Friday Miscellanea

I've been thinking of billing myself as the "World's Most Obscure Composer" but Jessica Duchen has an article on someone else in running for the title: At 82, composer achieves a first.

Erika Fox’s coffee mug is emblazoned with the title of HG Wells’s The Invisible Man. One can’t help noticing, because this extraordinary composer has for too long been an almost invisible woman. Today, her first-ever commercial CD is released, featuring a selection of her chamber music. She is 82.

Musical cognoscenti reacted with horrified astonishment to the realisation that Fox’s music has not previously been recorded. Its style is tough yet mesmerising, highly individual, with a strong undertow of unsettling emotion. “Some people have said it’s challenging, but because it’s mine, I don’t think of it that way,” Fox remarks. “To me it’s ordinary. It’s what I do.”

Read the whole thing.

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There is a debate going on in Australia these days about the depiction of women in opera: 'Difficult to renovate': Opera's struggle to move with the times.

The "call to action" co-authored by Sally Blackwood, Liza Lim, Peggy Polias and Bree van Reyk urged "respect" for "creators who are female, non-binary and from diverse cultural backgrounds" and ask for "safe inclusive spaces for people with diverse voices and abilities to set the agenda".

Operas written in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries are products of their time with the portrayal of women sometimes limited to that of a tragic heroine. 

Mr Terracini rejected the assertion that bias and sexism was only an "opera problem", arguing the discussion should involve all art forms.

"If we want to seriously examine the cultural history of Western art, let’s examine everything that constitutes the making of a civilisation based on the history of art," he said.

"If people are serious about doing something like this, it would need to involve an examination of painting, sculpture, ballet, everything.

This points out one strategy to push back at the people advocating "equity." You need to point out the hypocrisy in just calling for equity in the glamorous, sought-after areas and ignoring the equity in all the other areas.

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There is a post at Slipped Disc on this same initiative: LET’S BAN VIOLENCE FROM OPERA, RIGHT?

That’s the cry from 190 ‘leading Australian composers, directors, musicians, and vocalists’, who have signed a petition ‘to remove gender bias, sexism, and dramatised acts of violence against women in opera’.

What is most entertaining over there are the extensive comments. Such as:

Oh, I see. Then we’ll have to make some changes. First, Otello and Desdemona seek marriage counselling; then, Fasolt and Fafner draw straws over who gets most of the gold; Don Giovanni gets kneed in the groin by Zerlina; bad news for the Duke of Mantua for yes, it IS he who ends up getting knifed by Sparafucile, thus providing Rigoletto with that rarest of opera house phenomena: a happy ending; Brunnhilde gets done for animal cruelty in Gotterdammerung and Butterfly slaps a paternity suit on Pinkerton and wins a million bucks a year in child maintenance. Trust the politically correct maniacs Down Under to try and alter an entire art form to suit their loony notions….

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The New York Times takes a look at the problems of classical music in the Age of Streaming: In Streaming Age, Classical Music Gets Lost in the Metadata.

When Roopa Kalyanaraman Marcello, a classical music aficionado in Brooklyn, asked her Amazon Echo for some music recently, she had a specific request: the third movement of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto.

“It kind of energizes me, motivates me to get things done,” she said.

But the Echo, a voice-activated speaker, could not find what she wanted. First it gave her the concerto’s opening movement; then, on another try, came the second movement. But not the third.

Exasperated, Ms. Kalyanaraman Marcello gave up.

“Just play something else!” she recalled saying.

Her frustration may be familiar to fans of classical music in the streaming age. The algorithms of Spotify, Apple and Amazon are carefully engineered to steer listeners to pop hits, and Schubert and Puccini can get lost in the metadata.

One reason I have not been tempted to give up CDs for a streaming service. It's also personal: most streaming services just don't have a metadata field for "composer." As a composer, I rather resent that!

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Woody Allen is directing Gianni Schicchi at La Scala.

The film director, hounded out of Manhattan by his former wife and stepchildren, is staging Gianni Schicchi at the home of Italian opera, courtesy of Alexander Pereira.

As always with Slipped Disc, the comments are worth a look.

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Composer David Bruce has a number of videos over at YouTube. This one, about the uses of silence, is quite interesting:

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 Yuja Wang has a unique approach to practicing:

That's how to get a really fortissimo chord!

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For our envoi today, let's listen to a track from the new CD of the chamber music of Erika Fox. This is On Visiting Stravinsky's Grave at San Michele played by Richard Uttley. Blogger will not embed, so follow the link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjtSOseXuzg

(When I accessed this clip on YouTube it had only nine views!)