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| Click to enlarge. This is the most famous Chinese zither or qin, dating from the Tang Dynasty (618 - 907 AD). |
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I think the return to some kind of normality in the concert scene will be the real test of musicians' and administrators' creativity in the coming months. I am on the mailing list for the Palau de Les Arts Reina Sofía in Valencia and they just sent me this email:
I for one would love to start attending some concerts for €5 starting next week! Alas, that is not going to happen where I live, I'm afraid, where the summer chamber music festival has been cut to a brief two weeks in the last half of August.
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This is not how I imagined the 21st century:
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Norman Lebrecht has some tart words for the music establishment during this crisis: WHY IS THE WIGMORE HALL THE UK’S ONLY LIVE PROVIDER?
Yes and on the European continent, as mentioned above, great efforts are being made to return to live concerts. But in North America it is nothing but cancel, cancel, cancel.In this week’s Spectator, Richard Bratby reviews ‘The musical event of the year’ – the Wigmore Hall lunchtime recitals that are played to an empty house and broadcast live on the BBC. It’s the only live music heard in this country for almost three months.As Richard says: ‘Listeners were in tears. Comparisons with Myra Hess’s wartime concerts at the National Gallery did not seem absurd.’But why was it only John Gilhooly’s initiative at the Wigmore Hall? Where were the state supported South Bank and the banks-supported Barbican? Was it beyond the wit of their idle staff to devise a Covid-era broadcast series?And what about Classic FM and Scala Radio – why weren’t they relaying live music instead of exhorting listeners to relax and buy something?And what of all those so-called entrepreneurial agencies and manager who keep lecturing the world on how to run music as a business?Let’s not mince words: this has been an organisational falure on a massive scale for the whole of the classical music establishment.
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Also from Slipped Disc a brief lament on the terrible situation of small ensembles in France:
Les Arts florissants, Les Talens Lyriques, Les Musiciens du Louvre, Le Concert d’Astrée and other non-state French ensembles calculate that Covid has cost them more than 1,200 performances at a loss of 11 million Euros. Ther situation is becoming desperate.
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The New Yorker tells us about online orchestral practicing, which I didn't even know was a thing.
...almost every day on Instagram, Morgan Davison, a twenty-two-year-old bassoon master’s student at Juilliard, has answers for the bassoon-curious, providing her nearly thirty thousand followers with a running selection of practice excerpts from Francis Poulenc, Igor Stravinsky, and the gamut of bassoon-heavy composers.Davison benefits from a years-old trend in the flourishing micro-niche of online orchestral practicing. In 2017, the renowned violinist Hilary Hahn posted an Instagram video with the caption “#100daysofpractice.” The premise was simple: for a hundred days, she would post a daily video of herself practicing, letting other musicians see how she prepared for performances. On one day, Hahn played a series of slow, precise double-stops from Robert Schumann’s piano quartet; on another, the athletic, isolated shifts from Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto.
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Over at The Economist (I read The Economist so you won't have to) of all places is an article on pre-Columbian musical instruments in Mexico:
This is not really "news" as there have been musicians and ensembles here in Mexico claiming to offer concerts of "pre-Columbian" music for many years. The fly in the ointment is that while they are able to re-create facsimiles of the instruments from images found in sculptures, no actual music notation exists. So it's all freejazz noodling.One afternoon last December Arnd Adje Both, a researcher at Huddersfield University, in Britain, stood on top of the Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan, in Mexico, and blew into a conch-shell trumpet, sounding a note that echoed in the plaza far below. Later this year—covid-19 permitting—he hopes to return with a group of colleagues to conduct an aural examination of the site using replicas of the ancient instruments dug up there.Teotihuacan is a mysterious place. Once home to more than 100,000 people, at its zenith around 1,500 years ago it was among the biggest cities in the world. Its inhabitants, though, had no known system of writing.
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The Guardian bemoans the plight of classical musicians in Britain: 'We could go to the wall in 12 weeks' – are we just going to let classical music die?
From top to bottom, from big to small, from freelancer to staffer, from humble hall to grand auditorium, the world of classical music is facing its biggest crisis in living memory. Most musicians in the UK work freelance, even members of many big-name orchestras, so for them no gigs means no earnings. Some qualify for help for the self-employed, but many don’t. Conservatoires – employers of musicians, producers of future talent – are facing a financial crisis as overseas students stay away. All the backroom people who usually keep the show on the road, from agents to publishers, are haemorrhaging money. Concert halls and opera houses cannot earn.
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Wired tells us how those mosaic music videos are made:
FOR MOST PERFORMERS, social distancing means stopping. No more concerts or comedy clubs, no more plays or musicals. How weird, then, that one of the few bright spots of the pandemic has been the rise of a new musical-ensemble format: the virtual choir.
You’ve surely seen these videos, or at least scrolled past them in your feed: The singers appear in a grid, Zoom style. Each is clearly alone at home—and yet they’re all singing together, gorgeously and in perfect sync.
If you know anything about Zoom or its rivals, you probably sensed some fakery immediately. People can’t sing together over video chat. It can’t be done.
The problem is latency (audio lag): By the time your voice reaches the other singers’ speakers, the Internet has introduced about a half-second delay. Then they try to sing along with your already-delayed voice—and what you hear back is even further behind. It’s a vicious cycle of tempo dragging, and the result is always a train wreck.
The workaround: The musicians film themselves playing their parts individually, at home, on their phones. Then some poor, exhausted editor assembles their videos into a unified grid.
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My violinist and I tried to do a read-through of a new piece on FaceTime, but it just wasn't possible. What I notice about all these mosaic videos is that while they can put them in sync with the techniques mentioned plus a click track, the balance is pretty horrible because they can't hear one another and adjust.
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There are lots of great performances out there, so let's hear a couple. Here is the Mozart Clarinet Quintet in a concert from the Sudtirol:
Here is one of those live-streamed Wigmore Hall concerts with pianists Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy playing music by Brahms, Schubert and Beethoven:
As we have discussed there is geat indifference and some malfeasance in the classical musica establishment. But we just can't blame the organizations since the rest of the music establishment including musicians, schools, instrument makers / sellers and others aren't yelling and screaming. Everyone is protesting except for them. I understand about rocking the boat but the vast majority are not even going to be in that boat in 2 years anyway.
ReplyDeleteI wrote one response last night, but some glitch caused it to disappear so...
ReplyDeleteYes, the people who are in charge of the administration and promotion of classical music are showing themselves to be not up to the task in the present crisis. There are probably a lot of reasons for this, some of which we have discussed. So many ensembles large and small are being forced to cease their activity for how long we don't know. I contrast the Vienna Philharmonic who are back in the concert hall this weekend, with severe restrictions mind you, with the Victoria Symphony who have simply given up and canceled all concerts until the fall of 2121!!
We could compare this with the situation of small businesses like restaurants. If you can't get your business up and running pretty quickly, you will no longer have a business. Just ask J. C. Penney or Hertz.
ReplyDeleteI think the classical music oligarchs are using the pandemic more as a useful excuse. People and funders have been going through the motions in the US for the last decade or two on inertia. The labels stopped recording orchestras and regional/local orchestras have been disappearing slowly but steadily.
Still I have been surprised at the supiness of the arts organizations particularly those tied to particular performing groups and cities. The govt orgs like KC and govt funders are doing what I predicted they would do and just transfer their funding over to pop music. THE KC website is now featury Jamaica dancehall and a Navajo musical. They brought in Renee Fleming not to sing but to talk with two doctors about Covid 19 , music and mind.
But the org like the Met, Chicago Opera/symphony and other similar groups puzzle me as they do not have the flexibility derived from taxpayer funding. If the SF symphony goes belly up the org associated with it will fold too. Perhaps you Bryan have more insight into who is running these local arts groups and why they are so indifferent to whether the org survives?
I certainly don't have any insight into arts administration--I just have never moved in those circles except in a modest way doing program notes. Deep down I have a feeling that the arts in North America tend to be administered by people who had indifferent careers as artists and moved over to administration or people who are basically career-oriented and are into generic administration. Not to demean these people, but I don't think they would have a powerful attachment to or understanding of aesthetics. Essentially they are selling something: entertainment, "connection," fizz, something that is only loosely connected to the essence of the artform. We see this particularly on the Kennedy Center site: https://www.kennedy-center.org/ Note that the full name is left out: The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts which is likely too pompous these days. The San Francisco Symphony website is a bit fizzy as well: https://www.sfsymphony.org/ And what I find odd is that it is all about the past music director, Michael Tilson Thomas, and not a word about the new music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen. The Vienna Philharmonic site is less fizzy, more practical: here are our concerts and here are some DVDs you can buy.
ReplyDeleteTo be honest, I have never understood the weird relationship that North America has with classical music and art in general.
Forgot to include the Vienna website:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.wienerphilharmoniker.at/en
Your view is probably correct with the added idea that they have moved with the Zeitgeitst. Many probably have been there 15 or 20 years when there was still a vague positive aura around classical music. So they had an undemanding sinecure that had a bit of prestige. The last decade though attitudes like the overgrownpath or the Musicology site have pushed their attitudes more towards distaste and unhappiness about association wit a classical music viewed as too patriarchical and oppressive. So it is quite possible that many of these local arts administrivia types will either retire or jump to some other arts organization.
ReplyDeleteIt will be interesting to see if US composers give up on the classical music forms as a result. With hindsight it is looking like the 20th C relative embrace of classical music in the US was a result of widespread flight of composers and artists from Europe joined with the development of the LP. Once that faded things are reverting to "normal" in the sense that classical music has a tenuous existence in the US and maybe the Americas a s a whole. I am curious what is going to happen to East Asian interest in classical music if it diminishes in the West.
I think this is a very good insight:
ReplyDelete"With hindsight it is looking like the 20th C relative embrace of classical music in the US was a result of widespread flight of composers and artists from Europe joined with the development of the LP."
I think composers may be looking at a Scylla and Charybdis situation: on the one hand all the real money is in pop music so that is a huge incentive (but I rather doubt any classically-trained composers are going to make much because they are not really pop artists), and on the other hand there is this terrifically powerful tradition that to most young composers has to be pulling them toward a genuinely classical direction. Taylor Swift or Stravinsky? No contest. But that direction means poverty or a university job teaching theory and composition--if you can get one, which is doubtful.
I wonder if instrument makers don't have as much reason to complain because there's no reason to complain. Take flute or horn production. Depending on niche and social boundaries even if "classical" music in a symphonic form dwindles is band music going away? Not likely and if there are plenty of school bands and symphonic wind ensembles around then the conventional orchestra could come and go and there would still be a role for flute manufacture. Or as Jay Nordlinger put it in a set of essays issued at Future Symphony Institute, chamber music isn't going away and is more lively this century than symphonic/orchestral scenes.
ReplyDeleteWhether it's a book by Robert Flanagan I've started into or Robert Freeman's book on the crisis in classical music education in which there's a spectacular oversupply relative to demand it seems as though Paul Hindemith called it sixty years ago complaining that US music education was teachers replicating teachers at the expense of preparing musicians who would have music as part of their life whether they were playing professionally or not. I.e. the whole conception of music education in North American seemed to Hindemith to be on a foundationally wrong footing.
I've been branching out a bit into books on 20th century literary education and creative writing stuff, aka Mark McGurl's The Program Era and what seems easy to overlook is the extent to which U.S. and North American arts and arts promotion were inextricably linked to educational systems. Not just noting Hindemith on teachers replicating themselves at a cultural level but that so many in the arts were in the arts through sinecure as academics, even if some of them were actually teaching students along the way.
While I am actually sympathetic to the idea that classical music and popular styles will benefit from synergistic exchange my concern with Musicology Now and somewhat at times On an Overgrown Path is that diagnosing a problem is in itself doing nothing to formulate solutions. Richard Taruskin's polemics against cults of Boulez or Carter or Cage is fine by me but what reduces those polemics, sympathetic as I am to them!, to what can seem like well-poisoning is that simply pointing out that classical music has become marginal compared to classical music in part because of hermetic and elitist art religion is not necessarily giving any of us who make music as hobbyists or professionals ideas of how to bridge the self-created barriers on all sides of the pop/classical divides. For that music history can only, yet necessarily, help us chart the paths of segregation, but it's going to take composers and also, dare I suggest , theorists and analysts to help think through ways of bridging the gaps between pop and classical. In that limited sense someone like Adorno was paradoxically right to say that theory is needed that is not collapsed into action, which probably sums up the problems in a lot of would-be progressive musicology. Merely saying we need something new tells us nothing about what that new could be, let alone should be. I think at a practical level making new music that in some way addresses the problems of the divides between pop and classical has to come first and THEN there is time for theorizing and formal considerations.
ReplyDeleteI've been floating this idea at my blog for a few years but recognizing the possibility that after a couple of centuries the age of the orchestra and the symphony may be over and that covid-19 may just be forcing the classical music scene to recognize this does not for one moment mean, a la some Norman Lebrecht lament, that classical music is dying. Even Taruskin changed his mind on that by volume 5 of the Ox. Classical music is changing and if it changes into something that at a stylistic level isn't recognized "as" classical music that won't necessarily be a sign that it doesn't exist. I've written my own 130 some page thesis about ragtime and sonata forms so I admit I'm staking out my own position, that we're a century overdue to regard the Joplin school as inextricably part of the concert music canon and it's role as popular as well as concert music could give us a way to keep working forward toward fusions of pop and classical styles.
There are a lot of things it is hard for me to judge because I moved from Canada to Mexico twenty years ago and so I have not been able to closely observe how the music scene has shifted in Canada over those years. It seems to me that the problem comes back to education. Instead of turning out a modest hoard of aspiring classical musicians, many of whom will not be able to find careers, we need to be trying to raise the general musical understanding of most people so that they can be more attentive audience members. It is bigger audiences that we are in need of, not more virtuosos. I think all of us here at this blog believe that classical music has a great deal to offer, but that fewer and fewer people are able to appreciate it, largely because of the dominance of pop music. I find the unrelenting sameness of pop music to be enervating, but most people seem to be perfectly attuned to it.
ReplyDeleteI think the core of what we are calling "classical" music is not so much the externals: orchestras, concert dress, certain kinds of sounds, but rather the process, the approach. Composers go into themselves and into the depths of musical materials in order to create music of both substance and originality. This is something valuable in itself because creativity is always in short supply. This music can be inspiring in various ways to the listener even as it gives fulfillment to the performers. Pop music, while immediate and both emotionally and physically stimulating, has an important role, of course, but it is quite a different experience from classical music and it is more and more the product of a nearly industrial process supervised by committees of songwriters and marketers.