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: