Friday Miscellanea

The fetishization of the Goldberg Variations continues: Lang Lang delivers two versions, concert and studio. From the press release:

Pianist Lang Lang has conquered a musical Everest, realising a lifelong dream with his brand-new recording of J. S. Bach’s monumental keyboard work Goldberg Variations. Set for release on Deutsche Grammophon on 4th September, Lang Lang gives two complementary performances. The first was recorded in a single take in concert at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, Bach’s workplace for almost 30 years and his final resting place; the second was made soon after, in the seclusion of the studio. The two recordings, purchased together as part of a super deluxe edition, make this a world-first simultaneous live and studio album release.

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The Toronto Symphony becomes the latest to cancel: Toronto Symphony Orchestra cancels 2020-21 season, announces plans for smaller events.

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Here is an interesting article on something that is not often publicly discussed in the music world: After Corona, pay inequality among musicians will be unsustainable. The argument is fairly long and involved, but this captures the core of it:

Footballers attract attention because they earn colossal wages. But unlike CEOs, those wages are determined by the specifics of their performance week-to-week, which in turn demand extreme talent, focus and self-discipline. They are also market-driven: by-products of the huge worldwide demand and excitement their performances attract. There is a big difference between a Premier League player and a professional lower down the leagues.

A bigger gulf, you might say, than that which exists between a professional string player who sits in an ensemble and a soloist who commands a five-figure sum for playing a concerto in front of it. It’s known that top-end opera stars can attract fees of around €15,000 a night and there are string-playing soloists who are not far behind. These musicians may be those hit hardest by the crisis, with no salaries to fall back on. But they are also emblematic of the inequality that exists in our own industry, whereby largely state-funded charities pay more to visiting musicians for a few hours of work than many of their dependable full-time employees will earn in four months.

The hidden claim here is that the difference between a top-notch soccer player and professional players in the lesser leagues is significant while the difference between a classical soloist and a rank-and-file orchestral player is not very significant. The one is market driven and the other is not. There is also the interesting side claim that CEO salaries are also not really market driven.

In the long term, something bigger has to change. Wages in Premier League football have been inflated by unprecedented demand and a huge influx of cash from various sources. Many classical music organisations, in contrast, have seen their economic models steadily undermined just as soloist fees have rocketed. As the realities of our new situation sink in, we must ask ourselves if it’s necessary to make one section of our professional community inordinately rich, while the rest risk destitution.

Classical music and free markets are always uncomfortable bedfellows, but despite the fact that classical music can only survive with substantial subsidies, either from private patrons or government, the pay for soloists vs for orchestral players is not arbitrary. Orchestras hire famous soloists for very pragmatic reasons: they attract big audiences. This kind of argument is just the old socialist myths recycled.

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I always enjoy those stories of how someone discovered classical music. Here is one from Daniel Johnson:

It wasn’t until I went to the grammar school that I could make friendships and develop independent tastes. It was only then that music — real music, though it never occurred to me to call it “classical” — suddenly hit me with the force of an aural revelation. Although it was a couple of years later that I read Nietzsche, without knowing it I already subscribed to his credo, articulated in The Birth of Tragedy: “Only as an aesthetic phenomenon are existence and the world eternally justified.”

How did I discover music, by far the most intense manifestation of this aesthetic phenomenon? Music coincided with puberty, with the discovery of love and, especially, death. Still vivid in my memory is the Funeral March from Beethoven’s Eroica, played at the obsequies of the murdered Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. That symphony was one of the first records I owned, soon to be surpassed in my personal pantheon by the Ninth. Even more suggestive was Mozart’s Requiem, which I sang with the choir and which I instantly felt familiar.

Hey, let's drop the phrase "classical music" and just call it "real music." 

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Now here is a good idea: the Montreal Symphony is going to give a concert in a vacant parking lot at the Montreal airport. After all, most airport parking lots are empty these days!

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And a thumb-sucker from Alex Ross at The New Yorker: Musicians and Composers Respond to a Chaotic Moment. He starts by describing this music video:

You can probably imagine what he would write--the first thing I thought of was Jimi Hendrix' version of The Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock and Ross mentions it right away in paragraph two. He goes on:

The prevalent sensation of the world cracking in two—Willa Cather said this of the year 1922, and it might be said of 2020 as well—is palpable enough that I’ve been wondering how soon the rupture will leave traces in the work of composers. The lack of any immediate opportunity for performance has made it unlikely that composers will sit down to write the hour-long symphony they’ve been meaning to tackle, yet the coronavirus pandemic and its attendant isolation have already yielded some notable experimental scores. The turn toward protest may inspire a wave of work in a much different register. The strangeness of this moment lies in how it has pulled people both toward an extreme inwardness and toward an outward explosion of feeling. The radically expanded vocabulary of music since 1900 is equipped to span that divide.

The last sentence is the interesting one, or at least its underlying assumptions: that music has a vocabulary, i.e. semantic content, and that whatever it is can have something to do with a sociological divide. Still, whatever it means, it sounds good.

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The Japanese have been doing a lot of research on how orchestras can handle the problems of performing during the pandemic: Reshaping the concert stage.

The critical situation for Coronavirus peaked earlier in Europe than in Japan so we had been able to gather guidance from the European orchestras that had restarted, as well as scientific and medical institutions. However, I spoke to several Japanese medical advisers and decided to hold experiments specific to Japanese orchestras and halls, because there have been different infection and mortality patterns in Japan that might be specific to our situation – our custom of wearing masks and the humidity in Japan.

European trials have recommended distances of 1.5m and 2m (including studies by Freiburg University in cooperation with Bamberg Symphony Orchestra and Berlin’s Charité Medical University with seven Berlin orchestras). We started with 2m between musicians, each with their own stand. This meant that only one person from each section could be at the front, as there wasn’t enough space for two people on the front desk. The number of players in each section was 8–7–6–5–2: a total of 29. With 2m distancing, they were spread far apart and filled the stage, so there was no room for any more – either strings or winds. We also kept 2m between the conductor and front desks, and there was an acrylic board between us.

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 Remember a few years ago, Sting did an album of Dowland? Recently the ensemble of countertenor Iestyn Davies, violist Jonathan Manson and lutenist Thomas Dunford returned the favor by doing the Police tune "Every Breath You Take" as an encore: