Friday Miscellanea

We love well-crafted invective here at the Music Salon and Matthew Aucoin provides a rich harvest over at the New York Review of Books in a review of a collection of writings by Pierre Boulez:

Music Lessons, the translation of the lectures he gave at the Collège de France between 1976 and 1995, provides English-language readers with the fullest document yet of the mature Boulez’s musical thought: his approach to composition, his analysis of his predecessors’ work, and his attitudes toward many sectors of twentieth-century musical activity. It is an important publication, especially because I believe it casts doubt on the notion that Boulez grew wiser or more generous with age. This book embodies his every paradox: he is both discerning and myopic, clever and needlessly cruel, capable of moments of thrilling clarity as well as long stretches full of bland, arid tautologies. His contradictions are the contradictions of the late-twentieth-century European avant-garde; his narrowness became the narrowness of a generation. As his era recedes, it feels newly possible to take stock of both his strengths and his limitations.

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The ways the woke progressives have of undermining the cultural values of Western Civilization are multitudinous and manifold. And they usually involve either distorting the meaning of familiar words, or of inventing new words to describe new crimes against orthodoxy. Here is a lovely example: Beethoven Has a First Name.

For a lot of intersecting reasons, music critics, academics, consumers, and performers in the mid-19th through early 20th centuries thought about music history as the story of a few great men producing great works of art. (Of course, this tactic is very common in how we tell our histories in many domains.) Tied up in the respect and ubiquity afforded to these men is the mononym, or a single word sufficing for a person’s whole name. These canonized demigods became so ensconced in elite musical society’s collective consciousness that only one word was needed to evoke their awesome specter. Mouthfuls of full names became truncated to terse sets of universally recognized syllables: Mozart. Beethoven. Bach.

This is so clever! And superficially plausible. But the fact that we refer to people like Beethoven, Mozart and Bach only by their last names is simply because they actually ARE great composers and, unfortunately, all male. Speaking of canonized demigods, is there any way that this policy could be applied to people like Cher, Drake, Madonna, Lady Gaga or Beyoncé who also suffer from mononyms?

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I'm afraid that this is likely very true: Bail out our musicians or risk losing them for ever, say classical music stars.

Leading figures in classical music say many highly-trained orchestral musicians are giving up on music as they face homelessness and hunger this autumn. Speaking to the Observer this weekend, the internationally renowned conductor Sir Simon Rattle warned that an “exodus is happening right now”, while top English soloists the violinist Tasmin Little and the pianist Stephen Hough both spoke of despair and desperation among even successful performers.

As someone who left the music business as a performer a couple of decades ago, I think that the incentives to be a classical musician have been declining for a long time. The all-out erasure of music performance this year is just the last straw. No, I suspect that things will not return to the way they were--not for a long, long, long time.

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In response to the vaulting infection rates in Europe BREAKING: GERMANY SHUTS ALL OPERA AND CONCERT HALLS FOR A MONTH.

 “The federal and state governments want to get a grip on the drastically increasing corona infection figures with massive contact restrictions over the course of November — and this throughout Germany as early as next Monday, 2nd November. The goal: to be able to track infection chains again. At present, 75 percent of infections can no longer be traced, said Angela Merkel. 

“There are further restrictions on contact. From Monday on, private meetings will only be permitted for members of one’s own household and one other household with a maximum of ten people. Tourist overnight stays within Germany are to be prohibited in November. According to this measure, trips only for non-touristic purposes such as business travel may be made.

“Events that serve entertainment purposes will be prohibited. Catering establishments are to close from November 2 for the rest of the month. The delivery and collection of food for consumption at home will be exempted from this rule, canteens will be allowed to remain open.

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How did music evolve? Harvard study reveals a surprising theory. No, it’s not a sexual mating call.

The authors draw on extensive evidence to suggest two other likely roots for music: territorial signaling and infant care.

In warfare, rhythm and melody allow tribal groups to signal their strength, numbers, and coordination across far distances, to both allies and foes. This is not unlike how animals commonly use vocalizations to signal their territory or scare off others. “If we study music in traditional societies, we see it used consistently to form political alliances,” says Hagen. By this logic, military bands and marching bands are a late-stage adaptation of this dominance signaling: If the band can’t hold a beat, the football team probably can’t hold a ball.

In infant care, the researchers note that parents use sing-song language to communicate with their helpless infants. “The parent or caregiver needs a reliable way to signal to the infant that they are attending to them,” says coauthor Samuel Mehr, a psychologist and director of Harvard’s Music Lab. “But attention is a covert property of the mind. It’s hard to determine if someone is actually paying attention to you.”

To tell the truth, this seems a lot more plausible than other explanations.

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With the very creative Esa-Pekka Salonen and Nico Muhly behind it, this sounds really interesting: The San Francisco Symphony Plunges Into a New World.

 While recordings are nothing new, the vast majority of classical repertoire was not meant to be heard that way — or how it has been presented during the pandemic, inevitably with less visceral impact on a smartphone screen. With that in mind, the San Francisco Symphony commissioned Mr. Muhly to compose something specifically for a virtual medium. The result is “Throughline,” which has taken thousands of hours and endless patience to pull off and premieres Nov. 14 on the orchestra’s website and Bay Area public television.

The project is also an introduction to the eight collaborative partners Mr. Salonen announced when he was named to his new position in 2018, a group whose mission has been kept intentionally vague. “It’s an experiment,” he said. “I’m surrounding myself, at least mentally, with a bunch of talented and creative people.”

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 Let's have some music from Esa-Pekka Salonen. This is his piece Nyx, after the Greek goddess of the night:

Have we had an envoi from Dufay recently? We have not! Here is a very nice performance of "Se la face ay pale" by Cantica Symphonia: