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:
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.
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:
A private company choosing not to sell a product, or a publisher voluntarily discontinuing its own titles, are not the same thing as censorship. They are the free market at work! I would have thought conservatives would support that. Is the government going to force those businesses to act differently?
ReplyDeleteThe issue is complex because there is a long Supreme Court precedent that the government cannot encourage private business to perform acts of censorship that are forbidden to it by the First Amendment. I think that this is going to come up when the case of censorship by Google, Twitter and Facebook comes to trial. But the reason I put this article up is because it is not by a conservative, but a person on the left and she makes a rather different argument. Katha Pollitt is a liberal who writes for The Nation.
ReplyDeleteListening to a performance and playing it are two entirely different things. So the musician from the Vermeer SQt would have little basis for knowing how an audience member heard the work. If he were listening in the audience and then heard it differently but unrecognized on the radio that would be a more direct comparison of so called "faulty" memory.
ReplyDeleteAs an adult learner who still can barely scratch out music on my instruments, the few times I've recorded myself sounded to me infinitely worse than what I heard while playing.
ReplyDeleteMy discovery and exploration of classical music began in the mid-1980s just out of high school, and was mediated mostly on LP's. Once I went into a record store and asked the manager how many classical LPs I he'd give me for $100 ( a lot of money for me still!) and walked out with 20 LPs! The free concerts at the Yale School of Music were also very instrumental (haha!) in my lonely entry into the classical world, into which none of my friends or family followed for a very long time. But even then, I yearned for a type of record that wouldn't scratch, so when CDs came out I converted without looking back, and indeed was the first person in my college dorm to have a CD player. I have about 6,000 CDs now, including London Calling by the Clash (replacing my LP version), another music I loved alone and still kinda like.
Regarding the withdrawal from circulation of literature presently judged as racist, I too searched for Dr. Seuss books but found them over-priced. I am (presently stalled) in the middle of "The Pioneers" by James Fenimore Cooper (I very much enjoyed "Last of the Mohicans") and fear he too will be exiled from the canon for expressing the racial thinking of his people in their time and place, which will be a tragedy for American literature and for historical memory. As a young radical student of history in university decades ago, my professors warned me not to judge the past by standards of the present because then I will never understand the past. They were so right!
When you are learning how to play your instrument the first time you record and listen to yourself can be a little traumatic! But it is a useful exercise.
ReplyDeleteThrowing this into the mix in case anyone wants a sampler of how much a guitarist can compose using just natural harmonics (excluding the use of one artificial harmonic in the second study).
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzYyzirE6u6O79R4is8nKIkyrdoiOrad_
Some interesting stuff, Wenatchee. As I recall, Fernando Sor did some interesting things with natural harmonics. Isn't there an entire variation using them in one of his pieces? And he also used notes played by just hammering on with the LH.
ReplyDeleteSor's Op. 29 Study "21" in D major is entirely in harmonics. It's played in the usual way without hammer ons. I'm not a huge fan of variation sets from the early 19th century so he may have written an entire variation on a theme using harmonics but as Elaine Sisman put it in her monograph on Haydn and variation technique the early 19th century was so full of virtuoso variations music critics viewed it as the bane of their concert-going existence. Dana Gooley mentioned that, too, with Hummel being regarded almost universally as the exception proving the rule that virtuosic variations by composer performers back then was like people getting sick of jazzbros playing "Giant Steps" now. ;)
ReplyDeleteThat's the one! The hammer-ons are in the Fantaisie elegiaque where he has a whole melody executed using the technique.
ReplyDeleteI'm not a fan of early 19th century variations either, though Fernando Sor did some nice ones. I don't care for the ones by Giuliani.