The truth about opera singers is that food and drinks are pretty much the only topic we discuss. When they know you’ve been hired to sing in a new opera house, your musician friends will give you their list. Where to get the best täffelspitz with cream spinach if you’re in Vienna. The address of Pavarotti’s cook in Genova. The best wine bar in Madrid. Believe me, nobody knows food and drinks like an opera singer.
This is so, so true!
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Can Beethoven temper the political tensions between U.S. and China?
In the case of classical music, as Beethoven in Beijing illustrates, the ties that bind our two countries are historically driven and deeply emotional. They will be tested, but hopefully, they will survive.
The documentary revolves around the Philadelphia Orchestra’s historic 1973 visit to China, the first by a U.S. orchestra. It followed President Richard Nixon’s groundbreaking trip to Beijing that established diplomatic ties with the country. Classical music had been banned as “decadent” during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, but the orchestra’s visit, with Eugene Ormandy conducting Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, became a milestone in U.S.-Chinese relations.
And as a footnote to that we could mention Sviatoslav Richter's first US tour in 1960 at the height of the Cold War,
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Two Years Later: An Update on the Organs at Notre-Dame de Paris
In December 2020, the nearly 8,000 pipes of the grand orgue at Notre-Dame were taken to be cleaned, so the lead dust that had settled on them could be removed. What does this entail?
It wasn't only the pipes, but nearly everything has been removed and taken down: the console, the windchests, the wind trunks, actions, pipe conveyances, etc. This took the organbuilders almost five months. The treatment of each component will be different according to the element and material to be restored: cleaning and decontamination of the metal pieces (pipes, conveyances, wind trunks), application of a layer of paint to the wooden parts, and replacement of all leather parts, even those that are new. Leather cannot be cleaned except through the simple application of water, which is obviously not ideal for the material. The plan is that the organ will be completely reinstalled for the reopening of the Cathedral in April 2024.
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DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND FUNDING NEW MUSIC IN THE ’90S
The music that became subject to Culture Wars controversy––such as the rock and hip-hop targeted by the PMRC and Christian fundamentalist organizations––seemed far from the world of contemporary composition. Indeed, in an October 1989 article, the young composer David Lang expounded on the apparent lack of significance of the so-called “Helms amendment”––an attempt by the right-wing senator Jesse Helms to restrict federal funding to art that was deemed obscene or indecent––for the world of new music. “Artists like to feel that their work is challenging enough to be controversial,” he wrote. “Photographers, painters, filmmakers and the like can imagine victimization at the hands of Congress as a badge of honor. They are Art-martyrs to the First Amendment.”
“With all of the excitement,” Lang fretted, “it is disturbing that so little of this controversy is aimed at composers. Are we not controversial? Why isn’t Congress rushing to censor the subversive power of modern music? It is possible that we are doing something wrong.”
That is just a brief excerpt and it is worth looking at the whole essay. There are all sorts of interesting questions that surround government subsidy of the arts. Some subsidies are likely to be challenged by conservative politicians on behalf of their constituents who might not be comfortable with art that could be seen as obscene or sacrilegious. But this is just one facet of a larger problem that is most keen in non-European western nations: Canada and the US simply do not have the deep cultural traditions that would support heavy subsidies of art by government, while in Europe this is fairly uncontroversial, at the present, at least. The very notion that art, in order to be taken seriously, has to be subversive pretty much excludes it from government subsidy, does it not? In Canada the problem is addressed by making arts subsidies through an organization, the Canada Council, that is at arm's length from government. In that case what has happened is that arts funding is determined by an insider group that essentially funds one another and their friends. Funding of the arts is always pretty problematic and I frequently long for the days when eccentric, but educated members of the nobility funded whatever art they liked...
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Science now says you can judge people by their taste in music after all
In 2016, University of Cambridge music psychologist David Greenberg performed a study with his colleagues called “The Song Is You,” aimed at evaluating how the main three dimensions of music, “arousal” (the energy level of music), “valence” (the spectrum from sad to happy emotions in music) and “depth” (the amount of sophistication and emotional depth in music), are linked to the Big Five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
Their results are what one might generally expect — self-assured people were more likely to enjoy positive music, while those who seek excitement prefer high arousal music. Greenberg says that those who were defined as open minded had not only a more general preference for music overall, but were also more open to music that spanned genres or might be defined as “genre-fluid.”
The article is quite a lengthy summary of a lot of recent research on music from a psychological standpoint.
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Here is a performance of the Appassionata Sonata by Beethoven by Sviatoslav Richter at Carnegie Hall in 1960. Over the course of a month, interspersed by recitals and concerto performances elsewhere, he gave eight different solo recitals at Carnegie Hall.
12 comments:
Having read up a little on Cold War era policies foreign and domestic I am not so sure the explanation for the comparative lack of arts culture in the highbrow sense is a lack of tradition. Douglas Shadle has been chronicling symphonic works in the U.S. that were well-received at one point and dismissed soon after (Florence Price, for instance; and I'm reading his new book on Dvorak's 9th). What I think arts advocates on both the left and the right have often blundered with arts history is failing to frame it in terms of the Cold War, which is why I appreciated Richard Taruskin's Ox for being the first long-form work I ever read that made the Cold War front and center in the last two volumes.
Philip Jeffery wrote something at National Affairs about how Cold war policies shaped U.S. arts policies to the point where the end of the Cold War catalyzed the crisis in arts funding that came to be viewed as "culture war".
https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/a-cultural-agenda-for-our-time
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2019/06/philip-jeffery-in-national-affairs.html
I eventually cross-referenced that National Affairs piece with a piece at The Baffler on how the right is habitually upset that the left and progressives (not actually the same thing) seem so prevalent in the arts without, yet the right rarely ever has an alternative vision of what the arts can do. That would be because, I'm proposing, the demise of the Soviet Union created a worse crisis for conservatives in the arts than for progressives because while progressives could keep pushing for the progressive visions they had during the Cold War conservatives were suddenly stuck without any sense of a point in the arts because, after all, we "won" the Cold War so simply teaching the canonized arts standards was the order of the day if you were going to bother with the arts at all.
A conservative case for restoring a synergistic relationship between popular styles and fine art traditions was something I've wanted to do more or less all my life but brand-name conservatives like Roger Scruton didn't get around to even considering such an idea until the last ten years of his life. At least he did but in terms of his cultural legacy that was too late and it matters not a whit if conservative artists keep going with the Scruton of the 1990s rather than the Scruton of the last ten years who conceded that using jazz to revitalize classical music would be a good idea. The almost meta irony there is that the composers who had been doing that for something like forty years were in the former Soviet bloc countries like Nikolai Kapustin.
when music has been controversial it has generally been controversial for extra-musical or non-musical reasons. William Byrd's underground Catholic liturgical music was illegal during the establishment of the Anglican church for religious and political reasons despite the fact that Byrd's own Anglican music came to almost single-handedly (with help from Tallis) define the English Elizabethan era choral sound! Byrd is an interesting historical case study of someone who was a capable musician and composer whose works ended up on both sides of the formal censure/approval divide.
I think Lang's lament was most likely basically misplaced, that said I'm planning to read William Robin's book as I've read some of his earlier work by way of Ethan Iverson and found it interesting. Plus, as a native Northwesterner, I confess I can't feel all that bad that people on the East Coast have had some kind of crisis of relevance. I was sick of Nirvana as soon as they were popular. :)
Thanks so much for the link to the Phillip Jeffery essay; I read it with great interest. I think he has a lot of excellent policy suggestions. The whole idea of focussing government support for the arts on the local level and on young, aspiring artists could do a great deal to heal cultural wounds in the US:
"At the moment, cultural communication, values, and artifacts all flow from urban to rural America, and a top priority has to be making that one-way flow of communication two-way. Imagine a grant program in which the NEA sends young aspiring artists to rural locations and shrinking, struggling small towns for an extended period of time in exchange for college-debt relief. It would require participants to use their preferred medium to document the people they're around, instead of artificially romanticizing, politicizing, or disparaging them from a distance. The program would likely have to attach some strings to encourage attention to, and respect for, local detail..."
so I finally found someone posted a video that has a recording(s) of the complete Igor Rekhin 24 Preludes and Fugues for solo guitar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZ_Q2AsxzzU
It took me a while to compare the performances to the two scores I got years ago but Rekhin's cycle is online
I'll have a listen when I have a bit more time.
the cycle is two whole hours long and I've only listened to half of it myself.
I listened to just the first few pieces. The performance seems a bit shaky, but I didn't get the strong urge to listen to the rest. The structures seem rather wayward.
I plan to write more about them later but my sense is that Rekhin paid a lot of attention to cycle-wide gestural and thematic details at the expense of making each prelude and fugue as a pair of pieces cohesive. It's of historical importance but Matanya Ophee mentioned he passed on publishing them. So the cycle may be of more historical importance than it gives by way of aesthetic pleasure compared to other cycles. The Koshkin cycle and the Dhzparidze cycles are both a lot more fun for me.
I also admit a no-surprise partiality to the cycle I composed from 2006-2012. I'm hoping P&Fs 25-48 keep building on what I've managed to do earlier.
I quite like what I have heard from Koshkin, but I haven't heard any recent works.
I'm hoping Selyutina can record the second half of Koshkin's cycle in the next few years. I've had the scores since they got published and am waiting to blog through the second half when that gets recorded.
The set I wrote I arranged for duet even though it's ideally a solo cycle. Daniel Estrem recorded the duet version back in 2015.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzYyzirE6u6OeJ5aHX7NTnmYSho7XmZ7k
Dzhaparidze's cycle has been given a good recording by Esteban Colucci but the cycle isn't published as yet.
I listened to your prelude and fugue in F minor and liked them much more than the Rekhin! Much more faithful to the prelude and fugue genre style.
Thanks for listening to the F minor P&F.
Leonard Meyer had a cogent and short observation that if you're going to call something a "prelude" it has to be a prelude to something, like a table of contents in relationship to what comes in the rest of the book. Rekhin's preludes and fugues have a lot of moments where the prelude will be in one style and then the fugue is in another style and post-Berio eclecticism pervades any given prelude and fugue. I'm not against stylistic shifts within movements, I've done that, but the core issues with Rekhin's cycle that makes it more of a historically interesting footnote than a cycle I've wanted to blog through piece by piece are:
1) his fugue subjects often don't have hooks/aren't hooks.
2) his preludes and fugues often have little connecting them across any individual prelude and fugue but
3) he clearly cycles through gestures across fugue subjects and preludes that are intended to give the cycle an over-arching cyclical unity
The problem with going for cycle-wide unity is it depends on each section of the unity keeping my attention. Castelnuovo-Tedesco went the other way by having no cyclical unity but having impeccable connections between each prelude and each fugue in his prelude and fugue cycle for guitar duet. Koshkin clearly gets the idea that Meyer articulate about how a prelude and whatever comes after have to have some obvious and compelling connection, whether it's Koshkin's preludes and fugues or Prelude & Waltz.
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