This came out a few years ago, in 2015, when Paul was 72 years old. Somehow, strumming along in the background (which is pretty much all the backup instrumental), he manages to look almost like a teen--a teen with a really hard life! Rihanna does her sexy routine and sings well. Kanye also forgoes any rapping and sings surprisingly well. But Paul just strums along in the background, hardly even mouthing a line. But listening to the song, you know, I kind of think he wrote it...
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The Guardian has a big piece on Karlheinz Stockhausen on the occasion of an upcoming performance of his opera Donnerstag aus Licht and a festival of his music at the Southbank Centre. Of course the writer struggles with the inconvenient fact that while we must, as a matter of course, deplore any instances of alpha-male geniuses, still, they just seem to keep coming up.
Matched in musical-myth-mania perhaps only by Richard Wagner, Karlheinz Stockhausen is the ultimate conundrum for those of us who believe keenly in shifting classical music culture away from its alpha-male genius complex – but are still enthralled by the music. Do we get to have it both ways?The German-born composer was the self-mythologiser extraordinaire who had entrancing charisma, bullish intelligence, no shortage of game-changing opinions, nor shortage of confidence with which to assert them. A guru with disciples and rivals, he fostered a personality cult that went way beyond his music to encompass fashion, spirituality, even a galactic origin story. Isn’t this precisely the artist-as-hero narrative we need to dismantle?
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I've got a bit of a bias against competitions in general, so it is nice to see this item where a competitor, offered a bit of a consolation prize, simply says "no thanks," and leaves town.
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And Lang Lang got married -- at Versailles! Page Six has the details:
Although it was held at her French countryside palace, Marie Antoinette might have considered the whole thing slightly over-the-top.We’re told 300 guests — including John Legend and Chrissy Teigen and HRH Prince and Princess Michael of Kent — were treated to a Bach recital by the newlyweds, a seven-course meal, including a “transparency of lobster” served over dry ice and an 8-foot-tall wedding cake accompanied by two Dom Pérignon vintages.
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I find the obsessions of progressivism entertaining, on the whole. One of them that won't go away is the idea that artistic creativity these days is all about blurring lines and dissolving boundaries. Doesn't that lead to immigration problems? Oops, wrong field of discourse. Are We Done With Genre Yet? How Young Musicians Are (Again) Dissolving Boundaries:
It’s easy for musicians to become trapped in the strictures of genre or style. How many times has an orchestra or chamber group been accused of playing Beethoven “too romantically” or a historical performance ensemble of failing to adhere to some anachronism or another? Crossover music, despite the name, deliberately upholds these sorts of distinctions, as the whole point is to attract listeners from multiple traditions. Conversely, the advent of the internet has allowed artists around the world to experience and assimilate new musical ideas and idioms.Oh for <%(/·)'s sake! The problem these days is that musicians often only know the genres and styles they grew up with. Learning to become a professional musician, of whatever kind, involves learning basic principles, various styles and genres and some history. This ain't news!
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For our silly item today, we have Hilary Hahn going for a swim in a Norwegian lake in her concert gown. Courtesy of the Violin Channel.
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We are on the verge of festival season and the LA Times has an article on the Ojai Festival.
Sounds tempting, but there's those boundaries again!Thus, this year’s festival begins with Ojai’s first staged full-length opera, Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress,” written in West Hollywood 60 years ago and standard repertory everywhere except, scandalously, L.A. It also happens to be the first opera that Hannigan sang in. This new production was created to tour Europe for singers from her training program Equilibrium Young Artists, and she conducts.“Each festival is designed as an emotional journey, and I work on that really hard with the artists,” Morris said.When Hannigan told him a piece by John Zorn was the most difficult thing she had ever sung, Morris’ immediate response, he said with delight, was: “We have to do that.” It took a while, Morris said, but getting to know boundary-breaking artists, be they Zorn or John Luther Adams or Sellars, who insisted on bringing the community into the picture, have made Morris realize that “Ojai is in my blood.”
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Stockhausen seems a logical choice for our envoi today. I don't think we have ever posted a performance of his vocal work Stimmung from 1968.
I saw the SFCV piece, too, and ... I think what tends to go on more than I'd like with these pieces about "can we be done with genre" is it tends to presume a hegemonic style that hasn't been the case since somewhere around 1913. We've lived in what Leonard B. Meyer called a polystylistic steady state since more or less the dawn of the last century and yet most music journalism and commentary from "the youth" assumes a dominant 19th century Romantic paradigm even if virtually any random composer of note did or wrote something to dismantle that status quo, whether Stravinsky or Schoenberg or Messiaen or Stockhausen or even Hindemith or beyond the Western world someone like Takemitsu (coming around to question the assumption that East and West couldn't arrive at a mutually beneficial fusion, if I recall correctly).
ReplyDeleteWhat most attempts to say we're "past genre" seem to mean is playing with language in music rather than diving into formal and structural analytical work. If we're going to move "past genre" what won't happen is that music will be made that cannot, eventually, be placed in a category. Fixations on the late/high Baroque era withstanding, one of the qualities we find in the span of the era of figured bass is that there were a lot of forms and styles and mixing and matching them was practical because musicians and theorists knew enough about the various styles and forms to encourage those kinds of fusions. Thus ... J. S. Bach. He could blend Italian, French, German, English and Polish musical idioms because he had enough mastery of forms and styles to do that. This gets back to what you've described as synthesist vs innovator and I think too much of journalistic discourse on "past genre" is still trapped in a battle with the Romantic legacy of a linear philosophy-of-history approach to music and style.
I do think forms of genre fusion are possible and practical. I've been incrementally tinkering with ways to develop some kind of jazz/classical fusion but the most substantial progress I think I've made in that direction came from decades of formal analysis of Haydn's work on the one hand, and a dive into Charles Rosen, Hepokoski & Darcy's Elements of Sonata Theory and books like that. I would also say my experience has been that people who want to be past genre rarely go back to a style that genuinely exists in the liminal space between classical and jazz, ragtime specifically. If we want to go back to a style or genre that exists in both the "literate musical tradition" of Western art music and serves as a foundational precursor to jazz ragtime would seem like the most natural style to go back to. If we can formulate a way of writing sonatas and fugues based on ragtime then a "post genre" idiom that, really, tends to be an unrecognized code for a restored synergistic relationship between popular and art music styles, could be more feasible. Most of the elements people want restored to classical music are in jazz, but many of these seem to have been in the galant style, too, it's just people haven't read widely enough on the topic to realize this. I've written this before, but people seem to not realize their beef is with the legacy of German idealism and the Romantic canon rather than with the thousand year history of Western music, which isn't holding them back (whatever that means) if they engaged with more of the music itself rather than the constraints of contemporary music journalism and press materials.
Might have to eventually write a post about that.
Absolutely brilliant comment, Wenatchee! I might add that the people that seem to be going beyond genre often end up with something that quite resembles a genre: look at the basic features of, say, psychedelic rock or punk. There are very definite stylistic elements that even include things like costume and stage presentation. The random happenings of 60s avant garde concerts often contain the same short list of dreary elements. Indeed the "beyond-genre" genre often seems less creative than what was done within a genre.
ReplyDeleteI suppose I ought to listen to some Stockhausen one of these days.
ReplyDeleteStockhausen is always interesting from a conceptual point of view. Stimmung is not hard to listen to, though it does go on!
ReplyDeleteStimmung will be my initiation into the Stockhausian mysteries, then. But after this morning's concert from the Berlin Philharmonic: Maria Joao Pires is playing the Beethoven Concerto no 4-- apparently fifty years ago this month Daniel Barenboim debuted with the orchestra and he's/they're doing the same program today, although with Pires performing in Radu Lupu's place (Clifford Curzon? in '69). Haydn's Symphony no 95 first and Schumann's Symphony no 4 after. I wonder how long she had to prepare for these three concerts?
ReplyDeleteBeethoven 4 is my favorite, absolutely lovely piece. I suspect that every concert pianist has all the Beethoven concertos in their fingers.
ReplyDeleteHmm. There's a concert at the OBF of a quartet (Brooklyn Rider) performing Beethoven's opus 132 along with pieces by inter aliae Du Yun (who is quoted in the 'Genre' piece), and then also one by Darrell Grant's jazz ensemble performing his The Territory ("[the] nine movements draw on both jazz and classical music to address pivotal moments in Oregon’s cultural history and reflect on the space between the myth and the reality of the territory"). Representations of floods and vibrations, eh; who knows. Am going to account the cost of both tickets to the Beethoven quartet and then be grateful for whatever else of beauty happens.
ReplyDeleteFrom the beginning of Guy Dammann's review of Donnerstag aus Licht (in the TLS):
ReplyDelete"Karlheinz Stockhausen was among those singled out by [critic Stanley] Cavell for their artistic 'fraudulence', and he remains one of the best examples of a composer whose artistry seems impossible to grasp outside the cult of personality that still surrounds him, twelve years after his death. For his part, Stockhausen played along, gradually discarding the early pseudo-scientific discourse of his youth for a more explicitly messianic narrative. In his music he moved towards embracing idioms which – in their integration of profound explorations of harmony and timbre with an enterprising if idiosyncratic sense of dramatic structure – are in many ways much easier on the traditionally trained ear than they are given credit for.... But as his music became more aesthetically approachable, the discourse in which its value was anchored became more and more outlandish. Literally so: Stockhausen constructed an elaborate cosmology in which his music would gradually reveal and make sensible the forgotten harmony of the universe. He was, he would patiently explain to his acolytes, conceived for this purpose by God, who had sired him on the planet Sirius and brought him to earth as a vessel for the vibrations of the universe. The risk, as his second wife, the painter Mary Bauermeister, put it, of giving the impression of being quite mad was clearly one Stockhausen was prepared to take."
I'm looking forward to Stimmung. :-)
Sometime in the 19th century the economic driver of music composition changed from the individual noble patron to the middle-class concert-going audience. And with that was born the need for composers to "market" themselves. We can see the beginnings of this with Berlioz' drama-laden programs, with Liszt's pyrotechnics and with Wagner's cult of personality. The trend just continued in the 20th century with Stavinsky's evocation of primeval Russia, Messiaen's exoticism and naturalism, Stockhausen's pseudo-science and later personality cult, John Cage's winsome orientalism and so on. Many composers, Brahms, Sibelius, Shostakovich, for example, didn't do much in the way of marketing, but many other composers found some schtick or the other to help cultivate public demand for their works.
ReplyDeleteI met Stockhausen in Salzburg in the 80s and had some illuminating conversations with him. In person, in conversation with another musician, myself, he was unassuming with really interesting things to say. So I suspect that, in the fullness of time as the immediate need for the marketing fades away, we can probably ignore most of it!
You may well be right about the 'marketing' but then we're left with trying to understand why we should listen to Stimmung again, without any of that-- Berlioz he's not. I'm listening to Handel's 'Chandos anthems' this morning because of the beauty of the voices and their harmonies and their existence in the 'reality' of the Christian world-- that's a pretty simple rationale that works for me. No doubt when the OBF or an ensemble at the University perform Stimmung I'll happily go to the concert but my guess is that 95% of my enjoyment of it will have to do with the circumstances attending it rather than anything intrinsic to the music. I'll give Stockhausen another go one of these days, perhaps.
ReplyDeleteStockhausen is likely well outside your aesthetic zone, so kudos for giving him a try anyway. My policy is to give just about anyone a try because they deserve that. But that doesn't mean you need to keep on giving them a try if you don't find something intriguing or satisfying in the music.
ReplyDelete