Friday Miscellanea

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My greatest disappointment this year was being unable to attend the Salzburg Festival--a disappointment shared by music critic Jay Nordlinger who nonetheless gives a chronicle based on listening to some concerts from the much-abbreviated festival online:

Andrew Manze, the Englishman, conducted an all-Mozart concert. The orchestra was a local band, and a very good one: the Mozarteum Orchestra of Salzburg. Its principal horn, Rob van de Laar (a Dutchman, as his name tells you), was the soloist in the Horn Concerto No. 2 in E flat. The pianist Francesco Piemontesi (another man whose name gives his origin) was the soloist in the “Coronation” Concerto. These two soloists are elegant and skilled players. About Manze’s Mozart conducting, I have rhapsodized before. He is a brainy musician and a natural, friendly leader who takes great pleasure in Mozart. So do the players under his baton. You can see it in their faces (as well as hear it in their playing).

What a gift, this conducting, and this music, and music in general—never more than in a screwy, sorrowful, dislocating time.

This was given in the Grosse Saal of the Mozarteum where I attended another Mozart concert last year. Here is a link to that post.

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The Times Literary Supplement asks if it is time to sound An elegy for handwriting?

Is it time to compose an elegy for handwriting? Anne Trubek thinks so – indeed, hopes so. She deems the ability to form a cursive script “merely emblematic”, and dreams of a future in which the school curriculum will include it only for art classes. It will remain solely the domain of calligraphers such as Patricia Lovett, who is herself probably Britain’s best-known practitioner, teacher and advocate. Lovett’s latest book is a gorgeously presented survey of the work of masterly scribes from the third century AD to the twenty-first, culminating, appropriately (and with no false modesty), with her own work. Though Lovett would undoubtedly baulk at such a description, her volume constitutes, in Trubek’s logic, an alluring swansong of an “antiquated” skill.

I think that handwriting might be undergoing a small renaissance due to the current rage for "journaling" whether in bullet form or not. Writing down one's thoughts, goals, musings, projects and accomplishments in a journal rather than in some digital format makes it all more concrete and lasting somehow.

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Things seem to be going backwards in Europe with rising infection levels prompting governments in France and the Netherlands to shut down concerts for the next month.

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The Nation has an interview with John Luther Adams who is, apparently, a "legend." John Luther Adams’s Songs for a Vanished World.

Adams: Musically, I came of age in a time when there was this ongoing war between smart music and pretty music. And one of the things that I discovered was that it’s a false dichotomy. Music can be intellectually airtight and still sock you in the belly or grab you by the ears or seduce you, ravish you. So it brought me back to this idea that music is all about sound. And the mysterious power of sound to touch us and move us and make us more fully human in ways that perhaps nothing else can.

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Igor Levit won the Instrumental Recording of the Year at Gramophone Magazine for his Beethoven Sonata Cycle.

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Alex Ross has a piece at The New Yorker about The Hidden Costs of Streaming Music.

Listening to music on the Internet feels clean, efficient, environmentally virtuous. Instead of accumulating heaps of vinyl or plastic, we unpocket our sleek devices and pluck tunes from the ether. Music has, it seems, been freed from the grubby realm of things. Kyle Devine, in his recent book, “Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music,” thoroughly dismantles that seductive illusion. Like everything we do on the Internet, streaming and downloading music requires a steady surge of energy. Devine writes, “The environmental cost of music is now greater than at any time during recorded music’s previous eras.” He supports that claim with a chart of his own devising, using data culled from various sources, which suggests that, in 2016, streaming and downloading music generated around a hundred and ninety-four million kilograms of greenhouse-gas emissions—some forty million more than the emissions associated with all music formats in 2000. Given the unprecedented reliance on streaming media during the coronavirus pandemic, the figure for 2020 will probably be even greater.

Do you ever get the feeling that progressive environmentalism will not be happy until they have forced all of us to return to pre-civilization levels of energy use? Have you heard the joke "What did progressives use for light before candles? Electricity."

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The Los Angeles Review of Books has a review of a troubling book: The Great Unread: On William Deresiewicz’s “The Death of the Artist” 

EARLY IN HIS new book, The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech, William Deresiewicz relates two stories often told about the arts today. From Silicon Valley and its boosters, we hear: “There’s never been a better time to be an artist.” Anyone can easily market their own music, books, or films online, drum up a thousand true fans, and enjoy a decent living. We see proof of this, time and again, in profiles of bold creators who got tired of waiting to be chosen, took to the web, and saw their work go viral.

The artists tell another tale. Yes, you can produce and post your work more easily, but so can everyone else. Every year, every major venue — SoundCloud, Kindle Store, Sundance — is inundated with thousands if not millions of songs, books, and films, but most sink like a stone. Of the 6,000,000 books in the US Kindle Store, the “overwhelming majority” of which are self-published, “68 percent sell fewer than two copies a month.” Only about 2,000 US Kindle Store authors earn more than $25,000 per year. Spotify features roughly 2,000,000 artists worldwide, but less than four percent of them garner 95 percent of the streams. The pie has been “pulverized into a million tiny crumbs.” We may now have “universal access” to the audience, but “at the price of universal impoverishment.”

You should read the whole thing. The review goes on to note that the narrative described in the first paragraph turns out to be pure propaganda--the second paragraph describes the reality. The truth is that if you are spending most of your time on networking and promoting your "art" is likely to be little more than shallow entertainment. And why would we be surprised at that?

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 Let's have a couple of envois to chase away our tears after that last article. Here is Gianluca Capuano conducting the Mozarteumorchester with Julia Lezhneva at the Salzburg Festival 2020:

And here is the 7th concert in Igor Levit's cycle of all the Beethoven piano sonatas, also from the Salzburg Festival this year:

Let's have a bonus envoi. This is the very young Kvartett Saphir from Norway playing two movements from the Eighth String Quartet of Shostakovich:

Damn!