Friday MIscellanea

We do have some reading today starting with this fascinating piece of sociological research: The New National American Elite. It is worth reading the whole thing, but here is the meat of it:

The Anglo American Protestant patricians in every region and state shared a common Anglo American and Trans-Atlantic culture—but not a common national culture. Instead, they had regional cultures separately based on a common British and European heritage. This is so peculiar that it needs to be explained.

Let us begin with what they shared: Trans-Atlantic culture. From the earliest days of the republic, the wealthy elites of even the most remote and Godforsaken parts of the South and West could afford to vacation in Europe. They would bring back the latest French and British fashions to rural Mississippi or Wyoming. Before the self-consciously regional Prairie Style of Frank Lloyd Wright, there was never any indigenous American architecture, just wave after wave of faddish European styles: Palladianism, Greek Revival, Gothic, Romanesque.

I think this is of some relevance to the changing fortunes of classical music, the basic canon of which was, like fashion or architecture, brought from Europe by the regional elites. The situation now is different:

 Membership in the multiracial, post-ethnic national overclass depends chiefly on graduation with a diploma—preferably a graduate or professional degree—from an Ivy League school or a selective state university, which makes the Ivy League the new social register. But a diploma from the Ivy League or a top-ranked state university by itself is not sufficient for admission to the new national overclass. Like all ruling classes, the new American overclass uses cues like dialect, religion, and values to distinguish insiders from outsiders. 

More and more Americans are figuring out that “wokeness” functions in the new, centralized American elite as a device to exclude working-class Americans of all races, along with backward remnants of the old regional elites. In effect, the new national oligarchy changes the codes and the passwords every six months or so, and notifies its members through the universities and the prestige media and Twitter. 

Constantly replacing old terms with new terms known only to the oligarchs is a brilliant strategy of social exclusion. Woke speech is simply a ruling-class dialect, which must be updated frequently to keep the lower orders from breaking the code and successfully imitating their betters.

What stands out in all this is the exclusion, not only of the "lower orders" but of tradition generally whether it is manifested in the canonic classical music repertoire or in any of the institutions devoted to the preservation and transmission of high culture: conservatories, humanities departments in universities, libraries (now becoming digital) and eventually even art museums, now enjoying considerable popularity.

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From Slipped Disc comes the news that the Salzburg Easter festival is off due to the general lockdown. Fingers crossed for the summer festival...

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And speaking of culture and the American elite, the inauguration of the new American president was not celebrated with any classical musicians. Slipped Disc, again, has the story. I must confess that I didn't watch the festivities, as I usually don't, but I recall classical musicians such as Yo Yo Ma being frequently heard at previous inaugurations. But nowadays, only pop and country artists are heard.

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Alex Ross weighs in on recent books on Beethoven in a piece in The New Yorker: Keep Beethoven Weird.

Is it possible that Beethoven felt confined by his own incipient myth—that he sought freedom, in a sense, from being Beethoven? The hammering splendors of his so-called heroic period, which began with the “Eroica” in 1804 and lasted intermittently for about a decade, at once began to hold audiences in thrall, but they constitute only a fraction of Beethoven’s output and grow scarce in the late period. The Ninth Symphony, with its tragic-gestured first movement and its world-embracing choral finale, is the obvious exception; yet Beethoven felt uncertain about the piece after its première, and evidently contemplated replacing the “Ode to Joy” with a purely instrumental finale, for which he had already made sketches. Those ideas wound up in the String Quartet, Opus 132, which inhabits an entirely different realm. Kinderman maps out the hidden relationship between the oratorical symphony and the introspective quartet, suggesting that Beethoven “showed himself capable of regarding Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ with distancing irony.”

This is one of Ross' better pieces with a really good and balanced survey of recent writings. Plus, extra points for proper use of the word "aperçu."

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From Forbes we have a look at the economic disaster that is the music biz: We Don’t Just Need A Review Of Music Streaming: We Need A Review Of The Entire Music Ecosystem.

The crux is that streaming — like all business — has winners and losers. And with the collapse of live revenues, the issues in how streaming pays (or doesn’t) is being discussed. Ingham calculates that 1% of all artists receive 90% of the revenue from streaming. That’s about 43,000 artists (and remember, many of these artists are subject to agreements where their share of this is far less than required). Of that 1%, many have been significantly impacted by COVID, as their streaming income has not replaced their live income. The other 99%, around 3 million artists, earn the other 10%. And remember, the race to being the 1% can only be won by 1%. This isn’t fair, but it is business.

It is worth having a look at the rest of the article.

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 A piece on Franz Schubert, a lovely composer who is finally getting some of the appreciation he deserves: A lost paradise of purity

Of all the premature deaths among the ranks of the creative, none is more painful to contemplate than Franz Schubert’s. His cutting off in November 1828 at the age of 31 was not as brutal in strictly chronological terms as Keats’s at the age of 25 in 1821, but there is with Schubert a yearning to know the music which he never composed that is even greater than the regret for Keats’s unwritten poems. All Schubert’s works are in a sense early works, and it is striking to think that by the time Haydn reached the age at which Schubert died, he had written none of the music for which we now revere him. 

Schubert’s last three piano sonatas (D958-960) were completed in September 1828. Perhaps the most obvious allusion to death in general, if not to his own mortality, is the macabre Totentanz which is the unremitting tarantella finale of D958. Likewise, the bass trill that is never far below the surface in the seemingly unruffled first movement of D960 announces that “Even in Arcadia, I am present”. However, the andantino of D959 is on a different plane of alienation. It is all the more aberrant in a work which is generally so warm-hearted and affirmatory. Alfred Brendel writes of its “desolate grace behind which madness lies”.

And that has to lead us to our envoi, the Andantino from the Piano Sonata in A major, D. 959 played by Mitsuko Uchida: