Friday Miscellanea

The New York Times has a review of the opening concerts: The Salzburg Festival Opens in Search of Elusive Peace

The opening was meant to feature the Britten requiem with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra from England, which premiered it in 1962, and its chorus, under its music director, Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla.

But pandemic restrictions affecting performers traveling from England, combined with the ensemble’s massive roster for the piece — which calls for two choirs and two orchestras — made the appearance impossible. And, in something of a post-Brexit message of European unity, a new group was quickly assembled from nearly 20 countries: members of the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Wiener Singverein. Grazinyte-Tyla still conducted, admirably, but not always eliciting a performance in which the details penetrated the sheer scale of the piece — though there were standouts in the tenor Allan Clayton, his sound by turns bitter and beautiful, and in Florian Boesch’s hauntingly somber baritone.

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Here's the kind of story I enjoy: Reconstructing a 12th-century pipe organ discovered in the Holy Land

In the early 20th century, a team of archaeologists unearthed a 12th-century organ from beneath the Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem. The organ, which was preserved by the dry climate for centuries, is the oldest extant example of a pipe organ. Now, Spanish music historian and organist David Catalunya will attempt to reconstruct it so it might sound again. 

To call the piece an organ is a bit of an exaggeration, as only the pipes and bells were recovered. The rest of the organ is traditionally constructed from wooden pieces that would not have survived. Still, these metal aerophones are the heart of the organ, which produce sound as air moves through the pipe. 

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I tend to approach the New York Times' recurring feature 5 Classical Albums to Hear Right Now with something of a raised eyebrow as if to ask, "uh-huh, and just what do they want to pass off as "classical" this time?" The solidly classical is an album of madrigals by Sigismondo d'India and that is followed by a collection of mono recordings with Rafael Kubelik and the Chicago Symphony. But then it goes rather offtrack with some hard to categorize, but semi-pop/new age meanderings by Gabriella Smith and Pamela Z. If I spent more time listening I might be able to offer a better categorization, but my interest waned early on. Wrapping up is a lite classical album by French pianist Lise de la Salle. So, ok, three out of five. But honestly, the only one that seems really interesting is the Sigismondo d'India. But that's just me.

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At The Guardian, Simon Rattle talks about the impact the pandemic has had on musicians:

Rattle said many freelance musicians he had approached to perform in a concert planned for earlier this year turned the down opportunity because they had moved on to other forms of employment.

“Many of the first-choice people said, ‘Look I’m sorry, I’m not doing this any more. I have a family. I had to take another profession. Six months ago, I’d have welcomed it’,” he said.

“We are not going to realise about this for a long time, and then it’s going to be too late. A lot of musicians are looking into the abyss.”

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Back to the New York Times for an example of what I would call "motivated reasoning." Asian Composers Reflect on Careers in Western Classical Music :

Asian composers who write in Western classical musical forms, like symphonies and operas, tend to have a few things in common. Many learned European styles from an early age, and finished their studies at conservatories there or in the United States. And many later found themselves relegated to programming ghettos like Lunar New Year concerts. (One recent study found that works by Asian composers make up only about 2 percent of American orchestral performances planned for the coming season.)

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This fellow built a very long piano:

It occurred to me that long bass strings sounded better. When I was 14 I asked my piano teacher how long a bass a string would need to be if it had no copper on it at all. The answer was “Adrian the string would be so long it would go on for ever!” so with this in mind I did an experiment where I could find that measurement.

I knocked a waratah (metal fence post) into the ground at both ends and with a big piece of timber with a hole and tuning pin in it I strung up an enormous bass string. After finding a safe tension I tuned it to the lowest A on a piano by moving rocks along the wire.

Here I discovered the most interesting sound and from this point I was determined to build a piano to have the longest string sounding like this. I later did more experimenting. Fifteen year old me said “Mum I’m going to build a piano!”

I think because I was so young I absolutely knew it was totally possible to do, I was fully determined and without consulting any professionals I had no barrier stopping me.

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I first heard the Britten War Requiem in London in 1974. Here is a 1964 performance conducted by the composer:

 Here is music by Cabezon played on the historic Covarrubias organ by Paulino Ortiz:

And here is music by Sigismondo d'India performed by Erika Tandiono soprano and Bernhard Reichel Chitarrone.

Performance Stress

There is a lot in the news this week from the Olympic Games about performance stress and it reminds me of my experience years ago with a big guitar competition. I forget the exact year, but back in the 1980s when I was working very hard to build a career as a concert soloist the perfect opportunity came along, or so it seemed. An international Segovia competition was announced, to be held in London with Andrés Segovia himself as the chair of the jury. In order to be accepted for entry you needed a recommendation from some well-known figure in the guitar world. After my Wigmore Hall debut a few years before I had become friends with the English critic and composer John Duarte who wrote me an excellent letter of recommendation so the door was open for me.

This was a brutally demanding competition! In most cases there are one or two set pieces with the rest to be chosen by the competitors--not in this case. All the pieces but one were required. My optional piece was going to be the Rossiniana op 119 by Giuliani, all the others I had to learn, mostly from scratch. Here is the list as I recall it:

• Prelude, Fugue and Allegro, Bach
• Sonata, Castelnuovo-Tedesco
• Fantasia para un Gentilhombre, Rodrigo
• Concierto del Sur, Ponce
• a couple of other pieces I have forgotten

This was a bit of bad luck for me as they were mostly pieces I had not learned. For example, I knew the First and Fourth Lute Suites by Bach, but not the Prelude, Fugue and Allegro. I knew the Sonata romantica by Ponce, but not the Sonata by Tedesco. I had performed the Rodrigo, so that was good, but not the concerto by Ponce. I only had eight months or so to learn all this music. And not just learn it, but master it to the perfection demanded by an international competition.

So I worked very, very hard and got about 80% of it memorized and was starting to polish the technique. Then I had a nervous breakdown, broke up with my girlfriend and quit my teaching job. It took me a couple of years to recover and start to rebuild my career.

The competition was held in the Fall and I didn't follow it at the time because I was busy with my own mental health. But a long time later I heard what had happened. Oh, I haven't mentioned the rewards. You were going to be instantly a very famous player with televised recitals, concerto performances, a hefty purse of prize money, tours and so on. A magical career with the imprimer of Segovia, the great master of the guitar. So what happened? The winner was a Japanese guitarist whose name I forget. He also had a nervous breakdown, but after the end of the competition. After returning to Japan he purposely injured his hand so he could never again play the guitar. A sad finale.

The pressures of competition are enormous and they tend to accumulate over time. In my case I stepped away from the guitar for a year and then rebuilt my technique and mental toughness from scratch. And I did so successfully as I went on to do many CBC broadcasts including live performances of the Villa-Lobos concerto and the Concierto de Aranjuez by Rodrigo with orchestra.

So I have the deepest sympathy for those athletes like Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka who crumbled under pressure. The need for psychological toughness is just as important as the need for physical strength and agility. I can't imagine the kind of pressure that competing in the Olympics puts on you.

Uncommon Practices

I was playing Bach this morning, as I usually do, and was struck, as I have been countless times before, with the rich creativity of Bach's imagination. Using the most fundamental aspects of the common practice system, tonality, he weaves a constantly developing texture. Scales, arpeggios, cadences, modulations, turns and simple rhythmic structures are all he needs. Take the piece I was learning this morning, the prelude to the 3rd Cello Suite:

[The original key on cello is C major so that opening phrase falls two octaves to the lowest note. The piece has usually been transposed up a major sixth to A major, and at that pitch the temptation is to add some bass lines. There is an arrangement by John Duarte often played by Segovia and others. A couple of decades ago, Pepe Romero released a lovely recording of this piece, but in D major. If you tune the 6th string to D you can play everything exactly as it is on the cello and there is no need to add a bass line.]

She plays it a bit fast, to my mind, but that's ok. Just listen to how simple, basic, fundamental and at the same time creative, Bach is in this prelude. And he wrote hundreds of preludes, each one original and brilliantly creative. Another example is Domenico Scarlatti who wrote five hundred and fifty-five sonatas for harpsichord, all in binary form and using these same basic structural materials. Not to mention the hundreds of concertos by Antonio Vivaldi.

My point is that composers were able to use and re-use and use again the basic materials of common practice tonality without running out of ideas. This is an old story, of course. My favorite hilarious example is that of the music theorist who, sometime in the 16th century, complained that every single contrapuntal idea had been exhausted and no more originality was possible. And two hundred years later we have Bach, the greatest contrapuntalist of all.

But then in the early 20th the most progressive composers began to think that this whole system was exhausted. The primary figures were Claude Debussy, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky who each developed ways of ordering music that avoided the common practice structures. Fair enough! But I think we can see in this a subtext: perhaps the structures of tonality were not so exhausted after all? Composers like Jean Sibelius continued to use them for decades and they returned with the so-called "minimalists" in the 1970s.

I think that what was going on here was not so much or not only a theoretical breakthrough, but a civilizational breakdown of morale. Composers couldn't or didn't continue to compose within these structures because they felt the subterranean cataclysm that was about to engulf European civilization. Schoenberg's first forays into atonality date from 1908, just six years before the outbreak of World War I. His Pierrot Lunaire dates form 1912 and Stravinsky's masterpiece The Rite of Spring was premiered in 1913, the year before the war began.

Are these works tokens or harbingers of a civilizational breakdown and not just aesthetic experimentation? If you were looking for a topic for a research-heavy doctoral dissertation, that would be a good one.

Here is another piece from around this time, the Six Little Pieces op. 19 of Schoenberg:

Early Pitch

One sentence from a quote in my Friday Miscellanea has been troubling me: Theodor Currentzis said "Mozart composed music at 430 Hz; that was the pitch of the time." Was it? I almost hesitate to bring this up as I have discovered over the years that all mention of pitch and tuning brings a flurry of comments from very knowledgeable people. Wait, that's actually a plus, isn't it?

I ran across a very interesting and informative website about these questions: The History of Musical Pitch in Tuning the Pianoforte by Edward E. Swenson. In this article he has a lengthy list of pitches derived from existing tuning forks from the years 1715 to 1880. They provide an historical record of where the note A was tuned to over the years. They vary between 419.9 in 1715 to 421.6 from Vienna in 1780 which he comments that "A= 421.6 is probably the pitch which Mozart used to tune his fortepianos and clavichords." Interestingly, many tuning forks from the 19th century range from 445 to 455 or even higher. I don't recall hearing any performances of 19th century music advertising that they are performing at the historically high pitch! One thing we should take away from this is that, despite numerous attempts, no standardized pitch was actually settled on until into the 20th century. Every orchestra and opera house, not to mention every piano builder, had their own "standard" pitch that might have been quite different from the one used the other side of town. In 1869, for example, the Gewandhaus Orchestra used a tuning fork at A = 448.2 while in Vienna the orchestral pitch was 456.1. But the Vienna Opera tuned to A = 446.8.

Until quite recently "standards" in the matter of pitch were local, not international.

And before 1711 when the tuning fork was invented, of course, pitch probably varied even more.

Here is a performance of the last movement of the Piano Concerto No. 23, K. 488 by Mozart on the fortepiano played by Steven Divine which is probably at the "standard" early music pitch of 415 or just a bit below what Mozart probably used!

Friday Miscellanea

One important category of music criticism is the piece advocating for a neglected or forgotten composer. In recent years these have often focussed on minority and women composers. There is a good example this week in the New York Times: A Queen of 19th-Century Opera Gets New Attention

Following her father, who was a gifted composer as well as a brilliant singer, Viardot put significant time and energy into composing. Her work is not nearly as widely known as that of Robert Schumann, Liszt, Saint-Saëns or others in her social circle. But her music was deeply appreciated by her contemporaries, with one person going so far as to compare her talent to Schubert’s. Clara Schumann referred to her as “the greatest woman of genius I have ever known.” A fierce advocate for her students, she died, just a month shy of her 89th birthday, in 1910.

Today, her works are enjoying a resurgence among scholars and performers — part of a wave of interest in long-neglected composers like Amy Beach, Florence Price, Clara Schumann and others.

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 An obituary for Dover Publications:

As a conducting student in the 1980s, Dover Scores were a miracle.  For $11.95, you could buy a full orchestral score of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, Brahms’ Four Symphonies or Tchaikovsky’s Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Symphonies in excellent editions that would cost close to 10 times that in their original publications.  Not all Dover scores were wonderful—the Haydn and Beethoven Symphonies reprinted from the old Eulenburg Scores, and later the Beethoven Symphonies reprint of the Litolff edition, were barely usable, but even there, Dover was a good value.  As the years passed, it became more difficult for Dover’s scores to keep up with the new Barenreiter and Breitkopf editions, but some Dover editions such as the Brahms Symphonies edited by Hans Gál retained their value and utility.  It wasn’t just the editions Dover chose that mattered.  Dover editions used a better binding process and higher quality paper than the original editions.

I have a bunch of Dover books on my shelf with scores by Bach, Haydn, Mozart and others. What really happened to them was, in a word (or rather, acronym) IMSLP.

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Here is a valuable resource for music students and amateurs: The Best Sites, Apps, and YouTube Channels to Learn Music.

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 Alex Ross reviews a new opera for The New Yorker: The Sublime Terror of Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence”

The psychological-thriller components of “Innocence” mark a change for Saariaho, who rose to fame by employing modernist and avant-garde techniques to summon otherworldly, dreamlike spheres. Her best-known score is the opera “L’Amour de Loin,” which premièred in Salzburg in 2000 and arrived at the Met in 2016; it gorgeously evokes the rarefied longings of the twelfth-century troubadour Jaufré Rudel. Saariaho’s second opera, “Adriana Mater” (2006), made a turn toward contemporary reality, telling of a woman raped in time of war, but its approach was more meditative and abstract. “Innocence,” which Saariaho completed in 2018, has a seething rawness. It’s as if the turmoil of recent years had prompted her to abandon aesthetic distance and enter the melee of the real.

Saariaho has said in an interview that she modelled “Innocence” on two great Expressionist shockers of the early twentieth century, “Elektra” and “Wozzeck.”

I'm scheduled to see the Salzburg production of Elektra next month.

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AGH! Just when everything was going so well: SALZBURG ORDERS MASKS ON FOR EVERYONE.

“After this unfortunate event, we have decided together with the health authorities and our expert council that we will now implement the next safety level described in the prevention plan: starting tomorrow, the wearing of  FFP2 facemasks is mandatory for all visitors at all performance venues,” says Executive Director Lukas Crepaz.

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I'm so susceptible to earworms that if I just see the words "Fly me to the moon" I will have that tune in my head for the next hour. But maybe there is an upside: Yes, earworms are annoying, but they may help you process memories

Mr. Janata’s recent study found that music can function as a targeted memory aid. That means learning names or new faces or places could one day be paired with an individual tune, almost like a personalized musical tag. 

Mr. Janata is exploring that idea in his research and attempting to observe how the brain responds to musical stimuli and earworms using neural imaging technology.

“It raises the question: Can this be deployed in a targeted way, taking novel pieces of music [and] pairing earworms with must-be-remembered information? Could this serve as a memory aid?

Nope, no upside there...

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For U.K. Bands, Touring Europe Is Now a Highway to Brexit Hell

Now, it’s not so simple for Two Door Cinema Club — or any British act — to tour Europe. Last Friday, the band headlined the Cruïlla music festival in Barcelona, Spain, playing to an audience of 25,000 screaming fans. But because of Britain’s 2020 departure from the European Union, known as Brexit, the band spent weeks beforehand applying for visas and immersing themselves in complicated new rules around trucking and exporting merchandise like T-shirts.

The ever-increasing rules and regulations of the modern state seem to work against touring musicians.

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The New York Times has an excellent article on the Salzburg Festival's new production of Mozart's Don Giovanni: At Salzburg, Don Giovanni Gets No Pleasure From Seducing. The conductor, Teodor Currentzis, talks about his approach:

These musical and psychological relationships, Currentzis believes, can only be brought out through historically informed performance. He has the players tune their A to 430 Hz, a quarter-tone lower than contemporary orchestras’s standard performance pitch.

“It’s obviously better,” Currentzis said. “Mozart composed music at 430 Hz; that was the pitch of the time. When he made the plan of the tonality, he knew exactly what he wanted to give brightness and darkness.”

“If you transpose everything a quarter-tone up,” he added, “all the spectral stuff is completely different.”

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First up for our envois today, a song by Pauline Viardot sung by Cecilia Bartoli:

 Here is a performance of Elektra from the Vienna State Opera:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDBA5r9a1_Y

Active vs Passive Listening

Listening, as opposed to mere hearing, is a core skill of musicians of all sorts and I have talked about the concept of active listening before on this blog. But I think it is worth taking up again as it has many facets.

"Active" listening implies intense focus, the selection of different perspectives and the sorting out and evaluating of what you are hearing. A great deal of music education, especially at the college and university level, is intended to cultivate and develop those skills necessary to be an active listener. It is essential whether you are a performer, a theorist, a musicologist or music historian and especially if you are a composer. But each of these different roles or modes needs a slightly different kind of active listening.

For example, a performer learns to attune themselves to the character of the music: harmonic, melodic and rhythmic, in order to activate, "bring to life" these aspects of the music so that their performance is more than mere mechanical reproduction. The use of active listening in your practice sessions involves perhaps isolating different melodic lines, taking the bass separately, doing a harmonic reduction so you can just listen to the chord progression, examining (by that I mean playing) the various rhythmic motifs and their relationship and so on.

The methods of theorists and historians move to a more abstract level and try to answer different questions (though every performer might need to use these methods as well to understand the music they are playing). What is the structure of the composition and how is that unfolded? What are the historic predecessors and influences? What was the characteristic performance style of the historic period and so on.

A composer might listen in all these ways but as well might take more of an aesthetic view: what is the music trying to communicate? What methods is the composer using? Perhaps even, what interesting devices might I want to steal? Oops, I mean borrow and cleverly disguise!

I was just re-reading the introduction to a collection of the Platonic Dialogues and found an interesting parallel. Plato did not publish any treatises or dissertations in his own "voice" as a philosopher. Everything we have from him (with the exception of a few letters, some spurious) is in the form of a dialogue between different characters, historic or anonymous. This was, then and now, rather a radical approach, because Plato is saying, more or less, that he does not have for us a complete and finished philosophical system, but merely invites us to take up certain questions about truth, morality, justice and so on and examine them. In many of the dialogues no final answer is found. The leading character of most of the dialogues is Socrates, Plato's teacher, whose central assertion is that he himself does not know the "Truth" but is always in search of it. Philosophy, rightly considered, is not a collection of "truths" or facts, but rather an activity in which one seeks out truths and, most of all, examines one's own ideas critically.

This feels very much like active listening to me. Instead of passively imbibing music, allowing it to wash over one or just to inspire intimate moods and feelings, one pursues music. engages it, takes it apart to see how it works and so on.

I think even ordinary listeners can expand their enjoyment of music enormously by taking up the practice of active listening.

Choosing a suitable envoi for this is a bit tricky. I am looking forward to hearing Daniil Trifonov play the Art of Fugue by Bach at Salzburg next month because I am very interested to hear how he engages this profound work, which has such great room for a really active performer. In that spirit, here is Trifonov playing the Brahms arrangement of the Bach Chaconne for piano, left hand. Brahms is actively engaging Bach in this version and then we have Trifonov engaging both of them...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ljb5MvKv0Hw

Ted Gioia on Branding

Three cheers for Ted Gioia for splashing cold water on this whole "re-branding" idiocy. I've expressed a lot of skepticism myself in the past, but he really does a good job of showing just what is wrong with the idea: Can We Stop Talking About "Rebranding" Classical Music?

Here’s the bottom line: Classical music faces many problems—but constant talk of rebranding is itself one of the problems.

The real need is to revitalize the repertoire; celebrate our traditions but also create fun and exciting new ones; make the performance situations less stuffy; reach into the community (and especially the schools); transform the entire experience of concertizing into something more thrilling and engaging; above all, inspire and change lives.

And the only way to do this is by focusing on the music.

As a reviewer who devotes hours each day to listening to recently released recordings, I know how much fantastic new classical music is out there right now—and it’s genuinely mind-expanding and enjoyable too, something that couldn’t always be claimed for the entrenched academic composition trends of the not-so-distant past. Yet I’m also painfully aware that almost nobody knows about this music, and the very institutions that should be showcasing it are caught up in other, lesser priorities.

I think he has it exactly right. Focus on the music. That's why we are here. 

Bartók: Piano Concertos

The "three Bs" of 20th century music, it could be argued, are Alban Berg, Bela Bartók and Pierre Boulez (leaving out a couple of Italians). Bartók is certainly one of the most important composers of the first half of the century (dying in 1945) who created a very characteristic musical style, fusing Western European forms with content derived from Eastern European folk music.

Bartók was a virtuoso pianist and, like Prokofiev, wrote concertos for his own use to provide additional income. He premiered the Piano Concerto No. 1 in Frankfurt in 1927 and followed it a few years later with the very difficult Concerto No. 2, composed in 1930/31 and premiered by the composer, also in Frankfurt, in 1933. The Third Concerto was composed towards the end of Bartók's life, in 1945, as a present for his second wife, Ditta Pásztory-Bartók, a pianist. It was premiered in Philadelphia in 1946 with György Sándor.

The three concertos are a significant and unique contribution to the piano repertoire. I first purchased an LP of the first and third with Daniel Barenboim in the early 70s. Currently I have two performances on CD, Pierre Boulez conducting the Chicago Symphony in the first with Krystian Zimerman, the Berlin Philharmonic in the second with Leif Ove Andsnes and the London Symphony in the third with Héléne Grimaud. The other set is conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen with Yefim Bronfman and the LA Philharmonic. I find both recordings very fine.

In recent years Yuja Wang has done some fine performances of the first two that are available on YouTube. I may have put the first up previously. The Swedish Radio Symphony is conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen:

For the second, the Berlin Philharmonic is conducted by Simon Rattle:

The second is just terrifyingly virtuosic! For the third concerto we have Martha Argerich with the Toho Gakuen Orchestra conducted by Yuri Bashmet.

If I get a chance I might do some individual posts on how these concertos are put together. But before that I have a post on Bartók's String Quartet No. 4 that I am working on.

Hahn: Ginastera

Here is something to wake your ears up: Hilary Hahn in a stunning performance of the Ginastera Violin Concerto just posted a few days ago. With the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra.

Friday Miscellanea

First up, confirmation via Slipped Disc that the Salzburg Festival will be proceeding in a normal fashion:

The Salzburg Festival clarified this morning that it will take place without restrictions.

All tickets will be sold and many performances will take place with an interval.

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 It seems the promo and marketing set have their hooks into the San Francisco Symphony: REBRAND WIZARDS: ORCHESTRAS ARE ‘A DUSTY OLD-WORLD ART FOR THE ELITE’

This inclusive approach builds on the ethos of the organization, demonstrating a vested interest in dismantling the “elite” narrative that risked making the culturally curious feel unwelcome. The alternative experience of SoundBox, for example, sells out in just a few seconds, appealing to both long-time members and young newcomers with its informal, intimate, and industrial environment where musicians easily mingle with the audience.

Somehow I suspect that the new music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen will manage to turn this to his advantage.

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Some interesting reflections on music and memory:

Paradoxically, one’s response to a recording of a live concert can on rare occasions have the exact opposite effect to a mediocre recollection of the concert itself.  The late Marc Johnson, esteemed cellist of the Vermeer Quartet, told me of an experience he had listening to a recording of a live concert on the radio in his car.  He had just crossed over from New Hampshire into Maine and tuned in a classical music station.  A Beethoven string quartet had just begun but Marc was too late to hear who was performing.  As he was driving, he was quite struck by the beauty of the playing—so much so, that as he seemed to be getting out of range of the station, he pulled over to the side of the road to listen to the remainder of the piece and learn who was performing it. “I was astonished,” he told me later.  “It was us—the Vermeer Quartet.  I don’t remember that concert being especially remarkable but it sure sounded great.”

I have had the experience of hearing myself in a recording without at first realizing it was me--the experience is eerie!

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I was going to put up an article in the Washington Post about the delights of discovering classical music on vinyl, but was defeated by the paywall:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/classical-music-on-vinyl-records/2021/07/07/e7bbb7c0-ce0a-11eb-a7f1-52b8870bef7c_story.html

You may have better luck. It reminds me that it was very much through vinyl, old, scratched vinyl, that I discovered classical music. Where I lived, in small town Canada, there was no classical music concert series and I don't remember listening to CBC FM so perhaps that wasn't available either. What I did have was a pile of loaned vinyl in 33 and 75 rpm format and an old cabinet mono sound system. Through this lo-fi haze and crackle I listened to Beethoven V, Schubert Unfinished, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Debussy and others. They very misty vagueness of the sound lent a mystic aura to the music. Well, except for the fact that the occasional bad scratch caused the needle to skip a few bars every now and then. I'm still surprised to hear the complete opening phrase of the Unfinished Symphony in its unsullied form!

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Bass guitar smashed at Clash gig to join relics at Museum of London

The Museum of London has announced that the splintered pieces of Simonon’s Fender Precision bass will go on permanent display from 23 July.

The guitar was last played on stage at the Palladium in New York on 20 September 1979. Frustrated at the stiffness of the audience, Simonon raised his guitar like a giant axe, turned his back to singer Joe Strummer, and brought it crashing down.

It would probably have been forgotten had not photographer Pennie Smith been standing less than six feet away with her 35mm Pentax camera.

“It wasn’t a choice to take the shot,” Smith told the Guardian in 2019. “My finger just went off.”

The resulting photograph was chosen by Strummer to be the cover of the Clash’s 1979 album London Calling, one of the most influential albums of all time. It was later named as the best rock’n’roll photograph of all time by Q magazine.

Some other guitars they might consider: one of Pete Townshend's several guitars smashed at the end of performances (so they wouldn't have to do an encore?) or maybe Jimi Hendrix' set on fire Fender Stratocaster.

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Here is an interesting article on free speech: The Left Needs Free Speech

When W.W. Norton decided to cease distributing Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth after several women accused Bailey of rape and other outrages, I called up my local bookstore and reserved a copy. When Amazon stopped selling When Harry Became Sally, which argues from a conservative point of view that it is not possible to change your sex, I went to Alibris.com and bought a used one. I would have bought the Dr. Seuss books withdrawn from distribution by their publisher, too, but I was too late: the few copies for sale online are going for hundreds of dollars. That these books had become “controversial” made me more curious about them than I otherwise would have been. I’m a grown-up, I thought to myself; I can make up my own mind about them. 

The left’s new enthusiasm for getting bad books taken off the shelves is a mistake. It’s in everyone’s interest, but especially the left’s, to have as broad a discourse as possible. 

When you ban a book or shut down a speaker, what you’re really saying is that you need to protect people from ideas you disagree with. You don’t trust people to contextualize, to historicize, to weigh evidence, or even just, like me, satisfy a curiosity, without falling down the rabbit hole of error. And if they do fall down, you don’t trust yourself to haul them out. They will stay there forever, nibbling reactionary carrots. You can argue forever that there is no such thing as “cancel culture,” but people know when their intelligence is being disrespected.

Worth reading the whole thing.

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Let's get right on with the envois. First, of course, Schubert Unfinished. The piece was written in 1822 but was not premiered until 1865! This is Trevor Pinnock conducting the Chamber Orchestra of Europe:

Next Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Orchestre de Paris in Debussy's La Mer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxEMgHGrAPM

And finally, the Vermeer Quartet playing the late A minor Quartet by Beethoven:

Friday Miscellanea

One of the coolest bands of the 60s were, according to many, the Velvet Underground and The Guardian gives us The Velvet Underground’s greatest songs – ranked! Plus an interesting commentary. The number one song is All Tomorrow's Parties from 1967:

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As long as I have been a musician I have been reading about attempts to uncover the secrets the great Cremona violin builders used. Here is the latest: New study reveals the wood treatments used by Stradivari, Amati and Guarneri:

For the study, researchers used samples of wood taken during restoration work, including instruments by Stradivari, Nicolò Amati and Guarneri ‘del Gesù’. ‘Modern makers usually copy the shapes of Stradivari and Guarneri soundboards but not their thickness,’ the report states. ‘Many Stradivari and Guarneri soundboards appear surprisingly thin and light by modern standards. The average modern soundboard, made of unaltered, air-dried spruce retains approximately 3.0mm centre thickness to avoid cracking risks over time, or even up to 3.5mm in German schools. By contrast, Stradivari’s centre thickness range is 2.0–2.8mm, and Guarneri’s is 2.2– 2.9mm.’ This suggested the wood had been subjected to some sort of treatment before carving.

In analysing the spruce of a c.1740 violin by Guarneri ‘del Gesù’, the researchers discovered large traces of aluminium (1300 ppm), while Amati and Stradivari samples were below 50 ppm. Previous reports have also shown 700ppm aluminium in an Andrea Guarneri spruce. ‘This is best explained by chemical experiments involving family recipes, instead of buying pre-treated wood from lumber suppliers or random contaminations from later centuries.’

The research also found that Stradivari used salt seasoning (NaCl) but Guarneri used aluminum crosslinking (alum). For alkaline treatment, Stradivari used potash (K2CO3/KOH) while Guarneri used lime (CaO). ‘Alkalinity may fragment hemicellulose and promote cellulose rearrangement, an artificial aging technique also advocated by ancient Chinese zither makers.’ Nicolo Amati had a simple chemical recipe: Borax and sulphates of iron, copper, or zinc as biocidal preservatives.

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The New York Times has a piece on modifying opera productions: Retooling ‘La Bohème’ for Pandemic Performances.

Mr. Mears said opera is an art form that breaks every social-distancing rule, relying on “crammed pits,” large and dense onstage crowds, moments of intimacy between performers, singing (which can spread viral particles) and a sellout audience. “All of these things really work against us,” he said.

“If you were someone who hated opera and you wanted to devise a disease that hit opera particularly hard, then you’d probably come up with something rather like Covid,” he added.

The global coronavirus outbreak has had a drastic effect on the performing arts, and opera, which is expensive, has suffered hugely. Many of Europe’s major houses have received government help — in addition to annual taxpayer-funded grants — to avoid insolvency.

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The Guardian has a fascinating article on a production of King Lear using a cast drawn from opera singers: Can opera singers act – or do they just wave their arms around like traffic cops?

Tomlinson and Bullock bring to Shakespeare’s play passion, intellect and skilled vocal resources about which they speak aphoristically. “The voice,” says Tomlinson, “is like a stringed instrument, not a brass instrument.”

Bullock counters with: “Singing is just speaking with a bigger vocal range.” I also sense that for them and others this King Lear is a starting, rather than a terminal, point. There is already talk of the production having an extended life in Vienna, Paris and Frankfurt – and Bullock tells me that she yearns to play Mrs Alving in Ibsen’s Ghosts. At the very least I suspect this pathfinding production will puncture popular prejudices and confirm that you can’t be a great opera singer without also being a first-rate actor.

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We talked about a new recording of Julius Eastman's music a while back, now Alex Ross has an article at The New Yorker: Julius Eastman’s Florid Minimalism.

“Femenine,” the companion to a now lost piece titled “Masculine,” can be roughly described as a minimalist score. Like Terry Riley’s 1964 classic, “In C,” “Femenine” is bound together by an unrelenting ostinato. In place of Riley’s endlessly chiming keyboard C’s, Eastman gives us a propulsive vibraphone motif, called the Prime, consisting of twelve rapid-fire E-flats followed by a syncopated alternation of E-flat and F. Other instruments join in, sometimes dwelling on the two basic notes and sometimes branching into scalar or arpeggiated patterns. Beyond that, much is left to the discretion of the performers. Eastman calls one passage “Mao Melodies”; no one is quite sure what to make of that.

The crucial guide to the realization of “Femenine” is a tape of a 1974 performance by members of the S.E.M. Ensemble. Eastman, at the piano, knocks off double-octave runs with Lisztian flair. A mechanized sleigh-bell device provides the backdrop of bells. The label Frozen Reeds released that recording in 2016, and, almost overnight, new-music ensembles around the world took the work into their repertories. There are rival renditions by Apartment House, on the label Another Timbre, and by Ensemble 0 and aum Grand Ensemble, on Sub Rosa. Wild Up’s version grew out of an exhilarating 2018 performance by the echoi ensemble, at the Monday Evening Concerts series in Los Angeles, which can be seen on YouTube.

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One of the great questions of aesthetics is usually avoided these days: On Taste How do we know whether art is any good?

...the very notion of taste contains within itself two ideas in constant tension. First, taste is always personal: a judgment, but one’s own judgment. The idea derives from our physical sense of taste. It takes no great powers of observation to notice that different people prefer different foods. I like cilantro, you do not. As the Latin tag has it, de gustibus non est disputandum—there is no disputing about tastes.

And yet, however much we have a right to our own likes and dislikes, such judgments are often measured against a standard. For instance, the man who refuses to eat spinach or asparagus is unlikely to be considered a discerning judge of fine food. These two principles—the autonomy of the individual taste and the existence of some broader principle of excellence—are perpetually at odds. Each of us navigates between them, sometimes vindicating our own preferences, other times yielding to (and perhaps learning from) the taste of others.

The whole argument is well worth reading.

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Time for our envoi. First, a fascinating performance of the Sixth Cello Suite by Bach on a 5-string violoncello de spalla:

Next a fine and sober performance of the Chaconne in D minor by Bach on guitar by John Feeley:

Finally, this is Les Arts Florissants with Haydn's Symphony No. 80:

Mid-week Miscellanea

Here is something interesting for you: Polish composer and pianist Hania Rani:

Motoric, modal and with a groove: what's not to like?

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We don't have a lot of multi-talented people like Fred Astaire these days. He was a pretty fair piano-player, a good singer and, of course, a superb dancer. Notice how this is mostly just a couple of long shots, meaning they couldn't splice different takes together but had to get it right the first time:

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Here is an orchestral piece from 1918 by Lili Boulanger, who died very young at age 24.

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The UK has a long and distinguished choral tradition, which is why UK CULTURE SECRETARY ‘DESPERATE’ TO GET CHOIRS BACK.

Friday Miscellanea

I haven't looking into the details, but apparently you can stream concerts from the Leipzig BachFest. Looks interesting and appealing.

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Here is a very interesting news item. Up to this point there has not been a formal lobbying group of German concert agents, something I find surprising. GERMAN CONCERT AGENTS FORM POLITICAL LOBBY GROUP. Or maybe music is so well subsidized in Germany that they never felt the need?

The mission:

– Clarification and standardisation of the status of guest artists under labour and social security law.

– Improvement of model contracts and industry-wide acceptance of regulations that acknowledges the artists’ preparation in advance for projects and entitles them to compensation payments in the event of cancellations through no fault of their own.

– Recognition of artists’ media and personal rights in connection with streaming and digital distribution of opera performances and concerts.

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This is a rather sad story: Violinist Apologizes for ‘Culturally Insensitive’ Remarks About Asians

A master class by the renowned violinist Pinchas Zukerman was supposed to be the highlight of a recent virtual symposium hosted by the Juilliard School.

Instead, Zukerman angered many of the roughly 100 students and teachers in the class on Friday when he invoked racist stereotypes about Asians, leading Juilliard to decide not to share a video of his master class afterward with participants, as it had initially intended.

At one point, Zukerman told a pair of students of Asian descent that their playing was too perfect and that they needed to add soy sauce, according to two participants in the class. At another point, in trying to encourage the students to play more lyrically, he said he understood that people in Korea and Japan do not sing, participants said.

What is both sad and weird about this is how could Zukerman have possibly gotten to this point in this life without recognizing that these kinds of remarks are biased, and, not to mention, false? Does he live that sheltered a life, flying from concert hall to concert hall, oblivious to everything else?

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It wasn't very long ago that it was possible to make the joke that soon we will have period instrument performances of Stravinsky. No longer! The historically informed movement has reached the early 20th century: The Conductor Transforming Period Performance--Mahler, Stravinsky, Debussy and more: François-Xavier Roth and his ensemble, Les Siècles, are pushing historically informed practice into the 20th century.

Roth and Les Siècles have done Berlioz, too, not least a “Symphonie Fantastique” that matches Charles Munch’s for unhinged intensity.

But it is highly unusual to hear period performances, like theirs, of later music, using instruments and approaches fitting for the late 19th or early 20th century. The orchestral works of Ravel? An early version of Mahler’s First? Stravinsky’s trilogy for the Ballets Russes, including “The Rite of Spring,” reissued recently? Debussy’s “Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune,” the symphonic poem that Pierre Boulez once described as breathing life into modernity?

Early music this is not.

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This is good to hear: Intermissions are back at Lyric Opera of Chicago. The idea of opera with no intermission just didn't seem that civilized.

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Pretty thin pickings this week--maybe I should not have done a mid-week miscellanea? So let's have extra helpings of musical envois. First up, some Caccini. This is his big hit Amarilli mia bella with Jevtovic Rosquist, soprano and David Tayler, archlute.

When I was young I had an album of Pinchas Zukerman playing a lot of the famous virtuoso violin pieces, which included this piece by Wieniawski:

And finally, a cello concerto by Bach's son C. P. E. Bach: