Friday Miscellanea

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.