Friday Miscellanea

The Guardian has a review of a new lockdown album release by Igor Levit--does this guy never sleep? It includes Palais de Mari, the piano piece by Morton Feldman we were just discussing the other day:

Levit’s latest release, recorded in lockdown in May 2020, is Encounter (Sony), a double album of Chorale Preludes by Bach and Brahms in the versions by Busoni, together with shorter works by Brahms (arr. Reger) and Reger (arr. Julian Becker) – you get the idea – and a work by one composer pure and simple: Palais de Mari by Morton Feldman.

This is a collection of music rarely performed in the concert hall, and even less often heard together. The entirety, nearly two hours of intense listening, begins quietly and ends, pared back to nothing in Feldman’s half-hour meditation, in near silence.

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The most dangerous language to sing in? German! Slipped Disc has the story:

 Research by the Japan Association of Classical Music Presenters has revealed that two languages spread more Covid infection than any other.

Guess which?

German.

And?

Italian.

Both emit twice as many aerosols as, for instance, Japanese. French is also pretty bad.

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We mentioned before that dustup between a Schenkerian scholar and some who wanted to cancel him. Norman Lebrecht has an update: THE FIGHTBACK BEGINS AGAINST CRITICAL RACE THEORY.

Professor Timothy Jackson’s lawsuit against the University of North Texas is more than just a bid to clear his name of slurs that were spouted by a howling mob of musicologists who sought to cancel his career.

According to the National Association of Scholars,

Jackson’s lawsuit also illustrates the damage that Critical Race Theory (CRT)—the intellectual background for radical academic social media campaigns—has done to scholarship. CRT seeks and succeeds in annihilating scholarship that analyzes the actual substance of any domain of inquiry. In this case, CRT scholars seek to replace actual Schenkerian musical analysis with ritual condemnations of that analysis. Western music theory is taken to be prima facie invalid on the grounds that Schenker allegedly said something unpleasant about blacks in the course of his lifetime. The very premise must be rejected if scholarship is to survive.

As always at Slipped Disc, the comments are interesting.

Mr. Lebrecht does not provide a link, but here is the NAS article: A Canceled Music Theorist Fights Back.

Last September, the National Association of Scholars (NAS) published an account of how a large number of faculty and graduate students initiated a social media campaign against Professor Timothy Jackson of the University of North Texas (UNT), demanding sanctions against him up to and including that he be removed from his tenured position at UNT. The participants in this campaign included music theorists nationwide, as well as faculty and graduate students at UNT. His colleagues’ grievances were based on his defense of the music theorist Heinrich Schenker, and by extension modern music theory as a whole, from the spurious charge of “systemic racism.” They sought to punish Jackson harshly for exercising his right to free speech on an academic subject matter within his professional competence—and they sought to punish him for saying what any fair-minded, amateur observer would take to be the common-sense truth.

Read the whole thing. 

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 And on a much lighter note Slipped Disc also alerts us to this collection of bad album covers: The Worst of Classic Album Cover Art: A Collection of 30 Creepy Bad Album Covers! Here is a sample:

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Here is an interesting piece on the economics of the Wigmore Hall streaming series: Wigmore chief counts costs of live streaming.

When it began live streaming chamber music concerts in June last year, London’s Wigmore Hall was hailed as a beacon of hope for players and audiences alike.

In an interview with the Financial Times, the venue’s chief executive and artistic director John Gilhooly has now laid bare the cost of the initiative, which has included performances by the likes of Steven Isserlis, Mitsuko Uchida and the Heath Quartet, and which continues into 2021. 

He explains that staff costs and copyright charges for each performance come to around £3,000, plus artists’ fees. While the concerts are free to view, audiences have donated some £750,000 via the hall’s digital broadcast fund and the number joining its membership scheme has increased by a quarter. 

‘All that we have received has been ploughed back into paying artists their full fee and investing in programming,’ Gillhooly told the newspaper, adding that the hall aims to have raised £1 million by the time of the scheme’s anniversary later this year. 

Although a significant amount of money, this would represent only around one-seventh of the hall’s usual income over the period. A quarter of the Wigmore Hall’s staff have been made redundant since the start of the pandemic, which has seen venues across the UK closed to audiences for much of the past year. 

The main advantage of live streaming, according to Gilhooly, it its ability to reach wider audiences. He is downbeat, however, about its prospects as a financial saviour: ‘Apart from the deluded, no one can say streaming concerts pays.’

I'm going to make a donation.

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Michael Andor Brodeur is the new classical music critic for the Washington Post, replacing Anne Midgette. Here he alerts us to twenty-one up and coming composers: 21 for ’21: Composers and performers who sound like tomorrow. Here is a sample:

Originally from Washington and now based in New York City, Figgis-Vizueta, 27, knocked my comfiest socks off during the quarantine with “Music for Transitions,” a raw, scraping yet soaring solo piece commissioned and premiered by cellist Andrew Yee. Since then, I’ve been hooked: The Julius Eastman-inspired “Openwork, Knotted Object”; the haunting “No Words” for clarinet and electronics; the “reaching sap-slow toward sky” thriller of “Placemaking” — her music feels sprouted between structures, liberated from certainty and wrought from a language we’d do well to learn. Coming in 2021 are commissions for the JACK quartet and North Carolina-based ensemble earspace. inticomposes.com.

I left it in the original formatting so you could follow all the links.

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Ars Technica has an interesting story that is so complicated that I can't summarize it. But if you are interested in copyright on the internet have a look at How one musician took on the world’s biggest TV network over copyright—and won.

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I still have my fingers crossed that I will be able to attend the Salzburg Festival this August, but Glastonbury 2021 Canceled Due to Covid-19 Pandemic

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Russia for me has been a perplexing mixture of astonishingly rich culture and astonishingly bad government. Over at New Left Review, Sophie Pinkham weighs in with NIHILISM FOR OLIGARCHS.

For a century, Russian and then Soviet culture electrified the world. From Tolstoy to Tarkovsky, by way of the Ballets Russes, the Constructivists, Eisenstein and Babel, Russia and its successor reworked and destabilized poetry, the realist novel and the short story, post-figurative art, orchestral music, dance, cinema, theatre, science fiction. During the Cold War, writers like Pasternak, Shalamov, Brodsky and Sinyavsky/Tertz reminded foreign readers that Russian literature had not lost its vitality, even as tamizdat—dissident Soviet works published abroad—was wielded as an anti-communist cudgel. What is the position of Russian culture today? In quantitative terms, Russian cinema still produces some two dozen ‘international festival’ films a year; comparable numbers of contemporary Russian novelists and poets appear in translation. Russian musicians, dancers, and choreographers headline the world’s elite concert halls and ballet theatres. 

In the 1990s, the old landscape of cultural trade unions and government commissions was subjected to brutal shock therapy. The cultural infrastructure of the Soviet period—universities, orchestras, theatres, museums, film schools, fine-arts academies, research institutes, publishing houses—survived in skeletal form, unevenly supported by private funding, to produce new generations of the artistic, literary and cinematic intelligentsia.footnote1 Russian cultural producers desirous of money and prestige scrambled to reinvent themselves. Now one had to cater to the market, play up to the new private cultural prizes, cultivate an online following, find a patron—or resign oneself to scraping by in what was left of the old system.footnote2 Meanwhile the Russian Ministry of Culture remained a crucial funder for the arts, with the attendant problems of political pressure.

I don't want to summarize her complex evaluation of the current situation, so if you are interested, follow the link.

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After all that we need some charming and diverting music, do we not? Here is Hilary Hahn with the Prokofiev Violin Concerto No. 1:

 And for something completely different, here is a production from Opéra Nice of Philip Glass' opera Akhnaten. I warn you, though, if you listen to much of this you will have a bunch of stubborn earworms!