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