I'am now 37% of the way through Marcel Proust's massive shaggy dog of a novel, In Search of Lost Time and I took a break for a couple of days to read a much shorter novel, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. At only 162 pages it would barely make a chapter for Proust. He, Proust, has been accused of writing a novel with no structure and that is certainly the feeling one gets. He seems to wander around with no plan except whatever digression comes to him. The Calvino on the other hand is all about structure. Wikipedia describes the novel as having a "rigorous mathematical structure" and provides a table to show how it works. Here is how the Wikipedia article describes the structure of the novel:
The matrix of eleven column themes and fifty-five subchapters (ten rows in chapters 1 and 9, five in all others) shows some interesting properties. Each column has five entries, rows only one, so there are fifty-five cities in all. The matrix of cities has a central element (Baucis). The pattern of cities is symmetric with respect to inversion about that center. Equivalently, it is symmetric against 180 degree rotations about Baucis. Inner chapters (2-8 inclusive) have diagonal cascades of five cities (e.g. Maurila through Euphemia in chapter 2). These five-city cascades are displaced by one theme column to the right as one proceeds to the next chapter. In order that the cascade sequence terminate (the book of cities is not infinite!) Calvino, in chapter 9, truncates the diagonal cascades in steps: Laudomia through Raissa is a cascade of four cities, followed by cascades of three, two, and one, necessitating ten cities in the final chapter. The same pattern is used in reverse in chapter 1 as the diagonal cascade of cities is born. This strict adherence to a mathematical pattern is characteristic of the Oulipo literary group to which Calvino belonged.
That sounds a lot like a discussion of form in Stockhausen! Have a look at this article for an example.
Proust reminds me more of a symphony by Allan Petterssohn: it just goes on and on and on, exploring several themes from every possible angle, but in a kind of formless way.
Here is a clip of the piece Plus-Minus by Stockhausen:
And here is the Symphony No. 7 by Allan Pettersson:
With some help from Finale, I improved somewhat the playback of the glissandi in the opening section, so here is a clip that you can listen to. I have changed my mind about the basic structure somewhat. My original intention was to have five sections. The first, third and fifth were to be composed out and the second and fourth were going to be in moment form. For the present at least, I have dropped that idea. Instead we have the three existing sections which will be the Quartet 3. The three sections will be called
Opening, Slowly, quartet note = 50
Middle, Moderato, quarter note = 80
Ending, eighth note = 240
And that's it! Here is the Opening:
And here are the links to the Middle (previously, Section 3) and the Ending (previously, Section 5).
The main reason I decided to not add the other sections is that the quartet in Vancouver, the Pro Nova Ensemble, want to read the piece, so I thought I should give them something complete. And, I rather like it in this manifestation. It's a short quartet, about ten minutes total.
I am old enough to remember the profession of "music copyist." These were people employed by every composer (this was way back when composers had money) to make a fair copy of the score and parts for use in performances. The copyists had to make a clear copy of the score if the composer's own hand was not legible and then extract parts for each instrument. It was a fairly laborious process. If the work was to be published, the score and parts were then handed over to a music engraver who would engrave them on copper plates--at least as I understand it. Wikipedia has an article on music engraving. But that all went away with the advent of music software. Early versions were utilitarian and rather ugly in appearance, but things improved quickly and now music software like Finale and Sibelius automatically generate a perfect score and can extract parts in an instant. Now, mind you, after Finale has extracted the parts I have to go through them bar by bar because rhythmic proportions sometimes get distorted and things like slurs and expression marks can wander around. But the benefits are enormous as anyone can produce a publication-ready score on their desktop or laptop computer. And probably on their iPad or iPhone as well.
So for most of the last thirty years I have used music software for just about everything from theory assignments to my own compositions and have been deeply grateful for the resources. You can't imagine the benefit to a composer of a string quartet or orchestral piece of being able to hear a reasonable facsimile of what you just composed played by samples of the actual instruments. I haven't figured out how to get them to do sul ponticello, but they do pizzicato very well. Joseph Haydn had a full orchestra on call just down the hall to try things out, but the rest of us don't!
But I am writing a new piece for piano and I am going back to the oldest of old ways: scratching with a pencil on paper! An example:
Click to enlarge
Music software, for all its benefits, is a Procrustean bed (one of my favorite metaphors) in that everything you input has to be a precise pitch, precise rhythm, precise meter and exact tempo. But that's not how musical ideas come. They are often just little fragments with no rhythm or little rhythmic ideas with no pitches. Music software has two basic uses: putting down on paper already formed ideas, playing them using samples, and printing them out as a final publication. It's role in the actual compositional "process" (I'm not sure it is a "process" actually, more like stumbling around) is minimal. So I have, gratefully, gone back to pencil and paper as the first stage. The second stage is trying out various things on the piano (even though I am not an actual pianist) and the third stage will be notating the piece. I will likely do that with the music software, but not necessarily. If I want to do something the software will not accommodate, then I will just notate it by hand.
At this stage I have mostly primitive sketches for the first movement, which I am titling "Remembering What Is to Come" which is a line from a poem I wrote some thirty years ago. The second movement is titled "Transparent Sheets of Memory" and the third is "To Ascend the Stream of Time." All about time and memory. The titles of the second and third movements are semi-quotations from The Guermantes Way by Proust. The piece as a whole will be titled Per Sonare which dates back to compositions by Giovanni Gabrieli.
I'm sure you've seen the claim that this-or-that is "rewiring our brains"? Leaving the faulty metaphor aside, our brains are not "wired" in the first place, I think this is one of those terribly useful claims that usually comes with an ulterior motive. You know, like:
"all we need to do is spend just a little (or a lot) more money on the (homeless, war on drugs, war on poverty, healthcare, national defence, climate change ...) and the problem will be solved"
Uh-huh. What's really weird is that voters keep believing this stuff. Some of them, at least, the rest know that their government jobs depend on it.
But back to that "rewiring the brain" stuff. You know it is complete nonsense, right? But if you are reading about listening habits on Spotify, or the new fad of bullet journaling, or work habits, or work environments, or a host of other things, they always seem, mysteriously, to be connected with someone trying to sell a new book, project, product, program or website. You need this to
rewire your brain!
stop your brain from being rewired!
rewire your brain in a better way!
to help others rewire their brains!
It reminds me of the Tom Waits song "Step Right Up."
No, you can't rewire your brain and therefore neither you nor anyone else has had their brain rewired because that is just a stupid metaphor. All this boils down to claims about a different way of thinking about things. And just about the most salient truth of recent decades is that since education has been rotted from within by post-modernists, there is damned little thinking going on in the first place. If that is what is meant by "rewiring your brain" I think that we should go back to the older word for this phenomenon: ignorance. Oh, yes, and that explains voting patterns as well.
Now that we have that figured out I think we have the right to listen to some Bach. This is the Netherlands Bach Society take on the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 by Bach. And it ain't gonna rewire your brain!
Our individuality is our most precious resource, and it is probably the one most threatened by the world of high technology we now live in. One of the keenest threats to our individuality however is the steamroller of identity politics because what it steamrollers over is the individuality, not only of the ones who are attacked, white people and males in particular, but especially the ones for whom the attack is ostensibly launched. The identity of black people is erased just as thoroughly as that of white people. And behind it all are always those shadowy manipulators who are the ones who are the real beneficiaries because what you get when you erase individual identity in favor of easily manipulated cohorts is power.
Power.
I could go on at great length about how the relentless promotion of mass transit enables the few to tell the many where and when they can go, about how the minute regulation of every aspect of life again enables the few to tell the many what they can and cannot do, about how the draining off of every possible fee and tax and fine again enables the few to restrict the many from being independent of the state, but that would be to wander outside the margins of this blog, so I will not.
But I will point out that it is the individuality that we treasure in the great composers, who are not some herd of white supremacists who can be replaced by fiat with a different herd of diverse composers of color. In both cases it is the individuality that is simply dismissed because the group identity is the generic identity. We listen to Mozart because he is an individual, different from Salieri. We listen to Beethoven because he is an individual, different from Hummel. We listen to Stravinsky because he is an individual different from Anatol Liadov.
The problem with music theory is that it tends to always look for the Universal, the Ideal, the General and to discount the unique and individual as some sort of quirk. So in defining and describing "sonata form" the theorist looks for what is general and generic to all sonata forms, missing the fact that when he has so perfectly defined this form, he will discover to his dismay that none of the movements in sonata form written by Haydn actually fit his model!
Every great work of music is undefinable in the sense that it has an irreducible individuality. The generic form or genre is merely a kind of container or organization within which the individuality flourishes. If all you see is the generic bones, you miss not only the flesh, but the actual soul. This is the problem with music theory in general (quite useful as long as we recognize the limitations) and that of Schenker in particular--Schenker who reduced entire movements to the movement from 3 to 2 to 1 scale degrees.
For an envoi, here is one of Stravinsky's most individual and quirky pieces, Les Noces, based on Russian peasant folk traditions and melodies but which sounds like nothing but Stravinsky:
The University of Chicago has come under heavy criticism for its recent announcement that it will only accept graduate student applicants to its English Department who are interested in Black Studies for the 2020-21 school year.
I can just see Juilliard announcing that they will only accept candidates who not only pass the rigorous audition, but commit to playing at least 50% Black composers on their recitals. No? Let's not be too sure. A few years ago the above policy would have seemed absurd to the extreme. And at the University of Chicago? Where I thought a modicum of sanity prevailed?
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Here is some Mongolian mountain music for you:
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Here is a bit more on that vocal technique:
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Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris holds a special place in musicians' hearts because it was there that the notated polyphonic tradition of Western music was born, or mostly so. When it burned down this past February I wrote a piece in response. Well, the damage was not as bad as was feared early on and efforts to rebuild are successfully going forward: Notre Dame cathedral update: Carpenters wow public with medieval techniques. Follow the link for a photo.
With precision and boundless energy, a team of carpenters used medieval techniques to raise up — by hand — a three-ton oak truss Saturday in front of Notre Dame Cathedral, a replica of the wooden structures that were consumed in the landmark's devastating April 2019 fire that also toppled its spire.
The demonstration to mark European Heritage Days gave the hundreds of people a first-hand look at the rustic methods used 800 years ago to build the triangular frames in the nave of Notre Dame de Paris.
Wouldn't you know it that the French would have a few Medieval carpenters on hand.
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Musical life continues to revive in Europe with free foyer concerts at the Barbican in London.
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Also from Slipped Disc the unwelcome news that the Metropolitan Opera in New York will be closed for the coming season.
After being furloughed without pay for six months, we are concerned for our members and their families as they navigate what will now be over a year without economic support from the Met. Furthermore, we are devastated that the Met has not found ways to engage the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra during this closure – especially when the Met Stars series shows that there is a possibility for collaboration.
I think it is safe to say that any member of the orchestra who has the possibility of work elsewhere will simply leave. Does the Met still exist? Just the building...
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WQXR radio has an editorial on how music schools are adapting to the challenges of the pandemic:
The music world has been devastated by the effects of the global pandemic. But for all of the challenges facing professional musicians during this time, an equally herculean obstacle has been facing another part of the music industry: our conservatories. When the pandemic reached the United States just over six months ago, students were in the middle of their spring semesters. Many of these schools had to suddenly pivot as they reluctantly embraced a fully online format. Voice lessons had to happen over Zoom with inconsistent audio and shoddy microphones; students without personal access to instruments like pianos, harps, and organs were left without anything to play; and international students who had returned home were up at 2 am for classes with their peers back in the United States. Conservatories were doing all they could to provide the highest level of education, but the change had come so swiftly that most were knocked off their feet, stumbling to regain their balance.
In New York City, three conservatories — the Manhattan School of Music, The Juilliard School, and The College of Performing Arts at The New School — decided upon three distinct plans. For The New School’s College of Performing Arts, which includes the Mannes School of Music, the School of Jazz and Contemporary Music, and the School of Drama, the decision was made in the spring: all instruction would be fully remote. But the Manhattan School of Music and Juilliard opted instead for hybrid models, including remote academic instruction and a degree of in-person performance work. As Richard Kessler, Dean of Mannes, told me in a Zoom interview, “We had some level of anxiety over the number of schools and universities that were stating they were going to be hybrid or in-person. And we received a lot of criticism from students about that over the summer.”
If there’s anything we should have learned from months of “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter street protests, statue toppling and online mobs seeking to silence anyone who dissents against leftist narratives about “racism,” it’s that no one, living or dead, is safe from the attentions of woke fascists. Even Ludwig van Beethoven.
Remember years ago when there was all this talk about how playing Mozart for your unborn child or your infant was the sure way to start them off right, smarter, happier and alerter (more alert?)? My response was always, "Why Mozart, why not Bach?" This was because I recognized that "Mozart" was not really Mozart, but merely a placeholder for "some famous composer you have heard of." Similarly, all this critical theory aimed at Beethoven isn't really aimed at Beethoven, but "Beethoven," i.e. "some famous composer highly revered by Western Civilization and therefore now a target." I think it is time we drew a line in the sand, don't you? Let's start striking back at all the bogus intellectual horseshit that underlies this Maoist critical theory. You know who we mean.
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Time for some truculent envois, wouldn't you say? Something worth cancelling! Here is Daniel Barenboim conducting the Sixth Symphony by Beethoven at the 2012 Proms:
And here is Grigory Sokolov playing the Piano Sonata no. 9 by Beethoven:
And here are the Alban Berg Quartet playing the String Quartet no. 14, op. 131 by Beethoven.
I often browse around on YouTube just before I go to bed. Sometimes you see the most awful bait and switches ever committed, sometimes you see some really interesting stuff. And then there are the cat videos. One particularly ubiquitous type of video is of the 7 or 10 or 15 things you ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO DO or SEE or READ. I just saw one of the "15 books Jordan Peterson thinks you should read." Now, of course he is not thinking you or I should read anything in particular, he has other stuff to worry about. My first reaction to things like that is to start parodying them "The 15 Hairstyles Vin Diesel Recommends"
or "Marcel Proust's guide to writing short, pithy essays." But my second reaction is to think that there are a few books that might be worthwhile to read. Not for everyone, of course, you there, in the back, could skip a few, but the rest of you might, who knows, enjoy them in a sort of desultory fashion. Here goes:
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein
Selected Poems, Wallace Stevens
The Odyssey, Homer
Master & Commander, Patrick O'Brian
Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell
Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann
Modern Times, Paul Johnson
Anarchy, State and Utopia, Robert Nozick
From Dawn to Decadence, Jacques Barzun
Complete Works, William Shakespeare
Except for the last, not too heavy. Lots of variety. Fiction, classics and non-fiction. Most importantly is what is not on the list. Crap. No crap.
I think I mentioned that my big reading project this year is Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, which I am certainly reading in English. Time was, I was perfectly capable of reading the daily paper in French, even Le Devoir which seems to be aimed at French-speaking graduate students. I could even manage a novel if it wasn't too difficult. But not Proust, god no! The project is going quite well, by the way. I manage ten or so pages every morning and am 35% through the book, which is about 3,000 pages.
Proust is famous for his long sentences, sometimes extending for a page or two. One often has to initiate a special search to locate the verb. Proust also has a sense of humour, though it is well-hidden. Here, for example, is a sentence from a discussion of a theatre performance:
On the other hand it was because the society people sat in their boxes (behind the general terrace of the balcony, as in so many little drawing-rooms, the fourth walls of which had been removed, or in so many little cafés, to which one might go for refreshment, without letting oneself be intimidated by the mirrors in gilt frames or the red plush seats, in the Neapolitan style, of the establishment), it was because they rested an indifferent hand on the gilded shafts of the columns which upheld this temple of the lyric art, it was because they remained unmoved by the extravagant honours which seemed to be being paid them by a pair of carved figures which held out towards the boxes branches of palm and laurel, that they and they only would have had minds free to listen to the play, if only they had had minds.
Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time [volumes 1 to 7] (Centaur Classics) [The 100 greatest novels of all time - #13] . Centaur. Kindle Edition.
This will be another of those posts that eludes categorization and to which I therefore attach my "aesthetics" tag. I was just reading an article in the Globe and Mail about Ellen Degeneres: Ellen DeGeneres returns with a phony-baloney apology and I was struck by this passage:
In March, as the pandemic started, comedian Kevin T. Porter wrote on Twitter, “Right now we all need a little kindness. You know, like Ellen Degeneres always talks about. She’s also notoriously one of the meanest people alive.”
This phenomenon, of a public persona being so different from the reality that it is almost its opposite, seems to have become a pandemic of its own. I can remember a time when what you saw in public and the private reality were not so very different. A somewhat feckless, but well-meaning Canadian politician was somewhat feckless but well-meaning in both his private and public life--and yes, I am talking about Joe Clark for you Canadian political aficionados.
But more and more, as the slow seep of politics invades every aspect of society, we expect, as a matter of course, politicians to be Potemkin fronts of high ideals masking a vicious reality. Government agencies slowly transform into vast, unfeeling bureaucracies whose main priority is to preserve their pay and benefits. Regulatory agencies find it more and more profitable to be "captured" by the industries they purport to regulate. Students and scientists in fields like environmental science discover that certain views are well-rewarded with research grants while other views will cause you to be shunned. And artists lose sight of their real responsibilities in favor of "branding," marketing and personal promotion. Every career trajectory is calibrated to increase "exposure" and revenues.
Something has obviously gone a bit astray, I say with characteristic Canadian understatement.
But a field like classical music can offer a window into a scene where the "phony-baloney" does not rule the roost, where a bit of genuine truth can be glimpsed. I have been to many concerts where, completely outside the bounds of language, truth and not lies holds the stage. You can't really lie with a musical phrase. You can play it badly, or play it with no personal connection or conviction, but for a music-lover, this will pretty much be evident. The very abstract nature of music makes it hard to deceive the listener. Now, sure, we can argue about whether this or that artist is an empty virtuoso, but the more vacuous performers are largely known to the music world. Mind you, the pressures to sell records, to fill seats, while temporarily in abeyance due to the pandemic, are still there, but the performers who are most eager to pander are not hard to identify.
Most musicians are still out there to play music in a competent and expressive way--and they don't get paid a lot of money to do it, in most cases. So, when we despair of hearing an ordinary, warm, musical performance delivered with some conviction, we can usually find the remedy in a concert or online performance--well, when concerts recommence at least. Our chamber music society is launching its new season in mid-October with a piano recital in an outdoors setting. Easy to arrange in Mexico, but October in Montreal might be a different story!
I used to tell my students that when they played music, their real personality was right there for anyone to see and hear. Despite all the tricks and subterfuges and elaborate photo sessions of musical promotion, I still think this is true. It is pretty hard to lie with a dominant 7th.
Here, with one of those entirely truthful performances is the incomparable Grigory Sokolov playing some Beethoven:
I have only been a serious composer for twelve or so years now, though I have composed music for the last fifty years. Excluding the forty or so songs I wrote before I converted to classical music, I have been composing, in a not serious manner, since the mid-70s. It wasn't until I moved to Mexico and around 2008 finally sat down and wrote settings for some poems by Robert Graves, something I wanted to do for years, that I decided that what I wanted to do was compose music in a serious way. I think that no-one at university ever took me aside and said "you should study composition" because I was good enough at guitar to be able to plausibly contemplate a career as a soloist. That ultimately proved to be only half-true. I achieved quite a lot of success in Canada, but despite being the first Canadian guitarist to do an international debut at Wigmore Hall, did not quite manage to build a real career beyond that.
So I got around to composition quite late in life! At first I composed purely through intuition as is evident in my song cycle Songs from the Poets. Some of those songs are not bad, but while I was doing something, I didn't actually know what I was doing. I had read Schoenberg saying that he had the whole plan of the piece in his mind before he started to write it down and that made no sense to me. I just wrote when I had an idea and an urge and there really wasn't much of a plan.
I kept on like this for a several years, but with an increasing frustration as I realized I didn't know what I was doing. Slowly I started building a personal musical "language" often based on ideas from Russian composers, don't ask me why, I just liked what they were doing. I started doing more and more experimenting. The piece that was really a breakthrough for me was "Dark Dream" for violin and guitar which took a couple of years to finally come together. I re-wrote that, from scratch, about five times!
My Quartet 2 continued this process, but I began to be able to plan out the piece as a whole, though the first movement, again, took extensive re-writing. My Quartet 3, on the other hand, really came together and I had a sense of the overall form from the beginning.
I am just starting to write a piano piece for the local chamber music society and I am doing nothing but pencil sketches until the whole thing is clear, then I just have to write it down. This is sounding more and more like what composers do! The piece will be titled "Remembering What Is to Come" which is a line from a poem I wrote a long time ago. It will be about six minutes long and will use the Locrian mode. It will also have a lot of harmony! I have pages of melodic ideas and harmonic ideas already.
A few days ago I took down moderation of comments here because I haven't seen a comment I wanted to delete for years and years. There was a real problem several years ago. But no more. I have the best commentators on the web, it seems. We can discuss a wide range of things without descending to scurrilous personal calumny--or calling one another names. And thank goodness for that.
Since I ceased moderation there seems to be a real uptick in commenting and I encourage you to keep it up. This is a place where your views are welcome and it will remain so. I think a good conversation is one of the greatest pleasures in life, well above that of crème brûlée and nearly equal to a glass of ice wine.
The string quartet, at its best, captures in music the pleasures of a good conversation. So thank you commentators for your absolutely essential contributions.
Here, by way of illustration is Haydn's String Quartet Op 33 No 2 E flat major, "The Joke"
UPDATE: By the way, comments here at the Music Salon, are just about to top 10,000!
There is a vicious element in our culture, which, unable to add matter of worth to the world, and lacking even the ambition to do so, vents its sorry envy and anger at high culture via the cant of progressive ideology and identity politics to denigrate and dismiss the finest works of the creative human mind.
It’s mud or the stars, folks. And they’re cheering for the mud.
Show them the Pietà and they will complain Christ is “foregrounded.” The Sistine Chapel and they would smear witless graffiti over it. They narrow all to personal politics. They squeeze the world into their cloistered ideological preconceptions. And should art not speak to their preoccupations, or mirror their tiny fascinations, why then it’s racist or colonialist or phobic or marginalizing. It is always something other than what it really is.
Politics is not everything. In fact, politics is hardly anything. You may force politics on everything, but no one in their real heart agrees. The left wants to shrink life to its own obsessions. It wants to constrict human experience and human response to set slogans and narrow obsessions. It cannot listen to great music because its ears only hear what it seeks. It doesn’t seek pure music. It wants grad studies politics.
He is responding to the critiques of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony as an instrument “of wealthy white men … who turned it into a symbol of their superiority and importance.”
I would rather see the elegant and rejoicing music of the late 18th and early 19th century as celebrating the spectacular achievements of the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution that were moments of light in what is often a dark and meagre human history.
I had a FaceTime call with my ex-wife in Germany yesterday--we are very good friends--and I was telling her about my new hobbies of writing with a fountain pen and journaling. I pull out my Lamy Safari, thinking to impress her:
And she immediately pulls out TWO Lamy Safaris, one in blue, one in yellow. And she said her thirteen-year-old daughter (I'm not the father) also has two. In different colors. I sort-of forgot that the Lamy is a German pen. Europeans just use fountain pens all the time as a matter of course, whereas here in Mexico, it is largely a wasteland of ballpoints as far as the eye can see...
I'm going to get the better of her, though, I have a Japanese fountain pen on order from Pilot.
Oh, by the way, I can heartily recommend the Lamy Safari. It is under twenty dollars, will last you forever and is an excellent pen.
Here is Mozart's "Haffner" Symphony with the Royal Concergebouw conducted by Bernard Haitink which Mozart wrote down with the predecessor to the fountain pen, the quill pen.
Back when I was a professional guitar soloist, I used to do a lot of recordings for the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, sometimes in their Vancouver studios and sometimes they would even take the ferry to Victoria to record my concerts at the University of Victoria. One day my producer, out of the blue, called me up and asked me my opinion of some pianists that we both knew. I was kind of surprised and said, "Why me? Why aren't you asking other pianists?" He replied, "For the same reason I wouldn't ask you about other guitarists or a soprano about other sopranos!" I got the point.
Over the weekend I was asked to write a piece for the local chamber music society to be premiered in their 21/22 season. A guitar piece? Well, no, a piano piece! But I no longer ask why me, because they have heard enough of my compositions to NOT think of me as a guitar composer. Thank goodness! Actually, I am not the most comfortable writing for guitar, except in company with other instruments or the voice. I'm not sure why. But I delight in writing for piano, because it can execute things easily that are difficult on guitar.
Here is a piece for violin and piano from a few years ago. We recorded this in the CBC studios in Toronto:
The field must acknowledge a history of systemic racism while also giving new weight to Black composers, musicians, and listeners.
My emphases. I'm not sure we actually have to read this one, but what the heck. It will be interesting to see what contortions he will have to put himself into in order to give that new weight to Black composers and away from Wagner.
I am a white American who grew up with the classics, and I am troubled by the presumption that they are stamped with whiteness—and are even aligned with white supremacy, as some scholars have lately argued. I cannot counter that suggestion simply by gesturing toward important Black figures who cherished this same tradition, or by reeling off the names of Black singers and composers. The exceptions remain exceptions. This world is blindingly white, both in its history and its present.
Well, yes, being troubled is mandatory, isn't it? Already I am very, very tired and browsing on, I just don't think I want to deal with all the inevitable claims. It really boils down to this: if there are fewer (or no) great Black composers then it must be because white people are evil racists. There simply can be no other explanation and we will strain every muscle to avoid stumbling across one. If you accept that then all the rest follows.
The white majority [of Americans] tended to adopt European music as a badge of its supremacy.
Yes, that's the ticket: white Americans really listen to European music to show how superior they are. The stunning aesthetic parsimoniousness of that pretty much disqualifies it in my view. But as I said every time I see an article like this the profound stupidity of it just makes me tired. Seeing everything through the lens of racism is fair to no-one.
"Harmony and Voice-Leading" is the title of one of the basic texts in music theory. Written by Edward Aldwell and Carl Schachter it is the basic undergraduate theory text. I actually took an avid student through most of it one year as part of his weekly guitar lesson. "Aldwell and Schachter" as it is affectionately known, has sat on my shelf for years and an earlier edition of it was part of my music library in Canada. But oddly enough, through eight years of university music school, none of my theory professors ever used the text. I think they hated the idea of teaching from a text, plus they may disagree with a few, or many of the details.
I have a more fundamental issue with the book as recently came to light in the comment section to one of my pieces, the Quartet 3 Section 3. It turns out a frequent commentator and composer was hearing cadences in the piece. Fair enough, you hear what you hear, but, apart from, sort of, at the end, I really wasn't writing any cadences. You see, here is the thing: I'm just uncomfortable with harmony in general.
That sounds a bit like Dmitri Shostakovich saying to a friend one day that he knew nothing about music theory. I think what he meant by that was that he did not compose using music theory. Probably so. And I don't really compose using harmony so's you would notice. For Aldwell and Schachter, the harmony is the important thing and "voice-leading" is just what you do to get from one exciting harmony to another. For me, the harmony part is the dull bit and it is just what results when you do some interesting counterpoint or "voice-leading."
I'm afraid that, fundamentally, I look at composition rather as the composers of the Middle-Ages did: music is the combining of voices in interesting ways. Harmony is a mere byproduct the way that sawdust is the byproduct of a sawmill. Now I adore those wonderful harmonic surprises we come across in Haydn, or Beethoven, or Mozart, but my musical vocabulary doesn't really have the tools to create such things. So I have to get by with counterpoint and timbre and, oh yes, rhythm and meter.
Mind you, in my earlier days as a composer, twelve years ago when I wrote the song "Symptoms of Love" that I just put up, you will find loads of harmony. But not now. Let me just post that section from the quartet again so you can see what I mean. It consists of melodic lines in various incarnations with inversion, augmentation and so on.
Some years ago I wrote a cycle of songs titled Songs from the Poets which, for various reasons, I didn't make very available. On recent request, I put together this video for the song "Symptoms of Love" on a poem by Robert Graves. I tried to make each song setting reflect something about the poem itself. In the case of this one, which is about the problems of love, my idea was to have a song in which the voice and the guitar, the two imagined lovers, never actually get together! In the whole song, they alternate phrases, never sounding together.
The photos were taken at the recording sessions. The music was recorded in the studio of Ken Basman in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
I hope you enjoy the song. Here is the text:
Symptoms of Love
Love is universal migraine,
A bright stain on the vision
Blotting out reason.
Symptoms of true love
Are leanness, jealousy,
Laggard dawns;
Are omens and nightmares -
Listening for a knock,
Waiting for a sign:
For a touch of her fingers
In a darkened room,
For a searching look.
Take courage, lover!
Could you endure such pain
At any hand but hers?
I am still getting the hang of posting to YouTube, so I forgot to actually give this a name and now I don't know how to go back and edit it. But never mind! You can chastise me in the comments.
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony starts with an anguished opening theme — dun dun dun DUNNNN — and ends with a glorious, major-key melody. Since its 1808 premiere, audiences have interpreted that progression from struggle to victory as a metaphor for Beethoven’s personal resilience in the face of his oncoming deafness.
Or rather, that’s long been the popular read among those in power, especially the wealthy white men who embraced Beethoven and turned his symphony into a symbol of their superiority and importance. For some in other groups — women, LGBTQ+ people, people of color — Beethoven’s symphony may be predominantly a reminder of classical music’s history of exclusion and elitism.
This is the kind of nonsense that I used to like to dismantle, but frankly, I'm tired of it. Additionally, the purveyors of this ideological snake-oil have found a clever way of resisting criticism: they simply don't bother to make arguments anymore, instead they just recite some shibboleths and expect you to concur: "Exclusion!" "Elitism!" To which I reply: "Idiot!" "Maoism!"
So instead of going through the motions, I note that over at Quillette Daniel Lelchuck has already taken on the job: Then They Came for Beethoven.
The article has been widely mocked on social media—in part because the authors (both white men, from what I can tell) offer no real evidence for their claim. That’s odd given that they are purporting to redefine the cultural meaning of what is arguably the most well-known, widely performed, and beloved composition known to humankind. Hundreds of millions of people have fallen in love with this symphony over the past two centuries—many of them inspired by the fact that Beethoven managed to create it while he was succumbing to deafness.
I’m a professional cellist who—in non-pandemic times—performs classical music for people of all races. Beethoven’s music is precious to me. And it’s bizarre to hear these two men talk this way. None of what they say bears any connection to Beethoven’s actual work. And their call-and-response faux-curious dialogue about what aliens will think of Beethoven’s supposed “elitism” is embarrassing. Yet Sloan is a musicologist, and Harding is a songwriter.
Yes, well there will always be those who find career advancement in betrayal and cow-towing to the powers that be. So let's just move on and listen to a piece of music that will easily survive the petty political disputes of our day. This is the least politically correct orchestra I could find playing the Symphony No. 5 of Beethoven:
This is not exactly a reminiscence, but that was the closest tag. I think I mentioned somewhere that I was becoming fascinated by sketching and planned to do a bit of it. And I meant art sketching, not music sketching. It has something to do with wanting more tactile in my life. I am also returning to using a fountain pen for writing in general, but of course, it makes you want to write a journal, so I am doing that. I am going to be doing more music sketching as well because I have come to believe that music software tends to put you in a rut, or tie you to a Procrustean bed. If you don't know the story of Procrustes, the Attican bandit, then it is worth looking him up.
The relentless crispness of our digital world is all very nice, but that crispness comes at a price and the price is the atmospheric, the tentative, the subtle, the vague, the crepuscular, the transitional. And we don't want to lose all that, do we?
I want to do a lot of musical sketching for a while, you know, like you see in a Beethoven manuscript:
Did you ever have the thought that if Beethoven was working in Finale or Sibelius, he would have written the theme from Star Wars instead of the Grosse Fuge? What about Stravinsky?
Mind you, I think that a lot of Stravinsky's compositional work was done banging on the piano, even more physical than Beethoven, so when he got to writing it down, it was already more organized.
I want to recover the tactile. For a long time I just delighted in the joy of writing on a computer. How incredibly straight everything was, how you could use all those groovy fonts, the joy of adjusting margins or adding footers or, well, you get the idea. But after nearly thirty years of writing on computers, that thrill is gone and I realize it is still the content that is important, not how tidy the margins are. So I return to the fountain pen, the mechanical pencil--I got two new ones, Pentel GraphGear 1000s--they are magnificent pencils, but I also dug out my old Staedtler Mars 0.5 mm that I have had for at least thirty years and it still works just great. As opposed to the box of twenty Chinese mechanical pencils I got for five bucks from OfficeDepot that are all really horrible.
And speaking of fountain pens, oh my lord, how great they feel after ballpoints. Let's just admit it, ballpoint pens are the Taco Bell of writing. Cheap and filling, but the whole experience is just unpleasant. Fountain pens are not expensive considering that you just refill them with ink when they get down and they will last basically forever. Get a good fountain pen and bequeath it to your kids. Sign stuff with it.
Get some green ink for variety. It is a simple joy to write with a fountain pen. I like the Lamy Safari, a terrific pen made in Germany, available for around $18. Light, precise and a thrill to write with. And, like I said, it will last forever, though you will certainly have to buy lots of ink. Or the Hongdian Black Forest, a stealth fountain pen in all black:
For the maximum decadence, get some purple ink:
Pretty soon you will be writing your own In Search of Lost Time, or at least beautifully addressing Post-It notes to your fellow workers. Here's an idea, the next time you want to send a beautiful personal email, write it with a fountain pen on nice paper and then scan it and send it as an inline jpg. That's next on my list.
And now, for our musical exit, a little something from B. B. King:
Here is another little clip of extraordinaire harpsichordist Jean Rondeau. This is the Harpsichord Concerto in F minor by J. S. Bach's son J. C. Bach, the "London" Bach from whom Mozart first learned something about keyboard concertos.
This performance is the concerto as chamber music. They are almost playing it as if they wrote it.
And I think this is Rondeau's Rasputin hairstyle.
Love the Baroque bassoon!
This is from an album of a bunch of Bachs: J. S. and three of his sons. I don't actually think you could do that with any other family, not even the Couperins.
The main things that interfere with my trying to get some work done, i.e. composing, are things like barking dogs or a passing ice cream truck with an annoying bell. In Australia, however, they have different kinds of problems:
On a personal note, when I was a performer, the biggest check I ever got was a settlement from my record company when they violated my copyright after our contract expired.
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I'm not sure if this is related to the previous item or not:
Maybe being broke makes you left-leaning? I don't think artists typically sit down and read a lot of Austrian-school economists to find out why socialism usually ends up badly, nor do they necessarily read a lot of history.
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We started the week off with a section from my Third Quartet in 7/8, let's have some more music in seven! This is Don Ellis' band with that lyrical tune "Pussy Wiggle Stomp" in 7/4:
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I'm not sure whether to categorize this as silly or tragic, but I'm going to go with silly as I can just see a Babylon Bee headline: Western Civilization, troubled over its racist and sexist pass, decides to dissolve itself in favor of Maoism. The actual headline reads: Columbia marching band, ‘founded on the basis of racism,' votes to ‘dissolve’ itself.
The Columbia University Marching Band will disband “unanimously and enthusiastically” due to “racism, cultural oppression, misogyny, and sexual harassment.”
An announcement posted to the group’s Facebook page, begins with a “TW,” or “trigger warning,” and explains that more than 20 band members met on Sept. 12 to discuss anonymous social media postings that accused individual marching band members of “sexual misconduct, assault, theft, racism, and injury to individuals and the Columbia community as a whole.”
The band then unanimously decided that it would “dissolve” itself and would “no longer serve as a Columbia spirit group.”
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For this particularly wacky Friday Miscellanea, let's have some unusual music. I like John Cage's early stuff like these Three Dances for Two Prepared Pianos from 1945:
Sort of sounds like two otters mixing it up with a bunch of wind chimes. Next, Julian Bream brutally slaying a Fugue by Bach:
And finally, some Mongolian music from the BBC Proms. After an interminable introduction the music starts at the 3:30 mark:
Why is it that most "ethnic" music sounds so terribly boring? Or is it that the BBC just managed to pick the dullest Mongolian band?
Ok, now I am officially a huge Jean Rondeau fan--because it was also really, really good!
I'm pretty sure that his hair is like that because to play like this you have to practice virtually every waking hour. I think that also explains the un-ironed shirt and why he often plays barefoot...
Back when I lived in Montreal I was approached one day to do a recording for one of Canada's Olympians. She was a dressage rider and, alas, I forget her name. The fellow that approached me, whose name I also forget, employed me to do a recording for him of the first movement of this piece, the Concierto Andaluz for four guitars and orchestra:
This was exactly the music the Olympian needed for her routine. It was planned out in great detail and as a consequence the music needed to be edited to fit her routine. Some sections had to be abbreviated and others, perhaps shifted around. To be honest, I forget! And I no longer have the score. So how were we going to do this? The contractor, who I will call the Producer, had used music software to both do an orchestral accompaniment and a score. He reduced the four guitar parts down to three and I was asked to record the three guitar parts, using a click track, over the computer-generated orchestral accompaniment. It wasn't too difficult to reduce the four parts to three as the real reason this concert is for four guitars is that it was written for the Romero family who toured as a quartet: Celedonio Romero, the father and Celin Romero, Pepe Romero, and Angel Romero, the three sons.
Sadly, I don't have a copy of that recording which I would love to hear about now. I also don't have a recording of my performance of the Concierto deAranjuez with the Victoria Symphony which may exist somewhere in the vaults of the CBC.
When we were working on the project, I think it took about a week or so to learn the parts and do the recording, the Producer said let's go meet the Olympian and her horse who lived on a farm in the Laurentians to the north of Montreal. So we drove up one day and I met the Olympian, a very nice young woman. She took us over to the stables to meet her horse, probably more valuable than every car I have ever owned put together. He stuck his head out of his stall and whinnied. She introduced me and I patted him on the forehead and gave him a carrot. He regarded me with quite intelligent eyes. I couldn't help but think that he was the real star of the show and we were just his assistants. He was the one that was going to dance to a Rodrigo guitar concerto, after all.
There is a Jordan Peterson clip where he deflates the "everyone is creative" balloon by saying quite forthrightly that, no, very few people are really creative. However, I will provisionally place myself in that group.
Lately I have gotten frustrated with so much digital stuff and, oddly, inspired by fooling around with digital drawing on my iPad, I decided I wanted to get involved with more tactile creativity. In past years I usually had a fountain pen and used it from time to time, but quite a while ago, perhaps when I moved to Mexico, that was one of the things I didn't bring with me, having to trim all the non-essentials from my baggage, if not from my life. But I realized a little while ago that I missed the fountain pen, so I picked up a couple from Amazon. Oh my goodness, how lovely they feel compared to the horrible utilitarian ballpoints I have been scratching my signature out with for years and years. I also got some green ink, which I particularly like, along with the more usual blue and black. This, of course, has inspired me to start journaling again, something else I haven't done for a long time.
As an extension of that, I tried sketching a couple of things and though the results were quite remarkably horrible, I thought I would give it more of a try and got a little case of drawing materials. I found a good basic course at YouTube and did the first couple of lessons. I know you won't credit this, but after trying a few simple shapes, plus my lamp, I attempted to sketch my hand. And it actually looks like a hand!! Astonishing, I know, because previously I was fairly certain that I had no abilities in that direction. It turns out however, that the important skill is openness to experience and the ability to learn.
I learned, or confirmed, perhaps, something important in this first sketching exercise: there is a similar kind of mental state you have to adopt whether you are drawing or composing. You have to let go of what artists call "symbol images," that is the conventional abstract images you have in your head of trees, mountains and so on. You have to let that go and just look at what there is. Many years ago I read a book on the California artist Robert Irwin called "Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing You See" which is from a poem by, oh, I forget. He practiced this to an extreme degree. When I sit down to compose as well, I may make some general decisions about mood or structure, but then everything that follows has to come, not from some abstraction (and now let's have a nice C scale), but rather from forgetting what you are supposed to be doing and just letting the notes flow out (or in?) from somewhere. Maybe there is just a metaphorical relationship, but I was struck by the similarity.
Just a few musings, now let's have some music. This is, appropriately, a cover of (or rather an obbligato over) "Less I know the better" by Towa Bird, the original is by Tame Impala.
And this is "Heidenröslein" by Schubert sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau accompanied by Gerald Moore. The is the only lieder I have ever performed in public where I was the singer. It was the product of a vocal techniques course. In a lot of those courses you don't learn a great deal, much like "critical studies" classes in the humanities. But we had a really good teacher and I learned a lot about phrasing.
UPDATE: I was very lucky with that vocal techniques teacher. She was an actual accomplished singer married to a professor in the English department. At this great remove in time--this was when I was in first year undergrad--I realize that she should have been teaching in the music department as I suspect she was a more accomplished artist than the person who was teaching. The incumbent voice professor was married to the chairman of the department so you see how that goes. Music departments can be small, inbred communities with a lot of one-hand-washing-the-other going on. Anyway, the teacher of the vocal techniques course which was actually in the Music Education department, not in the School of Music proper, which is why she got the job, was seriously overqualified. For our final exam in the one semester course, we had to perform a Schubert lieder, from memory, in a public concert. Way more than would usually be expected. But as a result, I learned a lot and it sticks in my mind as one of a few outstanding educational experiences. Demand more, you get more. When I was teaching a course for non-music majors that was a follow-up to an introductory music theory course, I actually taught them species counterpoint and they loved it. That's probably never been done before or since! Demand more, you get more.
I just finished the last section, Section 5, of my Third String Quartet on the weekend. I can't promise that this will be the absolute final version, but I think any changes from now on will be minor. I think that the piece will be in two versions. One version will consist of three short sections about three minutes each that can be played as a conventional string quartet. An alternate version will consist of these three sections, but sandwiched between 1 and 3 and 3 and 5 will be two sections in moment form that will use material from the other sections and act as a kind of free meditation on them. If you want to know more about moment form, read this post: A Note on Moment Form.
I previously posted the middle section, Section 3 and today I am putting up the last section, Section 5 (assuming there will be a Section 4 and 2). This piece is a rather dynamic and quirky one and I hope you like it for its instrumental humor. Please leave a comment!
By the way, the only reason that I haven't posted Section 1, which was finished first, is that I am waiting for Finale tech support to fix the glissandi for me. For some odd reason sometimes they come out right, but sometimes they sound like a swoop from Star Trek and other times its a laborious chromatic scale.
A note on the photos: I don't have video to go with the soundtrack, which is a sampled audio file from Finale, so I chose some photos. I didn't take a long time to choose, just photos that I had taken here and there. The first is a screenshot of page one of the score, next is me in my old studio, next is myself and a friend in the Parque del Retiro in Madrid a couple of years ago, next is a photo of where I live in Mexico taken at Christmas time, same with the next which shows a couple of churches, next is a group of street musicians in Madrid (they were playing Vivaldi from the Four Seasons) and finally is a piece of art that I would love to buy as it seems to sum up my life!
The number of important, or influential or memorable teachers we have in life is probably quite limited. In fact, I have this sinking feeling that there are quite a number of people that may have never had a significant teacher. Other than their parents, for better or worse. Mine must have been ok, because as I recall, I arrived in Grade 1 already able to read. But that aside, here is a short list of teachers that made an impact on my life.
In Grade 10 I had a class with the school principal, whose name I forget. The class was social studies or something. But it was important for two reasons: first, I remember him sitting on his desk, trying to give us some life advice which boiled down to: "Don't be mediocre!" The second reason was that he taught us the origins of the First World War so brilliantly, laying out all the over-lapping alliances and mutual defence pacts and so on, that when he said, "and then Archduke Ferdinand was assasinated" I nearly gasped because he had set it up so we could grasp the consequences. Some excellent teaching and that is rarer than you would think.
The next outstanding teacher was the newly-minted PhD hire who taught Philosophy 100 in my first year at university. I doubt if I had ever previously encountered someone with a really trained mind. I won't mention his name, but that was his first year teaching and he did a brilliant job. He continued to teach at that same university for a few decades. The class was very small for a first year course, only 20-25 students. He would assign some reading and then in the next class we would argue about it. Since he was the best arguer, he won all the arguments! That was what got me hooked on philosophy, something that guides me to this day. I recall that I got A- minus on every essay assignment. I also recall that one day he said that only God got A+, so I guess that was pretty good. This was before the ubiquitous grade inflation.
The next outstanding teacher was maestro José Tomás with whom I studied guitar in Spain for a year when I was twenty-three. Today, I barely remember a thing he said! The way he taught was, after listening to you stumble through the piece, he would quietly pick up his guitar and either play it from memory or read it off your score, to show how it should be done. One day I remember I was playing a Spanish vihuela piece and one phrase came out just right and he said, "ah."
I had a couple of good teachers at McGill when I was there, both in theory, oddly enough. One taught form functional analysis and I learned that I could never use any of those forms! Another taught fugue, the most advanced counterpoint course at McGill and, again, oddly, the only counterpoint class I have ever taken. I tested out of the other undergraduate counterpoint classes by doing a little studying on my own. What I really remember about the fugue class was a couple of things. The first, at the very first class the instructor said, "lots of people have written fugues in one form or another over the last few hundred years, but the only composer we are going to look at is Bach." There really is no other form, nor composer, of which/whom that could be said. We spent quite a bit of time struggling to solve the problems of invertible counterpoint. Briefly, when intervals invert some dissonant ones become consonant and vice versa. If you use only thirds and sixths you will be ok. We were doing invertible counterpoint with two voices, of course, the minimum. Then one day we got to the Art of Fugue and it was explained to us that Bach wrote entire four-voice fugues, all four voices of which could be inverted!!! I nearly fell off my chair. I can't think of any other composer who even attempted that, by the way. They are called "mirror" fugues.
Finally my last memorable teacher was not my teacher, but my colleague, the extremely fine violinist Paul Kling, who was famous, in Vienna, from when he was nine years old. We met when I was in my thirties and he was in his sixties. I remember the first time we read anything together, a Giuliani sonata for violin and guitar, afterward he casually asked about certain specific measures and phrases where I had gone astray. We shared a number of concerts and in one he decided to play the Bach Chaconne. As I was making up the program I asked him how long his performance would take. His answer: "Thirteen minutes and forty-three seconds." And I didn't doubt it for a minute. Paul once said to me that every great violinist of the century was either a Russian Jew from the Caucasus, or studied with one.
I don't have a recording of his of the Chaconne, but here is a violinist with a similar approach, Jascha Heifetz.
Let's have another one. Here are two right side up fugues followed by their inversions:
I have just recently discovered some guitar videos by Brandon Acker who is not only a fine player on a number of different instruments, he also has some educational videos. Here is one on tuning:
He is absolutely correct about learning to tune by ear. When I used to teach guitar I noticed that all my students that used electronic tuners tended to be just a tad sharp. This was that earlier model that used a little needle on a dial, as the Korg still does. I speculated that they tuned a bit high because there was a delay somewhere. In any case, using either a tuning fork or a Korg tuner/metronome to get your initial pitch and tuning by ear from there is the preferred method. You could follow Brandon's method of tuning every string to the first string, but I prefer tuning every string to the 4th string: 5th via harmonic, 3rd via harmonic, B on 4 for the 2nd string, mix of A harmonic against A on 1st and E harmonic on 5th against 1st open and finally E harmonic on 6th against 2nd fret E on 4th.
He also has a nice introduction to the Baroque guitar and now I want to buy one!
Have a listen to this pretty terrific performance of the Gigue and Double from the Lute Suite, BWV 997 by Marcelo Kayath:
I know Marcelo Kayath from the Toronto Guitar Festival way back in 1984. He won the competition that year against some pretty spectacular competition. He was then and is now a strong, muscular, very consistent guitarist with a lovely warm sound. So why haven't you heard of him? Why haven't you been buying his records? The answer is he gave up the guitar for many years, did an MBA at Stanford Business and was an executive at a Brazilian bank. This recording represents his return to the music world.
I like to have a bit of whimsy in the Friday Miscellanea, which these days is hard to come by. So I will cobble up a bit of my own. I read somewhere recently that typical initial small talk conversation in the US is "So, what do you do for a living?" signaling the focus on work and material achievement. Here are some of my own observations from other countries:
Mexico: "Do you have any children?" or "How many children do you have?" Indicating the focus on family.
Canada (ex-Quebec): "How's it going, eh?" Indicating the distinct possibility that it may not be going so well.
Québec: "Ça va bien, lo?" The same, but in French.
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Columbia Artists, the home of so many great musicians for so many years, is shutting down:
The agency, founded in December 1930, has represented many of the leading conductors, among them Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein, James Levine, Eugene Ormandy, Antal Dorati and Otto Klemperer. Its pianists included Vladimir Horowitz and Van Cliburn. and its singer roster had Leontyne Price, Renata Tebaldi, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Risë Stevens, Marian Anderson, Richard Tucker and Jussi Björling.
The agency’s website lists its current roster as including conductors Seiji Ozawa, Valery Gergiev and Mirga Gražinyte-Tyla; singers Isabel Leonard, Russell Thomas and Brenda Rae; and pianist Maurizio Pollini.
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The Guardian used to be a good place to find informative articles on music, and, after a hiatus, it looks like that might be returning. Here is an excellent article on Sibelius:
Few composers dominate their country’s music more completely than Jean Sibelius (1865-1957). His emergence as a composer of international stature in the first decades of the 20th century went hand in hand with Finland’s struggle for self-determination and independence. If, in the decades after his death, his music was dismissed as conservative, he is now accepted as one of the greatest and most original symphonic composers since Beethoven.
Certainly the optimism returned with the Fifth Symphony, premiered in 1915 as a four-movement work, and revised four years later into the three-movement form in which it’s known today. The famous rocking theme of its finale, one of the most memorable in all his works, was inspired by the sight of swans migrating over Ainola, the house in the Finnish countryside where Sibelius and his wife lived for more than 50 years. His Sixth Symphony, first performed in 1923, was different again: almost neoclassical in its transparency, use of modal harmonies and avoidance of traditional symphonic rhetoric, and sometimes seems closer in spirit to Renaissance polyphony than to anything in the symphonic tradition. And the Seventh took that reconfiguring of what a symphony could be still further, compressing all the functions of the form into an organic single movement, as though symphony and tone poem had finally fused.
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Here is a really unusual story, Maria Kolesnikova, one of the leaders of the opposition in Belarus, was kidnapped by masked and armed men in the center of Minsk. It turns out that she is also a classical musician, a flute-player and conductor. Slipped Disc has the story.
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Sorry for all the bad news, but it is hard to find anything else these days! In Sweden, one in three musicians is changing professions:
A survey of 964 musicians in Sweden shows that one-third are making plans to change their profession.
Some 49% have not sought financial support from available corona funds.
Around 17% sought funds but did not receive any.
That means two-thirds have gone without any state subsidy.
Addressing a press conference at Downing Street on Tuesday, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said, “Theaters and sports venues could test an audience, all audience members, one day and let in all those with a negative result, all those who are not infectious. Work places could be opened up to all those who test negative in the morning to behave in a way that was exactly as in the world before COVID.”
Cecil Sharp, absorbed in the mysterious creativity of oral tradition among ordinary people, instinctively saw the link between song-making and nature: he looked at the dynamic forms of the starling swarms as both beautiful and orderly and instantly saw both of these qualities as—what else to call it?—musical. He was not saying, as so many Romantic artists and critics of the 19th century said, that music was “inspired by” nature or even, as the philosopher Eduard Hanslick said about Beethoven’s Prometheus Overture, that its form grew, not “haphazardly” but in a manner that was like nature: “in organically distinct gradations, like sumptuous blossoming from a bud.” The argument that there is both an aliveness and a wholeness to organic life which is potentially recognizable to musicians in musical terms has in the past been easier to make for those immersed in the invisible, mycorrhyzal webs of oral traditions than in the architectural solidity of art music, with its notations, institutions, theories and formal pedagogies. But let’s not get stuck in these academic distinctions. Undeniably, folk music and art music exist in distinct habitats and have distinct histories, like alligators and bacteria, but as forms of life and as embodiments of living processes common to both, it makes more sense to refer to them both in one breath.
It's a bit long and complicated, but hey, at least it's not about the plague!
What Neef failed to do spectacularly is build an audience. It is a failure that one might attribute to the vagaries of the economy, the advent of livestreaming, the price of parking or any number of standard-issue excuses that have potential validity anywhere. But there is a central and specific explanation for the underperformance of the COC: a parade of supposedly innovative productions that required a manifesto from the stage director to understand and a six-pack of Red Bull to sit through.
To some readers this conclusion might appear to be just a little tainted by personal opinion, so let us look at the numbers, some of them represented in a helpful article published in 2019 by Ludwig van Toronto. In 2014-15 Neef cut back the COC season from seven mainstage productions to six (one of these being a double bill). He did this despite the company’s residency at the Four Seasons Centre, a beautiful house at a perfect downtown intersection with excellent subway access in a metropolis that was deemed to have surpassed Chicago in size by population.
According to a 2018 survey conducted by the Music Industry Research Association, MusiCares, and the Princeton University Survey Research Center, American musicians earned a median income of twenty-one thousand three hundred dollars from their craft the previous year. A 2014 study by an arts advocacy organization showed that only ten per cent of America’s two million art-school graduates make their primary living as artists.
There’s still plenty of money to be made in art, or writing, or music. It’s just not being made by the creators. Increasingly, their quest for personal artistic fulfillment is part of someone else’s racket.
It's an interesting read, but one of those headlines that promises something it fails to deliver.
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It's a short miscellanea this week as I've been busy writing other posts, and a string quartet. So let's have a bouquet of envois. First, here is one of my favorite Sibelius symphonies, the Fifth Symphony with Jukka-Pekka Saraste conducting the Oslo Philharmonic:
We can't find any significant excerpts from a Canadian Opera Company production, but here is a little trailer/clip/advertisement for their 2016 production of Carmen.
And finally, Hélène Grimaud performs Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor, K 466: III. Rondo. Allegro assai accompanied by the Camerata Salzburg in the Great Hall of the University of Salzburg.
