Friday Miscellanea

A very Merry Christmas to all the readers of the Music Salon. May you and your families have a peaceful and prosperous New Year as well!

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The Globe and Mail has a survey of fifteen books on music that came out this year: Fifteen music books that struck a chord in 2020. Alex Ross' book on Wagner sounds interesting:

When it comes to hearing music in a comprehensive way, few are better at cocking an ear than Alex Ross. A dozen years after the release of The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, The New Yorker’s classical critic returns with a 360-degree account of composer Richard Wagner’s influence on technology, culture, politics and modern music.

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Thanks to Slipped Disc for alerting us to this wacky encore by Dorel Golan:

It sounds a bit like Stravinsky doing an arrangement of a Joplin ragtime while hopped up on amphetamines, don't you think?

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The Wall Street Journal has the story of the world's toughest busker: Neither Rain, Nor Snow Nor a Pandemic Discourages NYC’s Naked Cowboy

The Naked Cowboy is turning 50 this week. And if you ask me, he’s got plenty to celebrate. Every single day through the pandemic, the one-man tourist attraction showed up to do what he’s always done—perform in the middle of Times Square wearing only his hat, boots and tight, white underwear. He was out strumming and singing even when the district was deserted and he wasn’t making a dime.

Worth having a look just for the photo of him performing in a blizzard.

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 Musicologists often are haring off after social justice and identity politics these days, so it is left to a mathematician to explain the theory behind Bach: Bach and My Musical Advent Calendar

If we keep going up by perfect fifths, we get a sequence of harmonious intervals known as the cycle of fifths. The first five notes in the cycle form the pentatonic scale, which is used in the music of many ancient cultures. If we keep going up to seven notes, we get the notes of the major scale prevalent in Western classical music. Taking 12 notes of the cycle of fifths produces the 12 notes of the piano keyboard.

After 12 steps, something fortuitous happens: We get to a note that is almost the same as the one we started with, but seven octaves higher. The 12 notes of the keyboard essentially come from this numerical coincidence between the frequencies for seven octaves and 12 fifths. But there is still a slight mismatch in the frequencies—less than a quarter of the distance between two adjacent notes.

Before Bach’s time, the typical approach was to “hide” this error in notes that the music was unlikely to use, like when you stuff your mess in a bedroom before guests come around. For example, if a piece of music is in the key of C major, it’s important for F and G to sound perfectly in tune, since they’re the fourth and fifth notes of the scale; but it’s less important for F sharp to sound right, since it will barely be used.

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 Here is an article of a rare quality these days: simple praise of Beethoven, whose 250th birthday was Dec. 16. Beethoven and Freedom

The great composers create a sense of the infinite within the finitude of classical form, by manipulating musical time. Traditional as well as pop music work within the confines of regular time and fixed meter. Time itself becomes malleable in Western classical music. Mozart plays with time like a minor god; Beethoven challenges it directly. In his most characteristic works he presents the simplest possible musical material and subjects it to radical metrical transformation. 

By evoking the infinite out of finite temporality, Beethoven gives us not just an impression, but rather an existential participation in freedom. The composer confounds our expectations and plays hob with our temporal perception, demanding that we follow him through warps in the space-time continuum. In the Op. 111 he shows us that mortal man can achieve a presentiment of the infinite out of finite materials.

How nice to read something that does not accuse Beethoven of being a racist or sexist monster.

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Canada's fetishization of multiculturalism never seems to have no limit. A ‘Messiah’ for the Multitudes, Freed From History’s Bonds: A polyglot, nonsectarian, gender-inclusive film from Canada remakes the Handel classic for today’s world.

A gay Chinese-Canadian tenor struts through the streets of Vancouver, joyously proclaiming that “ev’ry valley shall be exalted” as the camera focuses in on his six-inch-high stiletto heels.

A Tunisian-Canadian mezzo-soprano reimagines Jesus as a Muslim woman in a head scarf.

In Yukon, an Indigenous singer praises the remote snow-covered landscape in Southern Tutchone, the language of her ancestors.

“This is not your grandparents’ ‘Messiah,’” Spencer Britten, the tenor in heels, said in an interview. He and the other performers are part of “Messiah/Complex,” an iconoclastic new production of Handel’s classic oratorio, which draws on biblical texts to form a stylized narrative of suffering, hope and redemption. 

An 80-minute film featuring a dozen soloists from all corners of the country, this unabashed celebration of Canadian multiculturalism has recast the work as a series of deeply personal video narratives.

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Interesting article on Mozart's visit to England when he was eight years old. How Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Came to Compose His First Symphony:

In some ways musically more interesting from that period is a series of sketches and drafts Wolfgang wrote down in a new manuscript book Leopold gave him. It would survive as “the London Notebook.” Father or son signed it in the front, “di Wolfgango Mozart à Londra 1764.” Here are forty-three ideas in various directions and states of completion, all of it, for a change, in Wolfgang’s own hand, which by now is neat and clear and would remain so for the rest of his life.

There are surprisingly few strikeouts or corrections in the London Notebook; probably he worked out the pieces at the clavier and then copied them down, relying on a remarkable memory for music, whether his own or works by others. The pieces, some incomplete, range from tentative to fascinating. Three of them may be sketches toward orchestral movements. Most striking is No. 15 in G Minor, a through-composed piece that deftly develops its opening ideas throughout and en route works in a quote from Gluck’s ballet Don Juan. Wolfgang may have looked at it as a harmonic study; its altered chords and modulations from key to key range farther than anything he had yet explored. Beyond that, there is a driving intensity to the piece that foreshadows a distinctive G-minor mood that would be with him to the end, most famously in his two symphonies in that key, one early and one late.

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For our envoi today, a driving performance of the the Piano Concerto No. 3 by Prokofiev with Yuja Wang and the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Kyrill Petrenko: