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| Ancient Greek Chamber Music |
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Learning an instrument or singing, or even just listening to or experiencing music – live or recorded – allows us to connect with others, to make music and fulfil a fundamental human need to be creative. The additional benefits are wide-reaching and may well include cognitive function, academic attainment, etc, but the experience of learning and doing music for music’s sake – for the sheer joy of music – must never be underestimated.
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Somebody doesn't like the new Teodor Currentzis recording of the Symphony No. 5 by Beethoven.
Admirers of Currentzis at his most provocative, impulsive and downright f-u are already comparing him to Furtwängler. Myself, I find the Andante aesthetically offensive and the rest mostly annoying.
My feeling is that if you are going to do a new recording of this much-recorded piece, I expect you to do something different with it. Otherwise, why bother?
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If Leonard Cohen had been from St. Petersburg rather than Montreal...
This is one of my favorite songs, not least for the lyrics, of course.
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Meet the Mozarts via a new edition of the letters.
It’s 1771, you’re in Milan, and your 14-year-old genius son has just premiered his new opera. How do you reward him? What would be a fun family excursion in an era before multiplexes or theme parks? Leopold Mozart knew just the ticket. ‘I saw four rascals hanged here on the Piazza del Duomo,’ wrote young Wolfgang back to his sister Maria Anna (‘Nannerl’), excitedly. ‘They hang them just as they do in Lyons.’ He was already something of a connoisseur of public executions. The Mozarts had spent four weeks in Lyons in 1766, and, as the music historian Stanley Sadie points out, Leopold had clearly taken his son (10) and daughter (15) along to a hanging ‘for a jolly treat one free afternoon’.Mozart’s letters deliver many such jolts — reminders that, however directly we might feel that Mozart’s music speaks to us, he’s not a man of our time.
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Jeremy Reynolds in the Pittsburg Post-Gazette responds to the New York Times piece on blind auditions: Equality or equity: Orchestral auditions should be more 'blind,' not less.
The Pittsburgh Symphony’s music director, Manfred Honeck, said in a phone call from his home in Austria that he fully supports the diversification of orchestras, but that musicianship must remain the principal factor in judging an audition, whether screened or unscreened. For Mr. Honeck, an audition often comes down to whether somebody “plays stylistically in the way we are searching for” rather than a technical assessment.“I don’t know that diversity hiring would change things much, as my impression is the highest caliber Black musicians out there are getting jobs,” Mr. Grubs said.“There just aren’t very many of them.”
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This sounds pretty bad: 'The situation is grim': Toronto concert venues look to government funding for survival.
The president of the Canadian Live Music Association, Erin Benjamin, says the live music industry is being challenged in a way it's never been in its history."It's a catastrophe. We're losing venues by the day," she said.According to the Canadian Independent Venue Coalition, which has launched an online campaign to support Canadian venues, without government support, more than 90 per cent of independent venues are at risk of shutting down forever.
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Speculation on 12 Ways The Pandemic Will Change Classical Music:
6. Audience sizes will be between 50-70% smaller, and multi-day performance runs will become the norm.
I suspect that a lot of this is just wind, but if it goes as projected, then the giant tech companies will have more power than ever over what people see and hear.
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The perfect envoi today is the Exsultate, jubilate K.165 that Mozart wrote when he was just sixteen:
Your mention of "murder hornets" reminded me of a LTE I read just yesterday, describing just how bad are the locust hordes plaguing East Africa this summer:
ReplyDeletecommonwealmagazine.org/another-plague
swarms of hundreds of billions of locusts that can travel hundreds of kilometers...will consume crops before they can be harvested, causing famine, etc. 2020 is a tough year!
Someone commented on a WhatsApp thread a few days ago that we should just re-start 2020 or shift into an alternate universe. I responded that as far as I knew, in the nearest alternate universe, the Earth is destroyed by a giant meteor.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of alternate universes for classical music I wonder how many contain harmonic based music? The development of polyphony counterpoint and then harmony is looking more like a historical fluke than inevitable process.No other culture created such music or even adopted it as a part of their own tradition eg Indian classical music. (Indian music did incorporate Western instruments however such as the violin and harmonium so the rejection of harmony was specific.) .
ReplyDeleteIn the West it developed purely out of religious services and remained there and at a few aristocratic courts for centuries. A few polyphonic chansons seem to have been popular in the 15th C, but it is quite likely that popular music was not routinely based on harmony until the 18th or 19th C. And in the 21st C we see a definite retrogression in modern pop and hiphop/rap away from functional harmony to beats and grooves with sonic background filler. Even later 20th C avant garde music didn't use functional harmony very much.
That's an extremely interesting question, Maury. I deliberated over the issue of harmony a few years ago on the blog. I think that the related issue of musical literacy comes into play. Despite that fact that there have been quite a few non-Western systems of notation developed, they rarely go beyond simple aides-memoires. There may have been harmony and even contrapuntal singing in lots of places and times, but without any notation we really can't be sure. What we can be sure of is that around the year 1000 AD the monk Guido of Arezzo discovered that by using a horizontal like (later five lines) the exact pitch of notes could be written down. With the development a bit later of clear rhythmic notation, Western music was free to develop not only complex counterpoint, but also a highly-structured harmonic language.
ReplyDeleteMaury, I recall a joke a successfully foisted about 8 years ago on some Yale professors of composition when, waiting with my young son (already a composer himself) for the beginning of that night's New Music New Haven concert, I said to him deliberately loud enough for the professors behind us to hear, "are you ready for another No Melody New Haven concert?" There was some laughter from behind us! The New Music New Haven concert series is about 8 concerts a year, showcasing new works by the Yale School of Music students and professors of composition. I'm sure the concept of melody is something those with musical expertise could debate and even argue can be stretched into things impossible to follow with the human voice, which I have always considered to be the test of melody!
ReplyDeletePerhaps harmony too can be mutated beyond our natural concept, which seems to me rooted in the overtone series. Perhaps dissonances and consonances are only words to indicate opposite ends of a continuous spectrum. No doubt our modern ears have come to accept as harmony some intervals that would leave earlier composers aghast and worried about the future!
I have a friend that delves deep into things like modes, tuning and their history. He is constantly reminding me that people well back in the Middle Ages in both the Muslim and Christian worlds were experimenting with all sorts of microtonal tuning systems. This seems to be always going on in every era.
ReplyDeleteYes microtonal melodies are likely widespread. Even with unfretted string instruments, microtones are used informally say with leading tones. But microtonal harmony I think is a late development and most likely dependent on electronic synthesizers for real accuracy.
ReplyDeleteMy point about harmony as a fluke was centered more on the religious esoteric milieu in which it developed and mostly remained for centuries except for some aristocratic songs. As you have recounted here, the Medieval system was a very structured theoretical framework based on theological notions. The broad public has never been that keen about polyphony and seem happiest with the kind seen with simple piano harmonizations. So I think it significant that other cultures accepted some musical imports but not harmony. I think the reason is that harmony interferes with melodic elaboration and even microtonal embellishments that are primary to them and supported by drone and percussion. Thus I am not sure if Guido's invention of melodic notation inevitably leads to counterpoint/harmony.
And yes to the Hatchet's point, the avant garde got rid of melody along with functional harmony. But modern pop music seems to have increasingly vague harmonic progressions and limited melodies so maybe it is more avant garde than we suspect.
Taking an overview of music history, it seems to be usually the case that in order to develop a harmonic system, the first thing you need is a fairly straightforward melodic tuning system. About the best example we have is the adoption of equal temperament over an extended period of time alongside the development of a sophisticated harmonic system which required the ability to modulate to any key. Guido's musical staff enabled both melodic and, with the development of the score, with as many staffs as you need stacked up, harmonic structures.
ReplyDelete