Friday Miscellanea St. Cecilia's Day

Who was St. Cecilia and why do we care? She is the patron saint of music, which is why there are odes and masses by Purcell, Handel, Alessandro Scarlatti and Haydn named after her. There are also modern works honoring her by Britten and Arvo Pärt. Here is the Ode for St. Cecilia's Day by Henry Purcell:

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Ok, now Kanye has the Correctional Service doing promotional videos for him:

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Wasn't there supposed to be a tequila shortage a while back? Doesn't seem to be one here in Mexico:

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And while we are doing images, here is an Irish Wolfhound with sub-woofers:

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Here is something interesting from The Strad: Bows of the 18th century have been ignored by string players for too long.

Much 18th-century repertoire suffered the same fate as the bows of that era. In the 1800s, such works were considered fit to be studied but were rarely performed. Rameau (1683–1764) is an example of a composer whose works were thus neglected, and attempts to play his music with a ‘modern’ bow (one made in the 19th or 20th century) cannot do justice to the articulation required. This is because modern bows have a different balance – they have considerably more weight at the tip than their 18th-century counterparts. In particular, inégalité (unequal weighting of down and up bows) is very difficult to execute with a later bow.

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I can identify with this: MY JOURNEY WITH BIRD SONGS. When I was a child I would wander around in the primal woods of northern Canada for hours and try and imitate the sounds of the birds.

For the past 11 years, I have been working on incorporating bird songs into my music. When I say “my music”, I am talking about my improvisations, because all of the music I compose starts with improvisation, which I then sculpt into compositions. To me, this is a more “natural“ way to go, but then again, that’s been my approach my entire life. When the composition is set, I leave space for improvisations based on the bird songs, as well as motifs created from the surrounding soundscape. Six of my bird song compositions that are currently in my repertoire were originally created back in 2008 during a 5-week residency at The MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

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I have thought for a long time that the secret to reviving classical music in North America is to get more people actually playing instruments instead of passively listening. This project sounds like it might help: DSO to give musical instrument to any Detroit child who wants to learn to play.

It's a visionary plan that still has a million details to be ironed out. 

But if the Detroit Symphony Orchestra has its way, in a couple years every single Detroit schoolchild who wants to play an instrument will get one, free of charge, as well as access to musical instruction. 

Detroit Harmony, as the project is called, represents a bid to dramatically expand music education throughout the city, one that hopefully will generate demand for an entirely new workforce of music teachers and craftsmen to repair and refurbish used instruments.

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Here is a gloomy piece over at NPR: The 2010s: Classical Music's Decade Of Reckoning.

The pianist and scholar Charles Rosen once said, "The death of classical music is perhaps its oldest continuing tradition." His humorous bon mot simultaneously pokes at the perennial hand-wringers who forecast the demise of a centuries-strong art form and reminds us that the classical music fortress is not impenetrable.

The past 10 years in classical music, which this episode of All Songs Considered explores, has been a roller coaster ride of high points and derailments. Hence the dramatic title, "A Decade of Reckoning." Symphony Orchestras and opera companies floundered financially, some going belly up and others rebounding as newly created organizations flourished. Women seemed to take a few steps forward and a few backward: While five of the last ten music Pulitzers were awarded to women, their music was conspicuously absent from our symphony halls. And tragically, both women and men, in many facets of classical music, were victims of sexual abuse and harassment.

The thing that always gets me about these kinds of essays is the assumption that the fortunes of classical music in North America are the whole story. As we see from the Plácido Domingo fiasco, classical music has quite a different narrative in Europe.

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Here is something all too rare: a conductor candidly talking about problems in an orchestra: BSO music director Marin Alsop criticizes how symphony is run, hints she is “nearing the end” of her tenure.

“One of the challenges for arts organizations is that as they get more threatened financially, they tend to get more conservative artistically," Kaiser said. “The number one thing it takes to be a financially healthy arts organization is to create really amazing art.”

That’s when Alsop spoke up.

She said she’s proposed several innovative programs she believes have the potential to get widespread attention, unite the city and develop a new audience. But she said that even when initiatives get adopted, they don’t receive sufficient publicity and supportive programming to allow them to achieve their maximum impact.

Baltimore has a lot more problems than the deficit of the orchestra.

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I confess that I read this article in The Guardian mainly to see if the author was aware of Richard Taruskin's critique: Bach to the future: how period performers revolutionised classical music. The answer is yes! ...sort of...

The US conductor and scholar Richard Taruskin argued fiercely that what was seen as the recreation of an authentic past was in fact the creation of a newly modern and vital performing style. His intervention did not deter either performers or record companies, now boosted by the arrival of the CD, from re-recording masterpieces in period-style performances

Well, no, of course not. His point was not to discourage anyone from reinterpreting the music, but just to recognize that all this stuff about "original instruments" and "authentic" performance practice was just propaganda and marketing to conceal that fact that what was being promoted was a new way of playing entirely suited to 20th century taste that might in some ways correspond to what we know about historic practices (and be utterly different from them in other ways).

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Yuja Wang played the new John Adams concerto at The Barbican the other night and it seems her clothing budget was slashed again! Norman Lebrecht calls these "backless dungarees."

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Our envoi will be the Missa Sanctae Caeciliae by Joseph Haydn: