The fairly brief prelude to this fugue has some interesting invertible counterpoint, plus a few other interesting things going on, all of which I am going to completely ignore in favor of talking about the fugue.
First of all, the fugue has an insanely long subject of thirty-one notes sprawling over three measures:
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The subject has a conventional answer on the dominant, the original tenor subject answered in the alto voice. Then we have the subject, on A, in the bass, answered in the tenor. As soon as these entries are over we have the subject in inversion in the soprano:
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Answered in the tenor. Then another entry of the inversion in the bass. Two brief measure of developmental episode are followed by the subject right side up in the original key in stretto with itself at the distance of a half-note. This is immediately followed by the answer in stretto with itself, on the dominant, also at the distance of a half-note. Half-way through the passage turns into another episode immediately followed by yet another stretto on the subject at the distance of a half-note between the tenor and the alto. There follows a nice little sequence and then yet another stretto but this time between the soprano and the bass on C, again at the distance of a half-note. The next episode wanders into D minor and has some decorated cadences. There is another statement of the subject inverted and an episode developing motifs from the inversion. Then another stetto, but this time in D minor with the subject in stretto with the answer, again at a half-note separation. This is immediately followed by the subject in inversion in the soprano, in stretto with the answer in the alto. Another little sequence is followed by still another stretto between the inverted subject in the bass, on C, and the inverted subject in the soprano. There is time for one more stretto, this time between the alto with the subject and the soprano with the answer. And that's it. Except Bach takes the time to demonstrate that that rule about the 7th in a dominant 7th chord always resolving down isn't necessarily true. He arrives at a V4/2 chord and follows it with a viiº7 of V chord. There is yet another abbreviated stretto and one final statement of the subject wreathed about with false entries so you almost think he has managed yet another stretto. And then that really is the end.
The prelude to this delightful pair has more invertible counterpoint than most fugues. In that sense it rather resembles some of the two-part inventions that Bach used to demonstrate how to use invertible counterpoint. When I refer to "invertible counterpoint" I mean the kind where one voice is transposed an octave below (or above) the other voice which flips all the intervals: thirds become sixths, seconds become sevenths and fifths become fourths, which is the tricky part as the fifth is a perfectly consonant interval, but fourths often have to be resolved.
Here is the subject and its accompaniment (I have removed the extraneous voices):
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That's a nice charming, simple theme that starts and ends on A. In the very next measure he gives us the same pair, but this time on E and he puts the sixteenth-note theme in the bass and the quarter note bass line in the alto. Then he has a five measure episode developing a theme in thirds in the soprano and alto in eighth notes. Then he has the original pair again, slightly varied, but this time starting on F# and with the original order of the sixteenths on top and the quarters on the bottom. This ends with a cadence in F# minor. Another couple of measures of episode develops the eighth-note theme in a different way followed by the original pair on A, but with the sixteenth-note theme in the bass and the quarters in the alto with a soprano free variation above. This is followed by the original theme and accompaniment, in A again, and in the original orientation. Two measures of scales, cadence and the piece is over. It is a veritable compendium of invertible counterpoint and it is just barely over a minute in duration. The fugue is simple in comparison.
The oddest thing about the fugue is the weird rhythmic configuration of the subject. Here is the subject and the answer with the other voices left out:
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He often develops the middle five notes of the subject, leaving out the first rhythmically isolated note, but apart from that, the fugue unfolds in a fairly usual fashion except the second half is decorated by running sixteenths. Here is Sviatoslav Richter and the score:
When I was a young person at university I used to find especially worthwhile those blue books with the gold lettering from O.U.P., the Oxford University Press. One I especially prized was A History of Greece to 322 B.C. by N. G. L. Hammond (partly because a friend got it autographed for me when he gave a lecture at our university). Why 322 B. C.? That was when Alexander died, of course.
The University of Oxford is considering scrapping sheet music for being 'too colonial' after staff raised concerns about the 'complicity in white supremacy' in music curriculums.
Professors are set to reform their music courses to move away from the classic repertoire, which includes the likes of Beethoven and Mozart, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.
University staff have argued that the current curriculum focuses on 'white European music from the slave period'.
Oxford University has had a pretty good run since being founded in 1096 A.D. But it seems to be coming to an ignominious end. Mind you, it might not be quite as bad as it sounds. If they are just talking about courses for non-music majors, then this is no big deal. I used to teach a very large section of what was basically music appreciation and there was no requirement to learn music notation. But if Oxford still has actual music majors then I presume they are still using notation.
Or, perhaps Oxford is going to focus more on the music of contemporary society. I notice on the same page of the Daily Mail an article on one of those artists, Cardi B, who is showing off her back tattoo. Presumably the students will be "reading" things like this instead of music notation.
I have in the past discussed something I called "new" musicology exemplified by the feminist musicology of Susan McClary. Now we have a new phase that we might call "woke" musicology exemplified by Philip Ewell. I think it is important, if you disagree with this methodology, to not simply dismiss it out of hand as some have done, but to take it seriously enough to examine the problems. Here is a positive statement of Ewell's position: Philip Ewell: Erasing colorasure in American music theory, and confronting demons from our past.
In the history of American music theory, and American classical music, Whiteness has consistently erased nonWhiteness from existence as unimportant in a process I call colorasure, which I based on Kate Manne’s useful concept of herasure when the same happens with women.1 In order to shine a light on notable colorased Black musicians, every February morning I sent out a tweet of a Black African musical figure, usually American, who has been colorased by American music theory—this list of 28 figures appears at the end of this post.
Anyone familiar with Thomas Sowell's book A Conflict of Visions will immediately recognize the nature of this tactic as stemming from the unconstrained vision of society. I recommend examining his book for a full presentation of the two basic visions of society and culture.
But as regards classical music we have a very direct way of countering these kinds of claims: they are always non-specific, that is to say collective and generalized. Ewell is claiming that black composers and theorists have been erased in favor of white ones and then provides a long list of examples. This sort of argument from the statistics of oppression is hard to answer on the face of it. But it contains a deep flaw: it avoids specifics. Instead of claiming, for example, that Zenobia Powell Perry (1908–2004) is as significant or more significant than a white composer such as Dmitri Shostakovich (1906 - 1975), the blanket claim is made that "Whiteness has consistently erased nonWhiteness from existence." The strained jargon is a typical giveaway. There is an agency problem, of course--"Whiteness" doesn't do anything, it is a mere abstraction. There is also a causality problem: what does it mean to "erase nonWhiteness from existence"? Something that obviously did not happen as Prof. Ewell was easily able to produce the names and biographies of twenty-eight black composers and theorists whose erasure was obviously unsuccessful.
But the basic issue is even more fundamental: significant music is produced by highly atypical individuals, not by generic possessors of this or that skin color. As soon as we ask whom do you advocate as a composer on the level of Mozart, Bach or Beethoven, the argument collapses into absurdity. If you have someone of that stature, simply name them. Ah, but then we come up with some figures like Scott Joplin or Miles Davis who are fine musicians, each in their area. But of a different significance than Bach or Mozart. So this really isn't a new argument after all. Just a new tactic to win illegitimate tactical points. And, not incidentally, as a nice hook to hang a career on.
The claim used to be made that only if the music of such and such a composer were more "available" then they would finally be appreciated as they deserved. But now everything is available on YouTube. This is Homage for piano by Zenobia Powell Perry, a pleasant enough piece, but...
For many years, nothing much happened with Tower, as people were getting their music from iTunes and then Spotify. But then an opportunity seemed to arrive: the unexpected comeback of vinyl records. People are rediscovering the pleasures of having a record player. Last year, for the first time since 1986, vinyl outsold compact discs. “Customers seem to want a more physical experience, like touching something, listening to a vinyl, a sense of community,” Zeijdel says. “When we were doing market research, a lot of kids, basically, what they’re doing with vinyl is that’s their alone time and their quiet time. They put the phone away, they listen to a vinyl, and just then decompress.”
Peel is also one of our most exciting crossover composers. Her brilliant new album, Fir Wave – finished over lockdown – explores and develops sounds from a recording by BBC Radiophonic Workshop composers Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson. Her musicbox-heavy score for Game of Thrones: The Last Watch, got an Emmy nomination last summer, while her eerie soundtrack for TV thriller The Deceived won critical acclaim. She’s Paul Weller’s orchestral arranger (she’s been working on his forthcoming LP: “he’s just fab”), and collaborated on a micro-opera about dating in lockdown, Close, with librettist Stella Feehily.
Across Canada, indie opera companies are making the art form cool again; daring and provocative again. Pre-pandemic, the collective mass of these companies was on the verge of something truly special: making opera mainstream, something to be wafted over a crowded pub, or poured out freely in church basements and makeshift venues coast to coast. Insert how the pandemic ruined everything here. Indeed it did. But the eventual return of these companies to live performances will also be a return to realizing a future for opera that is relevant, diverse in representation, and uninhibited in expression.
The opera revolution that is upon us now has been brewing for over a decade. Emerging from the minds of artistic directors and all-around tinkerers, to be realized in the voices of the next generation of artists who are swapping out the old for the new. If only the government grants flowed as freely as these directors' imagination, then Canadian opera would enjoy a more robust share of mainstream entertainment. So here's a friendly reminder to private donors, big and small, to keep in mind the long-struggling companies in your local communities, which lack the fundraising visibility of the larger ones. For it is in their hands that the awesome power of this art form will be passed on to the next generation of opera-goers.
On July 1, 1907, Marcel Proust organized a short concert to follow a festive dinner at the Ritz in Paris. The program, with its interweaving of Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and protomodern strands, exemplifies the impeccable taste of one of the most musically attuned writers in literary history:
Fauré: Violin Sonata No. 1
Beethoven: Andante [unspecified]
Schumann: “Des Abends”
Chopin: Prélude [unspecified]
Wagner: “Meistersinger” Prelude
Chabrier: “Idylle”
Couperin: “Les Barricades mystérieuses”
Fauré: Nocturne [unspecified]
Wagner: Liebestod from “Tristan”
Fauré: Berceuse
Afterward, Proust reported to the composer Reynaldo Hahn, his friend and sometime lover, that the evening had been “perfect, charming.”
In half a century, no composer has attained the fame and stature of Stravinsky, none has dined with ease at the Elysée and the White House. Stravinsky was the last of the Great Composers. Once he was gone, they locked the canon and threw away the key.
Before you contest that proposition, let’s raise a cheer for the closure of the canon. Across the world right now, from the BBC to the Boston Symphony, dead white male composers are being replaced with diverse unknowns amid a confessional wave of collective guilt at our colonial worship of the Great Composers cult. Stravinsky will have his privilege checked at this summer’s music festivals, and about time, too. But I still see newspaper critics saluting him as the “greatest” of his century.
I encourage you to read the whole thing. If nothing else it is a compendium of muck-raking (Stravinsky's affair with Coco Chanel), half-truths (yes, there are some loud bits in the Rite), criticism lite ("He mixed cocktails with Cocteau and aphorisms with Apollinaire until war broke out, when he found there was not much left in his toolkit") and maladroit comparisons (Prokofiev). My three favorite twentieth century composers are actually Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Shostakovich, but it would never occur to me to try and diminish one of them by beating him over the head with another. They are, all three, indispensable. Still, Lebrecht rarely forgoes the opportunity to diminish the quality of music criticism.
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In honor of that Proust concert, two of the pieces. First, Couperin's “Les Barricades mystérieuses,” probably the best-known of his pieces for harpsichord:
And now the Violin Sonata No. 1 by Gabriel Fauré:
And let's end with something by that mythical Great Composer, Stravinsky. This is the Violin Concerto with Patricia Kopatchinskaja:
While the message of the World Naked Bike Ride continues to be about the reduction of fossil fuels and the promotion of alternative, greener forms of transportation like cycling, Dare says the event has grown to include more voices.
“The ride has a primary focus and that is the reduction of oil. The secondary message is about nakedness,” Dare explains, emphasizing that nudity is a constitutional form of legal protest in Canada. “This ride stops traffic, and people get the message; less gas, more ass!”
All Montrealers who wish to participate are permitted, and nudity is optional.
More good news in Montreal is that public events like concerts and theatres can reopen as of March 26.
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As a current project I am reading a couple of Shakespeare's comedies starting with Twelfth Night which begins with this lovely speech by Duke Orsino:
If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe'er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.
Let's hope for a little "high fantastical" in all our lives as we slowly return to normal.
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For a suitably celebratory envoi here is Le Concert Spirituel with Marches pour les trompetes by Marc-Antoine Charpentier:
The Guardian has a very favorable review of Danny Driver's new recording of the Ligeti etudes for piano:
The influences shaping these pieces are those that permeate all of his later work, after it changed direction so decisively in the early 1980s – from the polyrhythmic player-piano studies of Conlon Nancarrow to the music of sub-Saharan Africa, chaos theory to the minimalism of Steve Reich. In the Études, Ligeti effectively created a new pianistic vocabulary, while remaining exuberantly himself – the moments when the music seems to evaporate in the highest reaches of the keyboard, or flounders in its lowest depths, find orchestral equivalents throughout his music of more than 40 years.
Danny Driver has been including groups of the pieces in his recital programmes for some years now. It’s clearly music that he admires hugely and understands profoundly...
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Slipped Disc has some very interesting reflections by French pianist Lucas Debargue:
‘I say something what might sound provocative. Pandemic was very damaging for culture, but it was very good for art. Art is a spiritual matter, it’s a matter of life and death. It’s not only entertainment. Of course, for entertainment it was disaster – and it’s still disaster. But art is dealing with inner life, what happens in one’s soul. It has nothing to do with surface, how famous you are, how many people read your books or listen to your CD.
‘Artists for me are like family who are keeping some very old spiritual values on earth. They are also kind of doctors. For me, an artist should be able to live being aware of big problems like this pandemic now and still create as much as possible. Even when in these horrible conditions, when you live in very little space – you can still have the space inside of you.
“It took 25 years for me to reach a point in my career where I was constantly preparing for the next orchestra concert, opera performance, or recording session. Not having goals to work toward really messes with your head. The last year has been devastating. Everyone is depressed. There’s no adrenaline rush, no companionship, no artistic satisfaction. If you’re going to remain disciplined under these conditions you have to dig really deep.”
The Metropolitan Opera House has been dark for a year, and its musicians have gone unpaid for almost as long. The players in one of the finest orchestras in the world suddenly found themselves relying on unemployment benefits, scrambling for virtual teaching gigs, selling the tools of their trade and looking for cheaper housing. About 40 percent left the New York area. More than a tenth retired.
As students, Fulford and Gould would argue about music. Fulford was acquiring a taste for jazz and other forms of popular music, which Gould dismissed. Having to argue with someone as informed and quirkily opinionated as Gould forced Fulford into becoming an ad hoc critic, thus beginning a second career on top of journalism.
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Which brings us to our envoi and there really is only one likely choice. Here is Danny Driver playing two Ligeti etudes in a recent Wigmore Hall streamed concert. This clip will become unavailable in a couple of months, so listen now. The etudes begin at around the 33:15 mark:
I'm a big fan of the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev and I just stumbled across a documentary about him, that, while it is the usual somewhat hagiographic treatment, does actually reveal quite a lot about him and what it is about his conducting.
Wow, it has been two weeks since I last posted a Bach prelude and fugue. I guess I was busy or something. I do want to finish Book One of the Well-Tempered Clavier because I have a new project in mind. I haven't been paying much attention to Bartók in recent years and I feel it is time to rectify that. So, as soon as I finish the Bach project you are going to see a lot of Bartók.
But first, on to the prelude and fugue. This polyphonic pair is characterized by, among other things, invertible counterpoint. I have written about this in the past, but this provides an occasion to review. Invertible counterpoint occurs when you take the upper voice and make it the lower voice and vice versa. This is feasible for most intervals, minor thirds become major sixths and seconds become sevenths, for example, though you do have to watch how you resolve dissonant intervals. But the problem is fifths, a perfectly consonant interval which become fourths, an often dissonant interval requiring resolution. So there you go, just avoid fifths. Easier said than done, of course. Here are the first two measures of the G# minor prelude showing how it is done:
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As you can see, the upper voice melody in measure one becomes the bass in measure two. The bass in measure one becomes, an eight-note delayed, the highest voice in measure two and the inner voice migrates up an octave to become the alto. Easy as really difficult pie as Willow would say. No, it's not so difficult, but you will notice that Bach avoids fifths here. There follows a series of sequences ending with a cadence on the sub-dominant, C#. More modulatory sequences take us in the direction of the sub-dominant of the sub-dominant, i.e. F#. A lot of the prelude is simply development, in different harmonic contexts, of that little sixteenth note motif we hear at the beginning. This leads to a lovely descending fifths sequence from measure 19 to 22:
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Oops, sorry, I omitted the sharp after the A, it should be A# to D#. After a bit more playing around with the basic motif, we have a leisurely cadence with a tierce de Picardie and Bach has taught his sons, and us, how to do invertible counterpoint and sequence. Not bad for a prelude lasting just over one minute.
The fugue is a very organic one with no fancy counterpoint. But it is all about the subject and two motifs from it that are developed in five different episodes. Here is that subject with the motifs shown:
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There are two interesting motifs in this short subject and Bach develops both of them. The basic layout of the fugue is entry of all four voices in subject-answer pairs (tonal answer) followed by an episode on motif B, which is often accompanied by secco chords. Then there is a solitary answer followed by another episode on motif B. we have a pair of entries, subject and answer with a new episode, this time on motif A. A couple of odd entries follow: the subject on D# (real) and then on F# (tonal). There is a final entry of the subject, on G# followed by another episode on motif B and the final cadence.
This fugue is all about deconstructing the subject and developing the resulting motifs. No strettos, no augmentation, just that subject and what Bach does with it.
The musicians who played these venues, the actors who can’t go on stage, the visual artists whose exhibitions were cancelled, are self-employed freelancers and independent contractors. Some jobs in their fields offer secure, steady incomes – the administrators, curators and even some technicians are staffers with large and small organizations – but being an actual creator often represents a Darwinian gamble. A tiny number will become stars; the rest will struggle to get by. That economic gap between the institutions and the actual artists, often a source of tension in the cultural community, is now widening. There’s an iceberg effect: The tip features brave arts groups offering online concerts, virtual gallery tours or remote learning. It’s individuals who are under water.
While many administrators will survive, it is the actual creative artists that are hardest hit and many will be forced to simply leave the profession. Even very established performing artists have seen nearly all of their income simply disappear. The bottom line is that a very large proportion of the most creative artists in the Canadian performing arts will simply be gone for good, working in some other field that will enable them to actually make a living.
Following one miscellanea with another, I offer a public service announcement. At one point in my life I was a diligent practitioner of the art of never doing today what you could put off to tomorrow. This even, or especially, extended to my mailbox. I was chronically short of money so I would avoid looking in my mailbox, which would contain overdue bills, until it became stuffed with unread correspondence. I guess the equivalent today would be avoiding looking at your email for weeks on end. This is a habit I have managed to completely erase, I am happy to say. Partly as a result of spending time in the business world I have learned to get things done promptly and this includes all manner of little tasks. The greatest benefit is that if you do something today instead of putting it off for several days, you won't be worrying about getting it done over those several days.
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I mentioned a while back that one of my hobbies is fountain pens which I really enjoy journaling with as opposed to those horrible ballpoints. Here are some pens:
From left to right, a Lamy 2000, Lamy AL Star, Pilot Explorer, Moonman T1, Baoer stainless steel and finally, for all musical tasks, a GraphGear 1000 0.7 mechanical pencil. The Lamy pens are from Germany, the Pilot is Japanese and the Moonman and Baoer are Chinese pens. The mechanical pencil is also Japanese. These latter have a real fixation on stationary and produce the most amazing range of paper and ink products.
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A recent sketch. I keep seeing articles about how the biggest problem many people have is stress and anxiety. I don't seem to have a lot of that myself, but I find that doing sketches is very satisfying and if I had a lot of stress, it would probably relieve it.
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I'm reading a book on the structure of Bartók's music right now and the one thing it is convincing me of is to do my own analysis of one of his pieces. The one I have in mind is his Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. A really wonderful piece not least for starting a whole new trend in naming pieces. The piece was written in 1936. Here are two performances. The first, for people who like to watch the performers, is Andrés Orozco-Estrada conducting the Frankfurt Radio Symphony:
The second, for people who like to follow the score, is Ferenc Fricsay conducting the RIAS Symphony.
I like to kick off the miscellanea with something really odd, so here is a heavy-metal version of the Deutsches Requiem by Brahms:
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Here, from Slipped Disc, is a depressingly uplifting video explaining why the BBC Proms is really cool and hip and not all about that dreary classical music! From the comments:
The founder of the Proms, Robert Newman, said “I am going to run nightly concerts and train the public by easy stages. Popular at first, gradually raising the standard until I have created a public for classical and modern music.” It looks as though the BBC is going into reverse: lovers of classical music are being weaned away from the likes of Bartok, Debussy, Hindemith, Kodaly, Mahler, Rachmaninov, Schoenberg (to name a few of the modern composers Henry Wood championed), and trained to appreciate, by easy stages, Acid House or Slime Punk or Igbo Rap
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Sviatoslav Richter was a pianist of unparalleled gifts: a master technician who hated to practice, especially technique. He swore he never practiced scales. When he was young he much preferred reading through the scores of Wagner operas. Here is a rare recording of him playing the Sonata, op. 110 by Beethoven made in 1951. Courtesy of Slipped Disc.
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From Slipped Disc, the progressive steamroller flattens another couple of pieces of classical music: Golliwog's Cakewalk and Le petit negre by Debussy. The clip, more easily viewed in the home page, is from the Special Music School at Kaufman Music Center in New York. The comments, as always, are enjoyable:
It is sad and ironic that, while all sorts of efforts are being made to uncover historical Black presence in Europe, evidence of Black musical influence on important European composers is being air-brushed away like this, instead of being put into its contemporary context. Was Debussy racist? Discuss.
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Here is an interesting example of pop music typography from The New Yorker: Genre Is Disappearing. What Comes Next? I used to love those absurdly long lists of pop music genres that included things like "grindcore" and "psychedelic death metal." All disappearing now?
What we mean by “pop” or “jazz” or “country” changes regularly; genre is not a static, immovable idea but a reflection of an audience’s assumptions and wants at a certain point in time. The scholar Carolyn R. Miller defines genre as being marked by some “typified rhetorical action”—a repeating feature that handily satisfies our expectations or desires. That rhetorical action might be musical (a proper twelve-bar blues, for example, is played on a guitar and built around a 1-4-5 chord progression), but it’s just as likely to be rooted in aesthetics (country singers wear cowboy hats and boots) or attitude (punk bands consist of miscreant anarchists). “Genre is always a blending of both formal structure and cultural context,” Ehren Pflugfelder, a professor of writing at Oregon State University, told me recently. “This may be the most frustrating thing about genre for those who want it to be stable over time. What makes something country music is often just as much about what the audience for that genre expects it to be as it is the chord progression, instruments, time signature, or lyrical content.”
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On the one hand Juilliard has just been rated the number one music school in the world by a UK company, but on the other hand, Juilliard Must Modernize, or It Will Disappear according to Rolling Stone. Well gosh.
Intrigued by the idea of stepping out of classical or jazz genres, I attended a non-traditional music camp at the Berklee College of Music in Boston in 2013. Each instructor taught us how to apply classical and bluegrass rooted techniques to perform funk, hip-hop, and pop on our stringed instruments. One class led by a Juilliard graduate, Tracy Silverman, taught a series of techniques introducing his “Strum Bowing Method,” showing violinists how to groove at rock-n-roll. The scene was electrifying. Creativity flowed from room to room with palpable energy; it felt like I was taking a walk through the eclectic troubadour scene in New York’s Washington Square Park as students joyfully riffed away on chords.
I can just feel the joy.
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Also at The New Yorker, Alex Ross explains how music appreciation is cool again, but this time it mixes in pop music:
A typical “Switched On Pop” episode pairs a contemporary hit with a musical topic—modal scales, descending bass lines, modulations, and so on. The strategy that Sloan used when he taught harmony by way of “Call Me Maybe” remains in play. Because the songs are so familiar to much of the audience, the hosts can wallow in technical lingo without fear of losing people. A sly bait and switch is at work: the conversation often wanders far from the song in question, ranging across pop-music history or delving into the classical past. For me, the switch operated in the opposite direction. For the sake of listening to Sloan and Harding musicologically jabber away, I received an education in the mysteries of the modern Top Forty.
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Lots of interesting stuff this week! For our envoi we have Claude Debussy playing his own suite Children's Corner in a 1913 recording. The last movement is the aforementioned Golliwog's Cakewalk.
To my mind, great works can only be born within the history of their art and as participants in that history. It is only inside history that we can see what is new and what is repetitive, what is discovery and what is imitation; in other words, only inside history can a work exist as a value capable of being discerned and judged. Nothing seems to me worse for art than to fall outside its own history, for it is a fall into the chaos where aesthetic values can no longer be perceived.
That's it, just two quotes. Oh and an unusual envoi. This is Katalin Koltai playing "The Night's Music" from Out of Doors by Bartók. On guitar. With some very unusual custom capos.
UPDATE: Here is another quote from Kundera about composition:
The art of complex and rigorous composition did not become a commanding need until the first half of the nineteenth century. The novel’s form as it came into being then, with its action concentrated in a narrow time span, at a crossroads where many stories of many characters intersect, demanded a minutely calculated scheme of the plot lines and scenes: before beginning to write, the novelist therefore drafted and redrafted the scheme of the novel, calculated and recalculated it, designed and redesigned as that had never been done before. One need only leaf through Dostoyevsky’s notes for The Possessed: in the seven notebooks that take up 400 pages of the Pléiade edition (the novel itself takes up 750), motifs look for characters, characters look for motifs, characters vie for the status of protagonist; Stavrogin should be married, but “to whom?” wonders Dostoyevsky, and he tries to marry him successively to three women; and so on. (A paradox that only seems one: the more calculated the construction machinery, the more real and natural the characters. The prejudice against constructional thinking as a “nonartistic” element that mutilates the “living” quality of characters is just sentimental naïveté from people who have never understood art.)
I don't have a COVID tag, in fact I resist having one, so this one takes "music performance." I just heard, via Scott Adams, that Rasmussen Reports is saying that two-thirds of Americans over 65 have been vaccinated. If that's true, then maybe we will have herd immunity by the summer. Which should me that we should be able to return to concert life soon after. Salzburg Festival? Well, maybe.
I have been saying that the scars this pandemic is leaving on the music world are deep and long-lasting and I see no reason to alter that observation, but perhaps by this summer we can start the long road back. Most musicians have not been giving concerts, not even streaming ones, for over a year and even if they have kept up their technique, they will still be rusty. Also, I have seen figures a while back saying that 30% of musicians have simply left the profession. By now it could be a lot more. 50%? Who knows?
The front rank players will come back strong, but the second rank and lower ones I worry about. They may have simply lost the urge to perform after having it denied for so long. Plus, even when normal concerts return I suspect there will be far fewer venues available. We will see, but I predict a long road back.
Here is a lieder recital streamed from Wigmore Hall yesterday with Carolyn Sampson and Joseph Middleton. Wigmore has been one of the most productive venues during these dark days. This is a concert for Spring:
Well that week just zipped by! I had a lot on this week in various areas. One important musical event was the completion, in draft form at least, of my piano piece "Remembering What Is To Come." I put it up in a post last night. For the video I am using some recent sketches.
But on to the miscellanea! First up is some excellent advice from Philip Roth on how to have a career as a creative artist:
...never marry; have no children; lawyer up early; keep tight control of your cover designs; listen to the critics while scorning them publicly; when it comes to publishers, follow the money; never give a minute to a hostile interviewer; avoid unflattering photographers; figure out what you’re good at and keep doing it, book after book, with just enough variation to keep them guessing; sell out your friends, sell out your family, sell out your lovers, and sell out yourself; keep going until every younger writer can be called your imitator; don’t stop until all your enemies are dead.
Put simply, Hipgnosis raises money from investors and spends it on acquiring the intellectual property rights to popular songs by people like Mark Ronson, Timbaland, Barry Manilow and Blondie. In a fast-growing market, what sets Hipgnosis apart from competitors is its founder’s bona fides as a veteran A&R man, manager and record label CEO. Like an old-school music mogul, Mercuriadis sells his brand by selling himself. Unlike those moguls, he’s a buff, teetotal vegan with spartan tastes. “The only material thing that I really care about is vinyl,” he says. “And Arsenal football club.” He looks rather like a rock-concert security guard: shaven head, burly torso, plain black T-shirt, hawkish gaze. Mark Ronson calls him “the smartest guy in the room”.
The world is watching. 30% of the members of the MET Orchestra can no longer sustain a living in New York City due to being faced with no salary from the Metropolitan Opera since April 1, 2020. This number will likely climb higher as the crisis continues.
The Met’s global reputation and the cultural landscape of New York City would be devastated by the loss of artists of this calibre – this orchestra hosts some of the best players in the world. These musicians have a cultural and economic impact beyond that of bringing great opera to the world, they are teachers and mentors too. They contribute to the communities they live in by inspiring people in all areas and stages of life.
This is from an open letter from the Vienna Philharmonic. Now generalize this to nearly every musician in the entire world. Music has sustained and is sustaining a blow like none other in its entire history. Perhaps all will return to normal after we achieve herd immunity sometime in the summer, but I suspect that the world of music will have scars that will take a very long time to disappear.
There are between 15,000 to 20,000 hits on the website every day. Musicians, researchers, students and music lovers who are trying to deepen their knowledge of the unparalleled composer. They look for performances to listen to, discuss the various recordings, and learn about the performers. There are also lots of posts to the site, some from performers announcing a new recording but also many others who are part of the group effort to constantly increase the knowledge of Johann Sebastian Bach.
“In all forms of art, great leaps forward have happened at times when it didn’t seem to be possible. The greatest artists have always made art in difficult circumstances and we are part of that tradition.”
It is the first time in more than 15 years that ENO has staged the Ring. The previous production was directed by Phyllida Lloyd and before that, ENO’s only fully completed cycle was one by the celebrated Wagnerian conductor Reginald Goodall in the early 1970s.
In a co-production with the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the plan is to stage all four parts over five years at ENO’s vast home, the Coliseum, London’s largest theatre. It will begin with the Valkyrie this autumn. Rhinegold will premiere in 2022-23 followed by a reprise of the Valkyrie and new productions of Siegfried and Twilight of the Gods.
An ambitious £288m concert hall that was supposed to be “the Tate Modern of classical music” has been scrapped by the City of London Corporation, which said the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic made the plan impossible to complete.
The Centre for Music was billed as being an acoustically perfect 2,000-seat concert hall for the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) and would have had restaurants, commercial space and a smaller venue for jazz performances.
The City of London confirmed on Thursday, however, that the project had been axed.
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We almost never have any music by Wagner as an envoi, so let's change that. Here is the Prologue and Act I (of Twilight of the Gods) in a concert staging by Opera North:
And for something completely different here is the cantata "Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben" BWV 147 by Bach from the Netherlands Bach Society:
Just finished this last weekend and I've been tidying up some details. There may be more pieces to go with this one. The illustrations are sketches I have been doing during the same time I was composing the music, but I claim no connection between them.
