Friday Miscellanea

Does this count as world music?

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This seems to be a perennial item: really unfortunate album cover art.

You rarely get to hear the Northumbrian pipes these days. Especially in duet.

It just doesn't give me a relaxing vibe...

Oh, if only electronic music sounded as interesting as that looks.

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Over at The New Yorker Alex Ross is tsk-tsking the appointment of Kyrill Petrenko to the Berlin Philharmonic. You know, I really should have been able to predict not only this article, but the stance he takes. After recalling how Simon Rattle began his tenure with a new work by Thomas Adès, Ross writes:

Kirill Petrenko, the forty-seven-year-old Russian-born conductor, who replaced Rattle in August, shows no interest in picking up where his predecessor left off. The main work in his first concert was Beethoven’s unavoidable Ninth Symphony. A short tour of European festivals also included Tchaikovsky’s inevitable Fifth. Marginally more modern repertory fleshed out the programs, in the form of Berg’s “Lulu Suite” and Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto. New music was conspicuously absent, and none appears in Petrenko’s remaining concerts during his first season. Conservatives in the orchestra and in the audience may be reassured, but this retrenchment is a troubling signal from a historically great orchestra that ought to be assuming a leadership role in global classical music.

Progressivism is like a ratchet: there can never be retrenchment or consolidation, only advance into the adventure of the future. As an ideology, it always reminds me of those Soviet posters of Great Leaders staring off into the golden future. While the masses starve in the Ukraine, but never mind.

Alex Ross describes Petrenko in terms that remind me a bit of his bemusement at the glowing reception Grigory Sokolov received in Salzburg last year:

Because of his avoidance of publicity and his reportedly monkish immersion in the music, Petrenko has acquired a cultish mystique. A German critic has described him as a “maestro without myth,” whatever that might mean. In fact, classical music has no older or hardier myth than the notion of rising above worldly concerns and letting eternal beauty speak for itself. 

The idea of a "monkish" immersion in the music is very consistent with the idea of music as a true vocation, something one pursues on its own terms and not just because you are looking for a nice career. That this might result in a "cultish mystique" is pretty much in the eye of the beholder. The idea of a "maestro without myth" seems quite appropriate. The conducting profession is littered with people layering themselves with myth, largely to build careers (among whom, Simon Rattle comes to mind). Petrenko reminds me very strongly of Sokolov who also refuses to do interviews--even when Deutsche Gramophon is doing a documentary about him! This seems to be a Russian proclivity. It brings to mind the great Russian mathematician, Grigory Perelman who turned down the two biggest prizes in mathematics (the Field Medal and the Millenium Prize, both with million dollar awards) simply because "the prize was completely irrelevant to me." So, the "myth" of rising above worldly concerns turns out to be one that is not limited to just Petrenko. Indeed, it seems to be shared by most members of the Berlin Philharmonic who voted him in as their new music director.

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Just to provide fuel for a hearty debate I offer this quote from an essay by Richard Taruskin on the aesthetic principles underlying the Early Music Movement:

I would go so far as to suggest that all truly modern musical performance (and of course that includes the authentistic variety) treats the music performed as if it were composed--or at least performed--by Stravinsky.

Richard Taruskin. Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Kindle Locations 1503-1504). Kindle Edition.

The term "authentistic" is one coined by Taruskin to identify the historically informed performance practice, also known as the early music movement. The particular essay from which this quote is taken is "The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past" a particularly salient and challenging essay that I strongly recommend.

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Your smartphone can now identify art for you: Wondering Who Did That Painting? There’s an App (or Two) for That.

Magnus is part of a wave of smartphone apps trying to catalog the physical world as a way of providing instantaneous information about songs or clothes or plants or paintings. First came Shazam, an app that allows users to record a few seconds of a song and instantly identifies it. Shazam’s wild success — it boasts more than a billion downloads and 20 million uses daily, and was purchased by Apple for a reported $400 million last year — has spawned endless imitations. There is Shazam for plants or Shazam for clothes and now, Shazam, for art.

Aw, and I was all ready to say, where's the music app? Maybe if I have time this weekend I will download Shazam and try it out on very obscure Baroque composers. Plus some tricky ones like the Symphony No. 37 by Mozart (actually by Michael Haydn with an introduction by Mozart). Or maybe some aleatoric music by Cage or a baryton trio by Haydn. Honestly, I should be able to stump a mere AI ten times out of ten. Right?

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Let's have a couple of envois today. First, a couple of those baryton trios by Haydn. Why, oh why couldn't the Prince have been an amateur guitarist? The music starts around the 2 minute mark.

Next, the Symphony No. 37 by Mozart, which is actually by Michael Haydn with a slow introduction by Mozart. It is still sometimes programmed by ensembles that don't realize it isn't actually by Mozart as I discovered when writing program notes a few years ago.