Friday Miscellanea

Rick Beato has a prolific channel on YouTube in which he not only talks about music in his core area, pop and rock, but also wanders further afield. This little tribute to Bach is actually not too bad:

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 From The Guardian we learn How John Cage, the great disrupter, had the last laugh – by writing beautiful music:

In the summer of 1990 John Cage gave a lecture at the International New Music gathering in Darmstadt, Germany, and effectively admitted defeat. The then 76-year-old US composer announced that his philosophical ideas of freedom and collaboration, concepts built into his avant garde musical compositions since the 1950s, had failed to influence reality. The world had got worse, not better. It was “a life spent … beating my head against a wall”, he announced. There was, however, one consolation. “I no longer consider it necessary to find alternatives to harmony,” he said. “After all these years I am finally writing beautiful music.”

Cage was referring to his Number Pieces, around 40 late works named after the quantity of performers involved (from 1 to 101) in which individual musicians could choose when and how long to play (within designated time brackets) resulting in often quiet and meditative pieces, a marked contrast to the previous, often abrasive compositions he’d built his 40-year reputation on.

Late John Cage sounds a lot like late Morton Feldman. 

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It is both interesting and heartening to hear how some musicians have responded to the pandemic: Isolated By Pandemic, Violinist Jennifer Koh Nurtured A New Community Online.

When the pandemic arrived, it hit artists like Jennifer Koh hard. A classical violinist whose repertoire runs from Bach and Beethoven to newly minted pieces, she returned to her New York home from a concert in March 2020, and within a day found all of her engagements postponed.

"My first reaction was panic, because I lost all of my work," Koh says. "It was not good times." At one point she had to rely on food stamps.

But she's also the kind of artist who creates projects for herself and her friends and colleagues. Concerned about ways the pandemic was affecting the musical community, she came up with an idea: she asked prominent composers, like Tania León and Vijay Iyer, to write short solo violin pieces, then had them nominate emerging composers to write pieces, as well. And, by April 4th, she gave her first recital on Instagram.

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What is the problem with Australia? After just attending a festival in Austria where nearly all the concerts were packed and held in the usual venues, I see that Australia is cancelling everything: ‘It just feels safer’: the Australian musicians pivoting from an industry in crisis 

With Australia reeling from the Delta strain, major festivals including Splendour and Bluesfest have been cancelled for the second year running, with an estimated 7,000 gigs and live events cancelled each week.

Strict restrictions and slow vaccination rates, coupled with unpredictable snap lockdowns, have made it impossible for musicians to plan tours and promote albums; and with many music industry workers ineligible for jobkeeper (which ceased on 28 March this year) and federal grants schemes failing to trickle down, there are rising concerns that government rescue packages aren’t reaching the people who need it.

Many of those people are musicians, in an industry that was worth $1.8bn to the national economy in 2019. And in 2021, some of those musicians are pivoting away from the industry to find work elsewhere.

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The New York Times has an interesting survey of what is happening with classical music in the city: For Music, a Fall Deluge of Performances Is Beginning

On Saturday the Attacca Quartet played a heavily amplified yet lovingly textured program for hundreds in Prospect Park, as part of the Celebrate Brooklyn festival. (The pop group San Fermin headlined the evening.) In a half-hour sprint that managed not to feel rushed, the group played excerpts from its July debut on the Sony Classical label: the dance music-suffused (but somehow not schticky) “Real Life.”

Here is a sample:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th2QoQ_yxPU&t=122s

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 Let's have some envois. First up, one of John Cage's Number Pieces. This is Seven2 played by Apartment House:

And this is my favorite piece from the Art of Fugue, the Canon per Augmentationem in Contrario Motu:

The second voice enters down a fifth, inverted, and in double note values. Then, in the second half, the two parts switch with the lower voice leading.