Friday Miscellanea

There's a new history of Western music in town: The Life of Music review – pushing at the boundaries of the classical canon

Nicholas Kenyon’s The Life of Music, a project long in gestation that he completed during the pandemic of 2020, generously embraces all, reminding us that “western music” began some four centuries before Bach and introducing us to composers, several of them women, born in the 1980s. The transformative power of digital music is central to his story. So, too, is that vital, ever-changing relationship between composer and performer: notes on the page are only the starting point.

* * *

118 Years Later, Japan’s Earliest Sound Recordings Still Resonate:

IT IS FEBRUARY 28, 1903, and 12 musicians from the Imperial Household Orchestra are seated in front of a gramophone horn in a Tokyo hotel room. American recording engineer Fred Gaisberg carefully lowers the needle onto a spinning blank disc and the session begins. The fragile melody of a bamboo flute breaks the silence, followed by the slow beat of the conductor’s drum. As the song unfolds, Gaisberg’s chikuonki, or “sound storing machine,” records the ceremonial sound of gagaku. The oldest continuously performed orchestral music in the world, gagaku had been the reserve of Japan’s imperial court for over a thousand years. This recital is the first ever to be committed to disc. “Weird and fascinating indeed,” Gaisberg noted in his diary later that day.

Here are some samples of these recordings:

https://soundcloud.com/user-258102796/sf115-sampler

* * *

 Muti: Pandemic year silenced culture, leaving world stunned

Conductor Riccardo Muti comments on the strange year we have experienced:

Muti called the experience of the past year “an unnatural global experiment” that had “stunned” the world.

“If we truly took into account how we are living, we would all go crazy. We try to maintain the illusion that we are living a normal life. It is the only way to reach the end of this absurd path,’’ he said.

Muti is plunging back into concert life. He is conducting his much-curtailed 50th anniversary tour with the Vienna Philharmonic in Florence on Monday and at Milan’s La Scala on Tuesday, before returning to Ravenna to prepare for festival appearances of his Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra and for the debut of a piece of music written for the Dante anniversary based on the Divine Comedy’s Purgatory canticle.

* * *

One Violinist, One Violin… and Six Armed Guards: Francesca Dego on What It’s Like to Play Paganini’s ‘Il Cannone’ 

When Niccolò Paganini, around 1802, needed a powerful new violin, he found (or was given) an instrument by Guarneri del Gesù. It had been made in 1743, near the end of the great luthier’s career. Paganini called his new instrument “Il Cannone” (the Cannon) and used it for the rest of his life. After his death, it was given to the city of Genoa, where it is exhibited in the town hall.

Il Cannone has its original neck (though it was extended and reset into the body at some point in its life), the plates were never re-graduated, and the instrument has never been polished. The Sala Paganiniana, where Il Cannone resides inside the Palazzo Tursi, is monitored by scientists, experts, and bodyguards. The instrument is played monthly by curator Bruce Carlson and each year by the winner of the Premio Paganini contest for young violinists.

* * *

Musicians Say Streaming Doesn’t Pay. Can the Industry Change?

Like musicians everywhere who were stuck off the road, staring into the abyss of their bank accounts, Shah — whose dark alto and eclectic songs have brought her critical acclaim and a niche following — began to examine her livelihood as an artist. Money from the streams of her songs on services like Spotify and Apple Music was practically nonexistent, she said, adding up to “just a few pounds here and there.” So she joined other disillusioned musicians in organizing online to push for change. Last fall, Shah testified before a Parliamentary committee that has been taking a hard look at the economics of streaming, raising the prospect of new regulation.

* * *

Here is a book that looks at a topic we have often touched on here at The Music Salon: The Opportunists

Louis Menand’s big new book on art, literature, music, and thought from 1945 to 1965 instills the conviction that the 20th century is well and truly over. 

Menand’s inclination is not really to debunk, nor to make or undo reputations. Yet guided by a fascination with the wayward paths to fame, he half-unwittingly sows doubt about the justice of the American rise to artistic leadership in the postwar era. In his erudite account, artistic success owes little to vision and purpose, more to self-promotion, but most to unanticipated adoption by bigger systems with other aims, principally oriented toward money, political advantage, or commercial churn. For the greatness and inevitability of artistic consecration, Menand substitutes the arbitrary confluences of forces at any given moment. 

The paradoxical feature of the book is that its stylish, comprehensive retellings of some of the most famous stories of the most famous individuals, weaving connections between them, made me doubtful and weary of them, and much more interested in minor figures whom we barely glimpse. (Funny that in this book Josef Albers, Ralph Ellison, and Aimé Césaire become such “minor figures”—because the more peripatetic fame seekers like Rauschenberg and Baldwin are pushing their way in front of the camera instead.) As for the construction of art history in “schools” or “groups,” the effect of The Free World’s explain-don’t-judge perspective on canon formation is to leave many of the major art movements looking negligible or meretricious, floated on excesses of cash, power, and mass media.

Obviously a book worth a further look.

* * *

Hmm, deciding on the appropriate envoi today is a bit of a stumper. Here is Riccardo Muti conducting the Orchestra Giovanile Luigi Cherubini in symphonies by Schubert and Dvořák. The program was given in March of this year.