This will be the official Music Salon "Good Riddance to 2020, the Year the Music Died" post. Thanks to all of you for reading and commenting and let's look forward to a much better year for music!
Brace yourself, hyperpop is here. This is 100 Gecs, a song from their Christmas album:
Every time I think pop has hit a new low of repetitive inanity, a new group comes along to confound me. At least it is mercifully brief. And the Wall Street Journal even has an article on the genre: Hyperpop’s Joyful Too-Muchness. On the one hand, artists are always going to exploit new technical possibilities to their utmost. On the other hand, the results aren't always easy to listen to:
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If this story turns out to be true then we might be able to return to a normal concert life sooner than expected: Study Of Virus Screening At Concert Reports Zero Infections.
The organizers of an indoor music festival in Barcelona to test the effectiveness of same-day coronavirus screening said Wednesday that preliminary results indicate there was zero transmission inside the venue.
The results were released over two weeks since 1,000 music fans volunteered to take part in the experiment. After passing an antigen test on site, around 500 people were randomly selected to enter the concert hall. The other 500 were sent home and used as a control group.
All participants were called back to take a second test eight days later. The results showed zero infections among the 463 concertgoers who complied with the second round of testing, while the control group of 496 people who did not get into the concert had two positive cases.
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Canada's Globe and Mail has a nice tribute to classical music : Classical music gets me through these COVID times.
And that’s what has captured me, the layers and complexity of classical music. It’s the amazing combination of disparate instruments brought together to tell us a story in music. Each composer is so different, each has their own signature, both the old and the new composers, they bring us music that engages mind and heart together.
In the midst of the noise of loss that we are all experiencing, I have found a place to go that actually helps to ground me so I can thrive in a challenging environment.
Classical music surrounds me now, all during the day and before I sleep. No matter the news of the latest catastrophe, this music helps me through it so I am never overwhelmed by grief or anxiety.
If there is a group of people who have paid a price during this pandemic, it is musicians, but especially the ones who play for ensembles and orchestras and, of course, the classical singers. They have watched their livelihoods disappear overnight and have had to adapt on the fly to a very different world. While we have obsessed about the millionaires and billionaires in professional sports, these creative artists get nary a mention. I would argue that the value they give for the modest livings they make, are of equal, if not more value to our society than most professional sports.
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Here is a very brief clip of Ravi Shankar giving George Harrison a lesson on sitar:
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Norman Lebrecht has posted a particularly biting critique of current musicology: IT MAY BE TIME TO CANCEL MUSICOLOGY.
The latest issue of VAN magazine has a survey of the Beethoven year with combative statements by the feminist musicologist Susan McClary and the BLM music theorist Philip Ewell (pictured), who says: ‘”Beethoven” is like a metonym for the toxic combination that often happens when whiteness combines with maleness in the history of the United States.. At times, especially in terms of power and impact, whiteness plus maleness has more or less always equated with power. And, when that power gets challenged, it really can lash out in horrible ways—up to and including violence, rape, and murder.’
Got it? Beethoven is a poster boy for every evil ascribed by anyone to men with white skin.
As always, the comment section has lots of entertaining bits. Also, there are lots of musicologist who continue to do traditional musicology--probably most fall into that category.
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Here is a thoughtful piece about listening in the year of COVID: What I’ve learned from six months of rehearing music favorites
Isolation surely had something to do with my listening. Music was no longer just music, but a reflection of what seemed to be going on. Piece after piece sounded like it had been written to reflect the last six tumultuous months. I chose Machaut’s luminous “Messe Notre Dame,” for instance, because it helped to show where our music came from. It hadn’t occurred to me that it was written not six months ago but six centuries ago, in the wake of the Black Death pandemic.
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I really think that something by the much-maligned Beethoven is called for. Here is Grigory Sokolov playing the Piano Sonata, op 28 'Pastoral', one of the most gentle and charming of the sonatas:
Having read Ewell's articles at one of his sites I'd say there's a distinction between what Ewell says about Beethoven and what he's saying about what Mark Evan Bonds has described in his recent book The Beethoven Syndrome. I'm not sure I agree with Ewell on a number of points (I don't think reparations have shown to work at all in a Native American context which is why I can't quite see how spending even more money on reparations for African Americans can be assured to work simply because people think it should be tried, and black scholars such as Adolph Reed and John McWhorter find the idea of reparations dubious).
ReplyDeleteBut as something of a life-long anti-Romantic I think that Ewell has been careful to distinguish between Romantic era repertoire and the ideologies associated with the veneration of Romantic and proto-Romantic era works based on what I've been able to read of his work in the last year. It's not something I would expect someone like Lebrecht to pay much attention to.
I'm not going to just become a Mahler fan just because I like Shostakovich, for instance, and I think Beethoven is a composer well worthy of study whose reputation got inflated in comparison to Haydn because his music spoke to the, er, felt needs for transcendence of his time and place. But it's not as though fans of pop music don't assign sublimity to Michael Jackson. My brother was telling me that someone was claiming that because Michael Jackson could sing, dance and also write songs he was greater than Stevie Wonder in terms of musical legacy and influence. Since Michael Jackson was grateful Stevie Wonder wrote a song for him I would venture that were Jackson alive right now he'd say Stevie Wonder is the more influential and substantial musician and, perhaps most telling of all, Jackson considered Stevie Wonder to have been as great in Jackson's day as Beethoven (i.e. Jackson had no thoughts of Stevie Wonder's songs displacing Beethoven or Mozart but regarded Wonder's music as fulfilling a role comparable for his time and place to the role Beethoven fulfilled in his). If new musicology took THAT approach then, hey, I am thoroughly sympathetic to that. What seems to happen is, well, Lebrecht reads stuff, pronounces it drivel, without seeming to take any time to go beyond op ed reflex.
There's a lot about new musicology I find frustrating but I also don't necessarily agree with the John Borstlaps of the world on a few things either.
More and more I suspect that new musicology has made the category mistake of thinking that the ways they talk about canonized composers could create a paradigm shift in what is canonized as though that solves the problems they see in musicology. Maybe the problems that really need to get "solved" are only soluable by composers finding solutions to the problems (if real and I'm obviously suggesting some of those problems might be real while others of them aren't without digressing into checklists of those categories) that musicologists like to talk about.
and, on the more progressive American side, advocates for American popular styles as musical art can get committed to the idea that they have to treat the musical canons of pale, male and stale earlier works as somehow emblematic distillations of white supremacy and predation, as though we didn't hear enough about the things reportedly done by R. Kelly to ask ourselves whether or not the problem is that celebrities take license to do awful things to people regardless of skin color. Within years of his death people were saying Michael Jackson was too big to cancel if the things he allegedly did were true, which means that to argue that Beethoven needs to be cancelled might only have weight if Jackson were to get cancelled, too, but if people argue that cancelling dead white guys can't also mean that some of the heroes of African American popular music aren't equally problematic that in those cases the double standard might be found. Then again, there are people who could/do argue that many a formidably accomplished musical artist was a sub-par human being in other areas of life. It's the residually Romanticist art-religion that has, until recently, ensured that such men and women retain their canonized places in reception history.
ReplyDeleteI'm sympathetic to Kyle Gann's approach to 18th century music of teaching Beethoven but also letting his students know that Haydn, Clementi, Dussek and other contemporaries of Beethoven and Mozart wrote music that is worth studying. It was steeping myself in Clementi's monothematic sonatas circa Op. 40 through Op. 60 that helped me figure out ways to synthesize blues and ragtime musical languages into sonata forms, for instance, so if I hadn't studied 18th century composers many musicologists and music historians regard as also-rans compared to Beethoven I wouldn't have picked up approaches to sonata forms that let me experiment with cross-stylistic fusion.
There's virtually no serious literature exploring sonata forms written for guitar, for instance, and some of the problems that I'm seeing in musicology about the over-emphasis on the venerated masters could be solved not so much by stoking issues about German hegemonic influence in Anglo-American pedagogy as by, say, digging through early 19th century Bohemian composers ranging from Anton Reicha through to Matiegka and others as a bridge between 18th and 19th century developments. I've found Hepokoski & Darcy's Elements of Sonata Theory useful there because their Type 2 category explains a number of early 19th century guitar sonatas and knowing that it was relatively normal to introduce a theme 1 in an exposition and abandon it in the recapitulation zone is a reminder that, as Richard Taruskin has put it, there were a lot of sonata forms in the 18th and early 19th century that were not even close to the "textbook sonata form" so often expounded upon in theory classes. That far I have at least some sympathy for American theorists who find it stifling to stick with some residually A. B Marxian conception of sonata form knowing that, say, nothing of that kind of sonata form necessarily shows up in the sonata forms of the early 19th century guitarist composers (and thanks to that Beethoven vs Rossini dualism, the odds of Italian and Bohemian guitar sonatas being considered a field of study was likely cut off without consideration for a couple of generations).
Merry Christmas and happy new year! I'm feeling much better after a week or so of nonsense beginning just before Christmas & am eager to catch up on what I've missed.
ReplyDeleteWill make an observation about the Barcelona concert plague-screening etc. My recollection is that at Salzburg in the summer there was one festival employee who was identified as potentially carrying the virus (i.e. tested positive in the daily testing SF did); she was carried off into quarantine and never heard of again. So I made the last part up and maybe I didn't pay very close attention but one person potentially infected. The only reason I'm not attending concerts is that they won't stage them.
Kanye released 12 minutes of "Latin and polyphony" for Christmas, I hear (via Twitter, so take this with the proverbial grain of salt). Looked on Spotify last evening and the EP doesn't seem to be there: word was that it's at both Apple and Spotify.
The chamber music society here has been staging concerts since October. They have been getting around the rules by holding them in an outdoor patio restaurant and calling them dinner concerts. The next one is January 17. I have missed every one so far for various reasons, but I will try to go to this one. Russian pianist.
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