Friday, May 31, 2019

Friday Miscellanea

Here is something kind of cool: watch and hear someone put together a version of "Gangster Paradise" by Coolio (which is based on a song by Stevie Wonder) on an iPhone running Garageband:


This is giving me some ideas, I have to say. I am working on my string quartet and I have a section where all the instruments are doing glissandi in different directions and my Finale program frankly just isn't up to it! So I may have to see if Garageband can handle it. Looks like it might...

* * *

Here is a wonderful interview with ex-Prime Minister of Australia Paul Keating who is an avid (perhaps obsessive) aficionado of classical music.
KEATING: I’m a listener; I’m not an occasional listener. I find it very difficult to do something with music in the background. In fact, I can’t do something with music in the background. I always have to listen. So, what I normally do, I block out about six hours on a Saturday afternoon. I generally begin about 2:00 in the afternoon and finish about 8:00; but I’m always finishing on the big symphony, and after eight the neighbors, you wear the neighbors down, so I don’t press my luck past 8:00 p.m.
KAPLAN: That’s amazing.
KEATING: Yeah. I have six hours but I start off on some songs, or a violin concerto, or some encore pieces by Fritz Kreisler or, you know, something I was playing last week, I was playing Fritz Kreisler, playing in 1929 the Mendelssohn. There’s just a kind of lyricism that comes with that middle European feeling, you know? It was not something I had played for years, but there it was, and I thought, how good is that?
KAPLAN: Wonderful. So that’s quite extraordinary. You actually play music non-stop for six hours on a Saturday afternoon.
KEATING: Yup.
If you're going to listen, then listen!

* * *

Alex Ross rediscovers Salieri in this week's New Yorker.
Salieri is one of history’s all-time losers—a bystander run over by a Mack truck of malicious gossip. Shortly before he died, in 1825, a story that he had poisoned Mozart went around Vienna. In 1830, Alexander Pushkin used that rumor as the basis for his play “Mozart and Salieri,” casting the former as a doltish genius and the latter as a jealous schemer. Later in the nineteenth century, Rimsky-Korsakov turned Pushkin’s play into a witty short opera. In 1979, the British playwright Peter Shaffer wrote “Amadeus,” a sophisticated variation on Pushkin’s concept, which became a mainstay of the modern stage. Five years after that, Miloš Forman made a flamboyant film out of Shaffer’s material, with F. Murray Abraham playing Salieri as a suave, pursed-lipped malefactor.
Lovely summary!
The classical-music world has fostered a kind of gated community of celebrity composers. Our star fixation produces the artistic equivalent of income inequality, in which vast resources fall into the hands of a few. That arrangement lands particularly hard on contemporary composers, who must compete with a group of semi-mythical figures who are worshipped as house gods. Salieri is better seen as the patron saint of musicians who prefer to live in a republic of like-minded souls rather than in an authoritarian regime where only certain voices count. With that in mind, I left my cheap rose on Salieri’s grave.
I'm not quite sure that I welcome Salieri as my patron saint...

* * *

One of my obsessions is how little most musicians get paid. Here with one story is techcrunch:
Tired of noisy music venues where you can hardly see the stage? Sofar Sounds puts on concerts in people’s living rooms where fans pay $15 to $30 to sit silently on the floor and truly listen. Nearly 1 million guests have attended Sofar’s more than 20,000 gigs. Having attended a half dozen of the shows, I can say they’re blissful… unless you’re a musician trying to make a living. In some cases, Sofar pays just $100 per band for a 25 minute set, which can work out to just $8 per musician per hour or less. Hosts get nothing, and Sofar keeps the rest, which can range from $1,100 to $1,600 or more per gig — many times what each performer takes home. The argument was that bands got exposure, and it was a tiny startup far from profitability.
The exploitation of young musicians by wily promoters is an old, old story.

* * *

 A violist friend alerted me to the fact that the new emperor of Japan is an avid violist a while ago. Now Slipped Disc has the story that President Donald Trump, on his recent visit to Japan, presented the new emperor with a viola:
Slipped Disc has learned that the viola was sold to the US State Department by a violin shop in Little Rock, Arkansas. It was made in 1938 by Ivan W. Allison of Charleston, West Virginia.
Message from Joe Joyner, owner of the Little Rock Violin Shop:
On April 30th I heard a news story that Japan’s Emperor Akihito was stepping down and that his son, Naruhito, would be taking his place. 24 hours later I received a call from the U.S. State Department seeking an American made viola to give as a diplomatic gift. Shortly after this call, I began seeing news stories about Japan’s new Emperor Naruhito being a violist.
Nearly a month later, I can now say that last week I sold the Emperor’s new viola, an instrument made in 1938 by Ivan W. Allison of Charleston, West Virginia. The instrument was presented to Emperor Naruhito by President Donald Trump today.
* * *

Let's have a listen to the Viola Concerto by William Walton. This is the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra with soloist Antoine Tamestit:


2 comments:

Marc in Eugene said...

So the world in which one esteems a constellation of 'great musicians' (composers, more specifically, I suppose) is in fact "an authoritarian regime where only certain voices count"? I was on the verge of skipping the AR essay but am happy I didn't. Am not much inclined to agree with his connecting the veneration of genius and the "pseudoscience of race" in the 19th c: surely there are the classical, Romantic ideals on the one hand and then the increasing enslavement to 'science', with its head bumps and racial stereotypes, on the other. Don't think I've ever listened to any Salieri but will give his operas or one or two of them (seven are available at Spotify) a listen-- La scuola de' gelosi and Il mondo alla rovescia.

Bryan Townsend said...

I must confess that one of my guilty pleasures is reading Alex Ross to see how long it takes him to insert the obligatory politically correct obeisance.