to express music that didn’t simply repeat what had come before. In the 20th century, the art form degenerated into a civil war between traditionalists and the avant-garde, even as audiences drifted away in search of more popular entertainments.

Grains of truth there, of course. But let me qualify that a bit. Classical music audiences in Europe are as big and as youthful as ever, so what is actually true is that audiences are diminishing and aging in North America, not the Western world. Composers did struggle with finding new kinds of musical expression in the 20th century, but some of them succeeded spectacularly. Not just Shostakovich and Britten (ones mentioned in the article) but also Stravinsky, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Arvo Pärt, Sofia Gubaidulina and others. But yes, more popular entertainments have certainly taken their toll.

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It seems we haven't had a clip from Leonard Cohen for a long time. This is a Cohen song in the form of a Viennese waltz:

And along with that we should really have a little Bach. Or, what the heck, why not the whole of the St. Matthew Passion. This is from the Netherlands Bach Society: