The New York Times has a fascinating article on Baroque theater design: How a Family Transformed the Look of European Theater.
From Lisbon to St. Petersburg, Russia, the Bibienas dominated every major court theater in Baroque Europe. Their innovations in perspective opened new dramatic possibilities, and their lavish projects cost vast sums, with single spectacles running budgets of up to $10 million in today’s dollars. Writing to Alexander Pope of an opera performed outdoors in Vienna to consecrate the Austrian crown prince’s birth in 1716, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu described a massive stage constructed over a canal. Gilded flotillas sailed beneath it — a spectacle, she wrote, “so large that it is hard to carry the eye to the end of it.”
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One of the most important roles in a symphony orchestra is that of the concertmaster. His or her job is to lead the orchestra from within the orchestra which includes leading the pre-concert tuning as well as marking the bowings in the string parts and other jobs that I likely am unfamiliar with, not being an orchestral player. Given the importance of the job, it pays pretty well. In the leading orchestras in the US that is around half a million a year in salary. Here is a piece on the details: WHAT CONCERTMASTERS EARN.
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Slipped Disc highlights a reader comment: NEXT THEY’LL BAN MADAM BUTTERFLY.
An important US industry insider mentioned to me that he might never get to hear Madama Buttefly again – an opera that is very much a target of the “racially-correct” crowd, and that an Asian mezzo-soprano he knows and who has sung Suzuki for many companies is now seeing her many future jobs singing the role being pulled away. I know that this a very sensitive topic right now, but hope that opera companies (especially in the US and UK), while working towards diversity and inclusivity, do their part to defend the art form. I also hope that some of the activists, sometimes in their zeal to increase racial justice and inclusivity in the business, realise that some of their demands might decimate the entire industry – in other words, everything will be just and politically correct, but there might not be so much of it left.
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Alex Ross has a long string of excellent pieces over at The New Yorker showing his range as a researcher as well as a writer. The latest is The Musical Mysteries of Josquin:
The murkiness of his existence notwithstanding, Josquin attained an enduring renown of a kind that no previous composer had enjoyed. In 1502, the Venetian printer Ottaviano Petrucci, the chief pioneer of movable-type music publishing, issued a volume of sacred motets, with Josquin’s four-voice setting of “Ave Maria . . . virgo serena” (“Hail Mary . . . serene virgin”) at its head. The piece must have cast a spell, and the beginning shows why. The highest voice, the superius, sings a graceful rising-and-falling phrase: G C C D E C. Each of the lower voices presents the motif in turn. After it arrives in the bass, the superius enters again on a high C, forming an octave pillar. A second phrase unfurls in similar fashion, then a third, with the voices staggered so that only two move together at a time. Eventually, the scheme changes, the texture thickens, and the descending order of vocal entries is reversed. About a minute in, all four voices coalesce to form a gleaming C-major sonority. The entire opening gives the illusion of breadth and depth, as though lamps have been lit in a vaulted room. Music becomes a space in which you walk around in wonder.
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TANIA LEÓN ORCHESTRAL WORK STRIDE AWARDED 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN MUSIC
Tania León has been awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her orchestra work Stride which received its world premiere in a performance by The New York Philharmonic conducted by Jaap van Zweden in David Geffen Hall in New York City on February 13, 2020. According to the Pulitzer Prize guidelines, the annually awarded $15,000 prize is for “a distinguished musical composition by an American that has had its first performance or recording in the United States during the previous year.” The Pulitzer citation describes Stride as “a musical journey full of surprise, with powerful brass and rhythmic motifs that incorporate Black music traditions from the US and the Caribbean into a Western orchestral fabric.”
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One of the best music blogs around is Ted Gioia's over at substack. Here is a sample: How to Punish Your Neighbor with Music (Plus Other Annoyances & Amusements):
I’m still trying to wrap my head around Bitches Brew beer which presents “a mix of traditional African mead and English stout… chock full of aromas of vanilla, licorice and chocolate.”
My considered judgment is that nothing associated Miles Davis ought to be described as vanilla.
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Beauty and the Blob is a really interesting piece over at Tablet. Here is a sample:
Not only will beauty not save us, Oppenheimer warns, but it will be a struggle to save beauty from “the blob of curators, academics, review boards, arts organizations, governmental agencies, museum boards, and funding institutions that [have] claimed for themselves almost total control” of the meaning and value of art. The blob, as Oppenheimer describes it, is the network of powers that includes not only the enforcers of an ever-narrower vision of “woke” political correctness on the arts, but also those who contend with that vision either by calling on art to defend supposedly traditional values, or themselves defend art by speaking only of its formal, technical qualities. The blob is all the institutions and discourses that divert our attention away from beauty—the essence of art.
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The obvious choice for an envoi for today is something by the wonderful Josquin des Prez. This is his Ave Maria Virgo Serena:
I think I can maybe go one worse than Ted Gioia, I'm afraid. I was calling about an issue (I can't remember what) but I remember hearing Miles Davis' Kind of Blue as the hold music. It may or may not have been a government office.
ReplyDeleteEver since then I've wondered whether or not a lot of people hate jazz who might not otherwise hate it because jazz has become, in some settings, the hold music of the United States.
Obviously a lot of operas will not survive scrutiny according to today's standards, since Carmen and Desdemona get stabbed and Butterfly abandoned and Giovanni gets serially-laid, etc. I wonder if the James Fenimore Cooper novels I read will be dropped from the canon because they include the racial thinking of European-Americans in the early American republic era. Funny thing is I am very sympathetic to the need to dismantle systemic racism yet do not strongly condemn some aspects of earlier culture because the struggles and experiences that got us here had not yet occurred. Early contact between people of vastly different cultures was different than it is in today's cosmopolitan globalist civilization. I hope someday we can tour the art and literature of the past as primary documents of inherent value without imposing today's standards on them. Think of the systemic destruction of earth's climate and biodiversity and ecosystems that is inherent to our economy of fossil fuels and plastics and factory farming. We will all be guilty in the eyes of future centuries when our technologies and systems eventually recognize the limits of the earth and come to more sustainable relations with the biosphere. Will that therefore make us all today reviled villains and our art barbaric and hateful? These are hard perspectives to explain in a presentist culture of immediate gratification and hyper-short attention spans blasted with superficial readings of history. I was guilty of it myself some decades ago as young marxist studying history at university. My professors told me not to judge the past by the standards of the present because then you will never truly understand or appreciate the past for what it really was to those who lived it. My thinking has transformed many times in the decades since, and I thank them for that conceptual lesson that allows me today to tour the past without a righteousness that would only be a graven snapshot of a continuously evolving humanity.
ReplyDeleteI have never heard jazz, serious jazz at least, as hold music. Down here we are usually stuck with something from the Ana Magdalena Bach book played on synthesizer.
ReplyDeleteI am extremely leery of all attempts to erase the past from whatever ideological perspective. The replacement of curiosity by ideology is pretty much always a bad move.