Friday Miscellanea

Here is an article about the problem of singers losing their voice and how surgery may not be the best answer: Why Do Stars Like Adele Keep Losing Their Voice?

There is no precise data on the number of performers who have gone under the knife over the years. But several surgeons told me they estimate that vocal cord surgery has been performed on thousands of pop, rock and classical singers, as well as on theatre and stage musical stars. Cancelled shows reverberate across social media and hit a struggling music industry hard. When Adele pulled out of her remaining two Wembley shows this summer, nearly 200,000 tickets had to be refunded. It’s unclear if she will ever tour again.

After Adele’s 2011 surgery, Zeitels became something of a celebrity. Occasionally, a reporter asked him if Adele was cured for good. He made no assurances, but told Channel 4’s Jon Snow that her surgically repaired voice “sounds smoother now than before”.

While the media was celebrating this miracle surgery, one woman in the music industry raised a dissenting voice. According to Lisa Paglin, a former opera singer turned voice coach, Zeitels had simply found a temporary fix; in the not too distant future, Adele would once again be forced off the stage and back into the operating theatre. It was a prediction that Paglin and Marianna Brilla, her coaching partner, were willing to stake their reputations on. The rash of vocal injuries silencing our most promising young talents, they argued, is too big a problem to be solved by microsurgery.

* * *

 Norman Lebrecht, who usually delights in scandal, seems to have come around to Plácido Domingo's side: MUSIC JOURNALISM FACES A POST-DOMINGO BACKLASH.

Every day, my social media feed carries messages of support for Placido Domingo, the singer whose US career was derailed by mostly unnamed female accusers. Many of the messages are from young female musicians. 

These messages have persisted and increased in recent weeks, while newspapers have gradually lost interest in the Domingo story. The people who support Domingo are aware of the reports about Domingo. They simply don’t believe them, nor do they trust the journalism that produced this furore.

Many colleagues of Domingo’s post daily messages of support. Today’s pack includes fond waves from tenors Piotr Beczala and Javier Camarena. They don’t trust AP’s reporting, either.

Nor does the Vienna State Opera, which will feature Domingo in a livestream this weekend, greatly increasing its online footprint.

What we are witnessing in the post-Domingo environment is a widening gulf between the media industry and the world of opera.

Where this will lead no-one can tell, but what was once an easy dialogue has been coated in frost and we hear that some media organisations will not be welcome in certain opera backstages from here on.

 * * *

I think that Lola Astanova may have just won the performing costume contest over Yuja Wang and Slipped Disc has the clip.

* * *

I haven't ranted about pseudo-science for a while, so let's look at this article in Forbes: What Makes Music Enjoyable? It’s Complex, But Measurable.

Who is to say what people find predictable or unpredictable? To try to answer that question, researchers from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, found a new way to study predictability in music. 

They used a mathematical model to determine how predictable or unpredictable a musical fragment is. Then they asked volunteers to listen to different pieces of music and rate how much they liked them, and learned that the most well-liked music has a somewhat intermediate level of predictability.

As is often the case with these sorts of studies, there is a bit less there than is promised.

* * *

I just discovered Jay Nordlinger's article on the 2019 Salzburg Festival over at the New Criterion: He mentions street musicians--I saw a hammer dulcimer player myself, but mostly, as it is a very big festival, we seem to have attended different concerts. He mentions the Enescu opera:

I will give you a sampler of the festival itself, the festival proper—beginning with an opera. It was Œdipe (“Oedipus”), by Enescu. George Enescu, you remember, was the Romanian composer—and violinist and pianist and conductor—who lived from 1881 to 1955. He lavished great care on his opera (his sole opera). He worked on it, off and on, from 1910 to 1931. The opera did not have its U.S. premiere until 2005. It is an opera very much worth hearing and seeing. The score is a blend of Romanticism and Modernism. There is a lot of intelligence behind it, musical and otherwise. There is nothing showy about it; it is not a crowd-pleaser, though it may be a crowd-satisfier, depending on the crowd. Sometimes, it is dream-like, hypnotic, reminding me of Pelléas et Mélisande, the Debussy opera (1902). There are also shades of Salome and Elektra (the Strauss operas, 1905 and 1909), with their exoticism. (The second of these operas, of course, is another Greek tale.) Yet Œdipe is its own thing.

Here he is on a piano recital and again, he attended one I didn't:

The Salzburg Festival always offers a slate of piano recitals. Many of the same pianists are invited back, summer after summer. Five of them this year were Pollini, Sokolov, Kissin, Levit, and Volodos. Let me tell you about the last of these, Arcadi Volodos, the Russian pianist born in 1972. If he is not the best pianist in the world, he is unsurpassed. Who might tie him? Grigory Sokolov, for example.

At Salzburg, Volodos played a recital whose first half was all Schubert—Volodos is a devotee of Schubert, like many a profound and songful pianist. He began with the Sonata in E, D. 157. This sonata is unfinished, missing a last movement. You recall that Schubert left a symphony unfinished, too. He was careless that way. The recital moved on to the Moments musicaux, a set of six, D. 780. I could go through Volodos’s playing piece by piece—almost bar by bar—but let me speak in general terms. He has nearly unerring taste. He plays in a singing line (where appropriate, as it often is). He commits no wrong accents. He gets the most out of the music—whatever it is—without forcing anything on it.

Nordlinger tends to be a bit chatty, but it is worth reading the whole, long piece. It seems we didn't attend one concert together. I think he came for the last two weeks while I was there for the first two weeks. Ah well, it is back to Salzburg next year for me and this time, more opera!

* * *

 We  haven't said much about philosophy for a while so let's have a look at this piece in the Times Literary Supplement: Why bother with philosophy?

Is philosophy relevant to anyone outside academia? Those of us who believe in what has come to be termed “public philosophy” say yes. But the answer is not without its complications. For some time, philosophy has been an activity that has primarily taken place within universities, following the specialization model of the natural sciences. The vast majority of academic philosophers work within a subset of a handful of specialized areas. Philosophers specialize in epistemology or metaphysics the same way that physicists might focus on particle physics or condensed matter theory, producing research papers – the fundamental unit of academic distinction – equally unreadable to the uninitiated.

Unfortunately most of the rest of the article is behind the paywall, but let me weigh in on why bother with philosophy. Philosophy is simply an intellectual discipline that is pretty much essential to most people's lives and certainly any society's. It is essential because it is the one discipline that really does teach critical and objective thinking. Others may claim to, but usually don't. Supposedly philosophy is no longer worth bothering with because its essential lessons and practices have been incorporated within the operating procedures of all the other fields and specialties. Psychologists and sociologists don't need philosophy because they already know all that stuff. If only! The truth is, if more people would simply be acquainted with the most basic ideas in just one philosophical area, epistemology, the world would be a far better place. Epistemology can be summed up pretty easily: how do you know what you think you know and is it at all reliable? If people stepped back and took a look at their basic assumptions and evaluated them for their validity, just think how differently elections would go.

* * *

Browsing around for items for the miscellanea I ran across one of my favorite things about Montreal: it is a city devoted to the pleasures of life. Things like Schwartz's smoked meat sandwiches, the greatest sandwich ever invented:

And the superb Montreal-style bagel:

And for the seriousness with which they take the consumption of fine wines. Every week in the Montreal Gazette, Bill Zacharkiw publishes a column on recommended wines in different price ranges. This week it includes a crisp sauvignon blanc from France, a well-oaked Spanish blend, a bubbly from Nova Scotia (!) and a well-aged Lebanese cabernet sauvignon. Most weeks he also publishes another article on wine. This week it is about a favorite practice of mine: seeking out lesser-known and cheaper neighbors of famous appellations.

* * *

Christian Henson gives a tutorial on how to create orchestral scores for movies and tv shows without actually, you know, knowing harmony or how to read music or other stuff like that. He does have a point about creativity though.

* * *

We almost got through a whole Friday Miscellanea without a single political item. Yay! But wait, maybe we should mention this one: Eastman to Remove Koreans from Top Orchestra For China Tour. Update: Tour postponed.

China refused to issue visas for Korean students, forcing Eastman to either remove them or cancel their tour. Eastman has shockingly chosen to go with the former.

Even more stunning, the students in the orchestra themselves voted overwhelmingly to go ahead with the tour by leaving their peers behind. Under such tremendous pressure from their fellow students and school administrators, the Korean students could never have voiced any objections that they may have had.

There have been countless times in history where musicians have been called to stand up for their colleagues in the face of discrimination. In the Civil Rights era white jazz musicians would refuse to tour when their black colleagues were unwelcome. In World War II, which musicians chose solidarity with their colleagues and which chose collaboration is forever linked to their legacy.

As of Tuesday night, however, Eastman rethought the issue and decided to cancel the tour after all.

* * * 

I think that brings us to our envoi for the day. It is time to put up some George Enescu. This is his Sonata for Cello and Piano no. 1 in F minor, op. 26: