Friday Miscellanea

Here is an entirely laudable project: The rich world of African classical music

It has not been an easy journey for Omordia. Entirely self-funded until this year (when she secured a £15,000 grant from Arts Council England) she has battled scepticism, indifference and – most challenging of all – faced nearly insuperable difficulties tracking down the music itself, which remains mostly unpublished. Yet the 2020 African Concert Series has proved to be an outstanding success, which has sparked widespread interest in this hitherto virtually unknown genre. Launched the previous year with a mission to introduce music by African art composers to the mainstream, the series has already been promised a day of concerts in the 2021-22 season at one of London’s most enlightened concert venues, the October Gallery in Holborn.

Be sure to follow the link to hear some examples. 

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Despite high levels of COVID, Europe is struggling to revive concert life: Dudamel conducts for an audience of 1,000 indoors. What reopening looks like in Spain

BARCELONA, Spain —  Try to imagine Gustavo Dudamel conducting 50 musicians huddled in an orchestra pit, with 75 singers packed on the stage above and 1,000 people on hand just to watch, all indoors.

That’s exactly what maestro Dudamel pulled off on Saturday night — albeit 6,000 miles away from a still-closed Walt Disney Concert Hall — when the Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor premiered a starry Bavarian State Opera production of Verdi’s “Otello” at the Gran Teatre del Liceu.

It was all perfectly legal and earned a healthy round of applause (and, to be fair, a few boos). Dudamel made his Spanish opera debut in an uncut, fully-staged production that many hoped would mark the beginning of the post-COVID-19 era.

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 Colorado Public Radio helps us Discover The Music Jane Austen Loved.

Playing piano was an integral part of Austen’s life. She practiced every morning and acquired music from friends by copying pieces note for note, in addition to purchasing her own sheet music. But scholars like Ray believe that music was more than just a passion, it might have been a linchpin to her writing creativity.

When Austen was 21 years old, she and her family moved to Bath, England. “In Bath, we don’t think she had an instrument to play and she does very little, if any, writing in Bath,” Ray told CPR Classical. “Music scholars of the period who also read Jane Austen like to propose that unless Jane Austen had music in her life, her writing didn’t proceed the way it should.”

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Long Beach Opera Refuses to Play It Safe:

 Long Beach Opera defies the odds in several ways. Founded in 1979, it’s the oldest producing opera company in Los Angeles and Orange County, a region that has not always been fertile ground for the unwieldy art form. (O.C.’s opera fans still get emotional when talking about the messy demise of Opera Pacific in 2008.) But unlike many regional companies that exist to dutifully produce the same dozen or so warhorses, LBO has made its reputation as a risk-taking and iconoclastic organization, exploring new and obscure work with innovative productions and championing up-and-coming talent, all on a budget that would make a shoestring look overfed.

The company’s vision is succinctly summed up in the self-description on its website: “Our artistic vision is to present unconventional works — repertoire which is neglected by other, more mainstream opera companies — ranging from the very beginnings of opera to modern, avant-garde works, emphasizing their theatrical and musical relevance to our time.”

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Music’s Most Treacherous Assignment: Finishing Mozart

The new Mozart-Jones recording is unusual, though, in its choose-your-own-adventure approach. Jones, testing different aspects of Mozartian style, made multiple completions of each fragment, and the album includes some of that variety, giving a heady sense of how open-ended creative production is — how differently symphonies (or paintings or novels) we know and love might have ended up.

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The problem of obtaining a traditional education in the humanities is being satisfied in unusual ways these days as we learn at Law & Liberty:

 Fortunately, the free marketplace of ideas is not yet dead. The unmet demand for a traditional humanities education in elite universities is increasingly being supplied by offshore institutions that set up shop near universities but are not officially part of them. Indeed, the last decade has seen an extraordinary blossoming of private humanities institutes that offer what progressive academe no longer offers:  a space to escape the suffocating taboos of contemporary university life, a place to explore the deep questions of human existence and form friendships in the pursuit of meaningful lives and (dare one say it) truth.

There are now many such foundations across the country, including the Morningside Institute near Columbia, the Elm Institute at Yale, the Abigail Adams Institute at Harvard, the Berkeley Institute at UC Berkeley, and the Zephryr Institute at Stanford. These institutes present themselves as non-political and non-religious but welcome students with religious convictions or unorthodox political views. The Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education currently provides support for 21 entities of this type. Others offshore institutes, like the Collegium Institute at the University of Pennsylvania or Lumen Christi at Chicago, were set up to foster the Catholic intellectual tradition but have become places that support the liberal tradition of humane studies generally. Many of their events are oriented to students with no religious commitments but who value the chance to discuss the great landmarks of the Western intellectual tradition in an atmosphere that treats those works with the respect they deserve.

I really don't see how these institutions are "offshore" though. Off-campus maybe.

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A couple of envois for you. First, if you want to explore some of the African Concert series:

And the Sonata for violin and piano, K. 301, completely composed by Mozart: