Friday Miscellanea

In honor of this week's anniversary:

This photo contains every human ever to have existed,
with the exception of Michael Collins, who is holding the camera.

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We love to complain about the terrible state of music education, but there are places where it is pretty good. Here is David Alberman and some friends from the London Symphony Orchestra giving a little demonstration of string techniques for A level music students in England:

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I wonder if NewMusicBox are trying to make up for those intemperate articles lately about how classical music is all about white supremacy by putting up more sane posts? Here is a good one by a woman composer giving some healthy arguments why her music--and all of our music!--should be played more often: WHY YES, I DO WANT MY MUSIC PERFORMED. She also brings up some interesting points about Canadian composers:

as a Canadian-born composer, I do have long experience with another kind of programming that takes more than just whether a piece is “good” or not into account, the Canadian Content (“CanCon”) requirement, which stipulates that a certain percentage of radio and TV broadcasts consists of work by Canadian creators and/or performers. CanCon was introduced in the early 1970s to give Canadian artists, who had previously been overshadowed by artists from the USA and Europe, a chance to develop, thrive, and reach audiences in Canada and abroad. Similar initiatives from the Canada Council for the Arts and other Canadian funding bodies preferentially support ensembles that perform Canadian music, enable ensembles to commission pieces from Canadian composers, and fund tours of Canadian music and ensembles abroad.

Has this effort been a success? In terms of promoting more Canadian music domestically, certainly, but I tend to disagree with the writer's claim that post-colonial Canadian music is on an equal footing with the rest of the world. To all of you who reside outside Canada, please answer the following question: name three Canadian composers. Take your time. Ok, Claude Vivier. Anyone else?

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Tablet magazine has a piece on Alan Lomax and the Search for the Origins of Music.

Ethnomusicology was initially the creation of a small number of men and women, mostly European and North American, who were trying to make sense of the growing number of recordings of music from non-Western cultures that were being made in the field, first on wax cylinders and then on shellac records at the dawn of the 20th century.  Non-Western music and European folk song did not follow the conventions of Western classical music. Indigenous harmonies, when they were found in places like the Balkans and the Caucasus, did not work according to the then-accepted standards of European classical harmony. The vocal styles were opposed to what educated, middle-class Western Europeans at that time thought was “true, good, and beautiful.” 

Lomax discovered and facilitated the careers of Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Muddy Waters, to name a few, and he was an early mentor of the young Bob Dylan. He also collected music in the British Isles, Ireland, Spain, Italy, and the Soviet Union (triggering the folk music revivals of Europe that followed the publication of his recordings there) as well as in the Caribbean, Appalachia, and other parts of the Deep South. He probably collected and listened to more and different kinds of folk, tribal, and non-Western music than any other person during the last century. Some of the obscure songs that he discovered and recorded later became global hits such as “House of the Rising Sun” (The Animals), “Rock Island Line” (Lonnie Donegan), and “The Sloop John B” (The Beach Boys).

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Here is something I can relate to: On Being a First Generation Classical Musician.

At second glance, many people at the center of classical music life grew up immersed in the culture. To name just a few: the composer John Corigliano’s father, John Sr., was the concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic and a friend of Samuel Barber. Andreas Ottensamer, principal clarinet of the Berlin Philharmonic, is the son of the late principal clarinet of the Vienna Philharmonic (a post Ottensamer’s brother now holds). The parents of the cellist Alisa Weilerstein and the conductor Joshua Weilerstein perform together in the Weilerstein Trio, an ensemble in residence at the New England Conservatory of Music. Nadia Sirota, the violist and host of Meet the Composer, is the daughter of Robert Sirota, a composer and conductor. Matthias Schulz, the artistic director of Berlin’s Staatsoper, recently told a local newspaper that, for his five children, playing an instrument “was as natural a part of their daily routine as brushing their teeth.”

Yes, classical music tends to be a bit dynastic.

Every classical musician who is not from a musical background has a different story of how their interest in the art was sparked. But for most of them, their early forays into music were baffling and awkward: more like riding a unicycle than brushing their teeth. The barriers of entry that classical music puts up against people of color and from working-class backgrounds are often discussed (though not always with clarity). The difficulties faced by first-generation musicians overlap, but are harder to unravel. They play themselves out in tenuous musicianship skills, in educational paths not taken, in careers that stall because of networks, not ability.

This was my experience to some extent. My mother was an old-time fiddler as we say in Canada, with no connection to the classical music world. My entry actually felt perfectly natural. I simply switched from electric guitar to classical guitar and went to a university school of music. It was a lot easier to get in, back then!

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Hat tip to Norman Lebrecht for alerting us to a huge outdoor concert conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin in Montreal: Orchestre Métropolitain au pied du mont Royal: une soirée parfaite.

Près de 35 000 personnes s’étaient rassemblées au pied du mont Royal, jeudi soir, pour écouter le traditionnel concert en plein air offert par l’Orchestre Métropolitain (OM) et son chef, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Pour cette sixième édition, la température était idéale, l’ambiance conviviale et l’émotion au rendez-vous.

Pénélope McQuade a présenté la soirée avant l’arrivée de Yannick Nézet-Séguin, chemise à pois et pantalon blanc, dont l’entrée a été chaleureusement applaudie.

L’an dernier, le chef avait choisi trois pièces de Tchaïkovski, dont la Symphonie no 4, pour le concert sur la montagne. Cette fois-ci, Yannick Nézet-Séguin avait opté pour un choix plus diversifié. Après l’ouverture avec Peer Gynt, suite no 1 d’Edvard Grieg, on a pu entendre la Symphonie no 5 de Tchaïkovski, ainsi que le fameux Boléro de Ravel en clôture.

For those of you without French, Québec's wunderkind conductor, newly appointed to the Metropolitain Opera in New York (and whom I will see conducting the Bavarian Radio Orchestra in Salzburg in a week or so) gave a hugely attended concert at the foot of Mont Royal for 35,000 people. The program included the 5th Symphony of Tchaikovsky, the Peer Gynt Suite by Grieg and Ravel's Bolero. Not to heavy, not too pop, just right. Montreal is a wonderful cultural center and I miss living there. But I don't miss the six months of snow every year!

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Let's have an envoi with the Québec maestro. This is from the 2013 Proms, a performance of the Symphony No. 5 by Prokofiev with the Rotterdam Philharmonic. The first five minutes are an interview with the conductor.