We don't often think of 21st century classical music as being especially fun, but here is a pretty good example, Strum for string quartet by Jessie Montgomery played by the Catalyst Quartet:
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Slipped Disc has a horror story about a pianist: HOW YOUTUBE SCREWS SMALL CREATORS
Marina of The Piano Keys keeps getting her videos taken down by Youtube, constantly getting told that Bach and Mozart are in copyright.
She has no recourse to appeal.
It’s a common complaints, and it’s getting worse.
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HOW DO YOU LISTEN TO MUSIC – WITH YOUR HEAD OR WITH YOUR HEART?
...when you listen to music, do you tend to analyze and think critically about what you are hearing (head)? Or is music listening pretty much an emotional experience for you—something that can tingle your spine or make you cry (heart)?
Perhaps it is because I spent many years as a performing flutist and had to work hard to figure out how to play things well that analysis is so close to the surface for me. Imagine the thought process in working through difficult passages and playing them hundreds of times. “Which fingering should I use for that B flat if I want the passage to be smooth [there are three fingerings to choose from]?” “How can I bring down the pitch of that high A natural so it is in tune with the clarinet?” “Should I play the repeat of that passage differently for more variety?” and so on. Without a great leap, such analysis can migrate to my listening.
Lots of interesting thoughts in that piece. I would add another pair of categories: do you listen to music to soothe you or to energize you?
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The Christian Science Monitor has an article on opera subsidy in Germany:
About a third of all opera performances worldwide take place here, and Germany has cultivated a society where children are schooled in music theory and adults commonly budget for opera season tickets.
“Berlin is a city where I’ve gotten into taxis and said, ‘Take me to Deutsche Oper,’ and the driver launches a discussion about ‘Don Giovanni,’” says Mr. Carico, a freelancer who was formerly salaried at Berlin’s premier opera company. “Music is baked into society here in a way I haven’t experienced in America.”
“What we learned in the crisis was that the public purse was very much willing to keep [opera] alive in Germany,” says Dieter Haselbach, a German cultural sociologist and consultant. “But in the long run the state-funded system covers a structural crisis which is an oversupply of theaters and opera houses, with [growing] competition from digital performances.”
Just a reminder that while audiences may be aging and diminishing in North America that is not the case in Europe.
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Alex Ross has a piece about the revival of the New York Philharmonic: The New York Philharmonic Mourns and Rebuilds.
No one was in a celebratory mood when, on April 14th, the New York Philharmonic returned to indoor live performance for the first time in more than a year. Instead, the atmosphere was meditative, wistful, even mournful. This was fitting, given what the city, the country, and the world have endured since the pandemic began. Working musicians are reeling. Most American orchestral players have had to accept considerable pay cuts, and freelancers are in a desperate state, some of them being forced to give up on music entirely. The composer Nico Muhly spoke for many colleagues this past March when he told the Times, “I don’t think there is a return to normal in the performing arts, I’m sorry to say. We have to make a new normal, and build a lot of it from scratch."
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The New York Times tells us When Bernstein Conducted Stravinsky, Modern Music Came Alive.
Stravinsky and Bernstein were linked in my mind: the world’s greatest living composer and his greatest (and certainly most famous) champion. That reputation has lingered: To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Stravinsky’s death, Sony has released a box set pairing these two artists.
Yet Bernstein’s Stravinsky discography is actually frustratingly small; the Sony set contains only six discs. Even in the concert hall, Bernstein did not conduct the range of Stravinsky works he might have — unlike the comprehensive approach he took to, for example, the symphonies of Mahler.
Read the whole thing for a detailed review of the Bernstein recordings and some interesting recollections.
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For our envoi today, here is Leonard Bernstein conducting the Rite of Spring by Stravinsky with the London Symphony in 1972:
1 comment:
The irony is that Google/youtube is the champion of copyright / data infringement and makes most of their money off it. Since as I understand it Wicca in a pagan religion centering on the moon, anyone who talks about the moon is probably in copyright violation of the pagan lorists. Beware their chants against you. Don't even look at the moon anymore to be safe.
As for musicians playing long dead composers music, if they are not planning to find a new line of work, I would recommend they use youtube simply like corporations use facebook as a place for announcements, ephemera, current news and basic info. Redirect people to the artist website for content or perhaps some other video showing site. It's really better to pay a modest annual fee typically between $30 - 75 to get out of this little game they are playing. BTW if you are a small company don't expect youtube etc to care about actual infringement of your content.
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