Friday Miscellanea

Finally some signs of hope on the concert scene: Art tackles social distancing and, for once, actually wins: Philharmonia Sessions reviewed.

First there were the home recitals: musicians playing solo Bach in front of their bookshelves, wonkily captured on iPhones. Next came the Zoom ensembles, and near-infinite quantities of editing time and digital processing power achieved what, for a millennium up until March this year, could be produced instantaneously by putting some musicians in the same room. In June, we had live chamber music relays from empty concert halls. And now, after what might be the longest enforced break many orchestras will ever have taken, we have socially distanced online symphonic concerts: the latest, and let’s hope final, manifestation of this godawful New Normal (you’ll know we’re back to the Old Normal once critics start complaining about grey-haired audiences again). 

On Friday the percussionist Colin Currie took the same slot, and like Wilson, he’s a sonic conjuror. A solo vibraphone passage from Per Norgard’s I Ching was alternately mellow and piercing, sometimes within the same note. But in a programme that included music by Kevin Volans, Toshio Hosokawa and Bryce Dessner, a little post-minimalist pattern-making went a long way. In the middle of it all, a flaring, iridescent nebula of unconstrained imagination, was Vibra--Elufa, a study from Stockhausen’s Licht. Stockhausen, famously, came from the Sirius star-system, which spares me the embarrassment of suggesting, in the summer of 2020, that some of the best stuff out there really is — still — the work of mad, dead German males.

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On the other hand: Huh? Wow! A tour round the imaginary museum.

It is a staple criticism of contemporary art that it, like the world, has lost the plot. In the past couple of years I have, in my capacity as an art critic, attended a seven-hour-recital of a looping two-and-half-minute passage from Franz Schubert’s “An die Musik”; travelled via virtual reality simulation to the surface of the moon not once but twice; watched an opera about climate change set on an artificial beach in an Italian military complex; taken a lesson in Sinhalese at a Manchester museum; and chaired a discussion about a video set in a Silicon Valley dystopia featuring a transgender dancer who brings Ayn Rand to climax. That all of these events have been framed as contemporary art could be taken as evidence that the term is meaningless, or that it has become so highly coded as to be indecipherable to anyone without a specialist education. Yet the fact remains that I found all of the above experiences in some way moving or enlightening, and that new developments have through the history of art routinely been dismissed as the speculation of chancers or the ravings of the deranged.

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 The pandemic starts to have an impact at music schools: Deep Conservatory Cuts Begin.

We hear from an insider that the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia has just laid off 14 staff, one of them a member of the senior leadership team. Their names have been erased from the website.

The Department of Artistic Programs and Performances has been abolished, our source says. The Department oversees all orchestral, solo, and chamber music, including the Student Recital Series and master classes. Five of the firings were from that department, including its head.

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Via Slipped Disc the response of the music theorist to the Schenker criticism: A CANCELLED MUSIC PROFESSOR SPEAKS OUT

The controversy engulfing me and Professor Philip Ewell of Hunter College is widely misunderstood as a debate over “racism.” This controversy is actually about whether or not the Twitter mob may silence open discourse and scholarly debate at the University of North Texas.

Professor Ewell certainly has a right to express his ideas. He labels as a “virulent racist” the great music theorist Heinrich Schenker. By extension, he argues, modern music theory is institutionalized “racism” and those who teach and defend Schenker are “whitewashing” music theory. We who have dedicated our life and scholarship to Schenker’s ideas are, by extension, inescapably racists.

I had the courage to object. But I did so by following the usual course of open academic debate. The Journal of Schenkerian Studies sent out a Call for Papers to everyone in the Society for Music Theory, including Professor Ewell. We deliberately collected different viewpoints, some supporting him.

Professor Ewell himself made no response. The claim that the Journal somehow denied him a voice is simply false.

Instead, as Professor Ewell told this paper, he chooses not to read the responses at all. He and the Twitter mob nevertheless shout down our viewpoints as “racist.” I have requested that the Journal and the University of North Texas Press immediately make all the responses publicly available.

 The tactic of launching a blanket accusation and then simply refusing to debate the question has become a popular one. The obvious conclusion is that the claim would not survive a free and open discussion.

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And speaking of racism: SO HARMONY IS NOW A RACIST TERM?

How much do formalisms, and words themselves, remember of their problematic pasts? Music theory’s foremost contribution to music studies in the West is its analytical terminology; this vocabulary facilitates detailed discussions of musical surfaces across disciplines.

Nevertheless, the central claims and innovations of canonic theorists

such as Heinrich Schenker and Hugo Riemann root our basic descriptive concepts in

an intellectual lineage of elitism, eurocentrism, colonization, patriarchy, and ultimately

white supremacy. Terms such as pitch, scale, analysis, and work thereby coproduce a

musical formalism built around the affordances of the Enlightenment subject.

One of the prime methods of sneaking these kinds of assumptions across the border of rational thought is to suppress actual agency. For example, the opening phrase here entirely obscures the idea of actual causality: "How much do formalisms, and words themselves, remember of their problematic pasts? " Well, nothing of course, words don't remember anything. Only people do. But already with this reverberating clinker we find our capacity for rational thought being systematically derailed, softening us up for the next absurdities. There are half-truths here, of course, but the agenda is simply malevolent.

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Repairing the Notre Dame organ:

Pipe by precious pipe, the organ that once thundered through Notre Dame Cathedral is being taken apart after last year's devastating fire.

The mammoth task of dismantling, cleaning and reassembling France’s largest musical instrument started Monday and is expected to last nearly four years.

Once restored, it will take six months just to tune the organ, according to the state agency overseeing Notre Dame’s restoration. Its music isn’t expected to resound again through the medieval Paris monument until 2024, to the dismay of the cathedral's dedicated organists.

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American Freelance Musicians on Surviving the Pandemic.

America in 2020 is awash in an unprecedented number of unemployed musicians. Live performances are cancelled and concert halls temporarily shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic. These events won’t be allowed until sometime in 2021—if not later. Playing in one, or several, ensembles and/or giving regular solo performances is how most musicians make most of their money (a truth in both the mainstream of standard classical repertoire and ensembles and in the more nimble world of new music). There are very few salaried union positions in the country, and even many of those are not currently paying their staff. As most musicians are freelancers, they are trying to solve for the present while also imagining the future without concerts. It’s the eternal question: How to eat?

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The New York Times tells us how Salzburg is managing its festival this year: Opera Goes On in Salzburg, With Lots and Lots of Testing.

The festival’s theaters will each be capped at about half their capacities; audiences will sit in a staggered, chessboard-like formation and will be asked to wear masks as they enter and leave, but can remove them during performances. Intermissions will be eliminated, and attendees will provide their contact information with the purchase of each nontransferable ticket, so that they can be informed if it turns out they attended a performance with an infected person.

Artists and staff have been divided into three groups, depending on their ability to socially distance. Singers, orchestra musicians and others who need to interact with one another closely are in the “red” group and are tested weekly, whether they have symptoms or not.

Other workers are divided into “orange” (those, like hair and makeup artists and festival executives, who must closely interact with the red group but can otherwise socially distance and wear masks) and “yellow” (those who can always socially distance and wear masks). Red and orange employees must keep logs of their health and contacts. Visitors — including journalists — must provide evidence of a recent negative test before having even distanced contact with members of the red group.

The festival has contracted with a private laboratory so that it can test large numbers of people quickly. For example, the singers, choristers and orchestra players for “Elektra,” a company of around 200, can all be tested at the same time and get results within a few hours.

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 As we can't be there to hear the apparently successful Così Fan Tutte, let's have it as our envoi today. Here is a production from 1992: