Friday Miscellanea

Signs of life over at Musicology Now where Alex Ludwig has a new post up analyzing the music of Game of Thrones. I have to confess I did something similar in a couple of papers I delivered at a conference at the University of Huddersfield a number of years ago. My papers revolved around Buffy the Vampire Slayer, another contemporary narrative.

Wagner’s extensive use of leitmotifs, in which musical phrases represent people, places, and even emotions, is appropriated here in Game of Thrones so that people, places, and great houses all have their own musical material. Using Wagner’s Ring as a model, I examine the dramatic deployment of both diegetic and non-diegetic musical cues in a Game of Thrones episode titled, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” (S8E2). 

In many ways, this episode is unusual: most of the main characters are gathered in one place, awaiting the army of the dead; and it functions like a giant anticipation, or upbeat, for the upcoming battle. The episode avoids action in favor of quiet contemplation, and reunites many pairs of characters (and swords) that have been long separated. 

Ramin Djawadi’s musical score, which combines both diegetic and non-diegetic cues, enhances these quiet moments with additional layers of information. In the first scene of the episode, Jaime Lannister—known as the Kingslayer—arrives in Winterfell, despite having fought against the forces assembled there nearly his entire life. He does so at great personal risk, which only subsides once Lady Brienne vouches for him. After this point, Djawadi includes a musical reference to Jaime’s past, a direct callback to the first statement of Jaime’s “Kingslayer” theme, heard in the episode titled, “Kissed By Fire” (S3E5).

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Just running slightly behind The Music Salon, Alex Ross has a piece up at The New Yorker about the new recording of two symphonies by Mieczysław Weinberg.

Weinberg, a Polish-Jewish composer who spent most of his life in the Soviet Union, has recently stepped out of the historical mists, encroaching on the mainstream repertory. He lived from 1919 to 1996 and long dwelled in the shadow of his older contemporary Dmitri Shostakovich. As more of his huge output emerges, though, his originality becomes clear. The Quatuor Danel has recorded Weinberg’s seventeen string quartets and is now playing them widely, honoring a body of work that rivals Shostakovich’s cycle in heft. A new Deutsche Grammophon recording of Symphonies No. 2 and No. 21, with Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony, is an even greater revelation. The “Kaddish” is a gaunt requiem for a succession of twentieth-century tragedies, of which Weinberg experienced more than his share.

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Also at The New Yorker is another piece by Ross on conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler:

The moral quandary inherent in the Furtwängler box set is addressed forthrightly in the liner notes, which take the form of a hundred-and-eighty-four-page hardback book. The lead essay, by the musicologist Richard Taruskin, is one of the finest things ever written about Furtwängler, who has inspired a shelf’s worth of books, along with a Broadway play and a film (both titled “Taking Sides”). Taruskin, a ferocious critic of the fairy tales we tell ourselves about the autonomy of art, would be the last to argue that we should ignore the context to which Furtwängler belonged. Instead, Taruskin confronts the reader with a quotation from a 1943 Philharmonic program book, one that pits the noble art of Beethoven against the atrocities supposedly being committed by Germany’s enemies: “It is our world that sounds forth when the bows are set in motion, the world of a spirit that no enemy air raid can destroy, nor any bomb.”

Such a statement forces us to consider the possibility that the nimbus of greatness around Furtwängler arises not in spite of the historical situation but because of it. The conductor and his musicians were working “as if there were no tomorrow,” Taruskin writes, in discussing the last item in the set—the final movement of Brahms’s First Symphony, recorded amid the inferno of January, 1945. “The music builds unbearable tension, abjures all ‘Brahmsian’ restraint or relaxation, and its raging subjectivity hits dumbfounding extravagances of tempo at both ends of the scale. . . . The bloodiest of all wars brought the foremost classical musician in the country with the most distinguished tradition of classical music to the pinnacle of his career, setting a standard neither he nor any other symphonic conductor was ever moved to duplicate.”

It certainly seems the case that some of the most intense musical statements in the 20th century came out of extreme circumstances. One immediately thinks of the Symphony No. 7 of Shostakovich, the first movement of which was written in Leningrad, besieged by the Nazis.

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I love those articles about the lesser-known corners of the music world, that street in Paris where all the best bow re-hairers have their shops, the secrets of the Cremona violins, and today, an article in NY1 magazine about the role of the opera prompter. Sadly, the piece is so incoherently written that it is hard to determine what the job is, exactly:

“The prompter has to be a highly trained musician. She can hear if they made a wrong entrance she'll do something like that and ask him to hold up a second wait a minute wait a minute you have two more measures before you come in okay now. That's why the singers love the prompter because they put them back on track,” MET Opera Archives Director Peter Clark said.

The job is like that of the prompter in any live theatre: if the performer misses an entrance or forgets a line, the idea is to give them a hint in time to rescue the performance! Just exactly how this is done in various situations I would love to hear, but we don't learn much from this article!

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The New York Times has a piece on rebel hipster viol player Liam Byrne:

This week, Mr. Byrne releases his debut album with the cult label Bedroom Community. Titled “Concrete,” it stirs together an eclectic compound of ingredients. A graceful showpiece by the high-Baroque French viol master Marin Marais is bookended by two works by Mr. Muhly. Ambient works by the contemporary Icelandic composer-producer Valgeir Sigurdsson sit cheek by jowl with five-part Renaissance counterpoint in which, through the magic of multitracking, Mr. Byrne plays every single line.

“I like finding connections,” Mr. Byrne said in an interview, describing how his three most formative musical influences were the American composer Steve Reich, the English composer Orlando Gibbons and the girl group TLC. He grinned. “New York minimalism, Renaissance polyphony and early ’90s R&B. That’s the only music you ever need.”

You know, I think I know exactly what he means!

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The Guardian continues its neverending crusade to ensure that every niche and realm in the world of music is exactly gender equal, or, preferably, biased in favor of women: Girls to the front: why gender is still a headline issue at festivals.

“We need to change the ‘pale, male and stale’ paradigm,” explains Marta Pallarès, Primavera’s head of press. “We wanted to show that the likes of Tame Impala, Guided By Voices or Stereolab can happily live together with trap divas and reggaeton queens.” It’s this commitment that means the Primavera lineup isn’t just one of the most right-on bills of the summer, but also one of the best. The middle-aged blokes are still there (hello Jarvis, Primal Scream and Interpol!), but there’s a thrilling diversity in sound as well as gender thanks to the three-day event’s fresh approach. Like a whistlestop tour through your most genre-hopping friend’s Spotify account, they’ve got London MC Flohio up alongside pop royalty Robyn and Carly Rae Jepsen, DJ Peggy Gou, Solange, Neneh Cherry, Lizzo, Tirzah and basically every woman who’s released music in the past year that made you go “Oooh, not bad”.

Pallarès is open about how this move did not actually require much work aside from a passion to shake up the industry. “It can be done now and it should be done now, but you need to want it. We hope that our move can spark change,” she says. So is anyone else following their lead?

Moral preening at the Guardian, it never gets old.

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And now, time for our traditional envoi to herald the weekend and may yours be fulfilling and bountiful. Here are a couple of clips by hipster viol-player Liam Byrne. First, a sarabande by Marin Marais with theorbo player Jonas Nordberg:

And here is something more contemporary: Lines Curved Rivers Mirrored by Edmund Finnis: