You may recall that I live in Mexico, which can be a very interesting place. The language of the Aztecs, still spoken by 1.7 million people in Mexico, appears all over the place in, for example, street names. Here is one for you: Huitzilopochtli, god of war. Nahuatl is an agglutinative language and today I ran across the name of a musical instrument: matlaxkalolistlatikwinaltlatzotzonwan which means "musical instruments that are made to thump by being slapped with the hand." Tambourines, in other words, or maybe just drums. This is from a video by Julie on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnQwfvP-QJE.
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Over at The Guardian we learn of a new Steve Reich piece: Colin Currie Group review – joyous celebration of Steve Reich
Traveler’s Prayer was composed last year, begun before and completed during the pandemic. It’s a setting not of the Hebrew Traveller’s Prayer itself, but of three short Old Testament passages that are often added to it, and Reich sets them for four voices in long sinuous vocal lines, often doubled and coloured by the instrumental ensemble, and making extensive use of intertwining canons and their inversions and retrogrades. Reich has said that the music is “closer to Josquin des Prez than Stravinsky”, though the opening section for two tenors (which takes up half of the 16-minute work) does seem to hark back to late Stravinsky, especially to Threni. It’s a muted, rather contained piece, low on rhythmic energy, rooted in the same tonality throughout, and very different from anything Reich has composed before.
Sounds like that was a terrific concert. Remind me to try and spend some time in London. Lots of great music happening there.
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In the New York Times John McWhorter weighs in on the controversy at the University of Michigan over a music professor showing a 1965 film of Laurence Olivier playing Othello in blackface.
Is blackface being shown as part of a collegiate-level discussion, as in the Michigan case? College students shouldn’t need protection from an old film used to help them think about and debate the conversion of a classic over time. Sheng was using the film to stir and inform artistic consciousness. To read that situation otherwise is deeply anti-intellectual.
Very much worth reading the whole thing. The latest is that the university is not going to pursue an investigation.
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This cheerful bit of news from the BBC: One in three music industry jobs were lost during pandemic
The research said there were 69,000 fewer jobs in music in 2020 than in 2019 - a drop of 35% - due to the "devastating impact" of coronavirus.
UK Music said the industry had been hit "especially hard" by the virus.
Musicians themselves as well as people working in venues and recording studios were particularly affected, it said.
Live music revenues collapsed by around 90% in 2020, according to the UK Music report, titled This Is Music 2021, which was published on Tuesday.
"The music creators and live music sectors experienced the greatest decline - the majority of those working in the industry are self-employed, and they have been hit especially hard by Covid-19," it said.
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Finally some people that agree with my policy on listening: NO BACKGROUND MUSIC! When the most beautiful music is no music at all
...music — at least for some of us — is an engaged and engaging activity that involves your ear, your intellect, your memory, your imagination and more. And that if those resources aren’t available, there’s no shame in preferring the more serene and restful option of silence.
Read the whole thing!
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The group of eight Collaborative Partners that Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen has enlisted to help him and the San Francisco Symphony rethink the future of the orchestral world is a notably diverse bunch. They come from various musical domains spanning the unclassifiable divisions of classical, rock, jazz and other. Yet they all share a dedication to new ideas and new approaches — a combination of traits that makes them suitable participants in Salonen’s quest to transform the future of the Symphony.
Read the whole thing for an introduction to the people involved.
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Arts Wars: Dogmatic diversity is destroying the cultural canon we cannot afford to lose.
Today, the only major charitable foundation funding artistic innovation in the symphonic field is Mellon.
Orchestras are mainly to blame for these troubles. By and large, they have failed to rethink the concert experience, failed to explore native repertoire, failed to revisit issues of purpose and scope. But foundations are not blameless. Knight’s “The Magic of Music” failed to engage informed consultants. Susan Feder, Mellon’s long-time arts and culture program officer, is an exception; when she arrived in 2007, she shrewdly discriminated between recipients who were coasting and those with something on the ball. In sum, orchestras have been left unprepared for the current cultural moment, with its changing audience demographics and shifting political, social, and arts mores. It will not be enough to simply engage more Black instrumentalists, soloists, and composers.
Read the whole thing for an interesting and unusual take on the subject.
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Alex Ross in The New Yorker: The Tense, Turbulent Sounds of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones”
Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which opened the Metropolitan Opera season, tells of a young Black man growing up in a rural Louisiana town, his exuberant childhood shadowed by family discord and sexual abuse. Such a story would be nothing too newsworthy in an Off Broadway theatre or in an indie movie house, but it’s a radical novelty for the mainstream opera world, which dwells largely in the European past. This is, in fact, the first time that a Black composer and a Black librettist have found their way to the Met: until now, Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” has been the principal, problematic vehicle for capturing African American experiences. The libretto is by the screenwriter, director, and actor Kasi Lemmons, who adapted it from the eponymous memoir by the Times columnist Charles M. Blow.
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Speaking of opera, Covent Garden is adopting a policy that may have some unforeseen results: https://slippedisc.com/2021/10/covent-garden-is-weeding-its-top-operas-for-racism/
As always at Slipped Disc, the comments are most illuminating.
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Let's have some music by Terence Blanchard to start our envoi. This is Ghost of Congo Square.
McWhorter first got on my radar for a great review he wrote of the 2nd edition of Edward Berlin's biography of Scott Joplin. I think McWhorter was (and is) wrong to define ragtime as a style being incompatible with large-scale formal development but I'm immensely grateful for his great review of Berlin's inspiring Joplin biography! As Terry Teachout put it, great criticism can make points you think are completely wrong but if they inspire you to continue conversations in productive ways they've still done their job. So I'll take McWhorter over Lebrecht. :)
ReplyDeleteMcWhorter's new book drops soon, for that matter.
Looking foward to hearing the newly release John Coltrane performance of A Love Supreme in Seattle. Joseph Horowitz is plugging for a new Naxos release of Arthur Farwell's string quartet that I'm interested in hearing. Farwell, as a key figure of the Indianist movement. managed to get dismissed as a crackpot for wanting to make use of Native American melodies back in his day and as Horowitz has argued, has fallen upon unfair dismissal as a cultural appropriator by people who don't know enough of his life and work to give him a fair shot now. Horowitz grants that Farwell wrote some music that sounds kitschy but we should give him a fairer chance than he's gotten from academic trend setters in the past and present. So, sure, I'll give it a try. We'll see what I think of it.
Horowitz' forthcoming book on Dvorak's Prophecy and American music looks like it should be a fun comparative read/companion piece with Doug Shadle's earlier 2021 book on Dvorak. I'll have to make sure I blog about both books in some kind of post later this year if I can swing that.
That Joseph Horowitz article is a hot mess of nonsequiturs and illogic. It complains that the US government is not supporting its cultural institutions, which is true, and then lists all the cultural harms perpetrated by government and foundation arts funding back when it did exist. The headline laments the idea that the canon is under threat without evidence. I attended a Philip Ewell talk the other day, the face of "anti-canonical" cultural influence if ever there was one, and he spoke reverently about the experience of performing all nine Beethoven symphonies as a cellist. He is fine if we continue to teach and play Beethoven, he would just prefer we not do it in such a blinkered and atavistic way.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, back to Horowitz. He argues that the canon is newly pertinent because it "references the African-American experience." White people writing about the Black experience is... not the goal here. Horowitz himself admits that Charles Ives' incorporation of Black culture consists of quoting blackface minstrel songs, and that Faulkner's portrayal of Black people comes from a horrifically racist standpoint. Horowitz tries to explain that last bit away as Faulkner just being "a product of his time," but not everyone was racist back then either.
There is certainly a conversation to be had about the best way to approach canonical works without continuing to perpetrate the oppression and exclusion that have traditionally accompanied them. And there is a conversation to be had about the best model for arts funding. This article is not a helpful contribution to either one.
The Horowitz piece is rather short on logic, but it is usefully provocative. For example, he says "a new emphasis on social justice either buttresses our institutions of culture or maims them." What is that supposed to mean? Without concrete references it is hard to tell. But are you asserting that white artists like Dvorak, Faulkner or Ives are simply not allowed to reference Black culture? That seems a bridge too far.
ReplyDeleteThere are plenty of white artists who do a good job representing Black culture, but that is academic so long as we continue to systematically exclude Black artists from representing themselves. I think about the fact that conservatory piano students are more likely to play Debussy's jazz pastiches like "Golliwog's Cakewalk" than they are to play actual jazz. Those Debussy jazz knockoffs are racist ("The Little N-word" especially) but they are also just not very good music. Kicking them to the curb in favor of Duke Ellington is no sacrifice at all.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I can agree with your aesthetic evaluation of Debussy. He also quotes Wagner in Golliwog's Cakewalk, does that make him racist as regards Germans?
ReplyDeleteTo call "Golliwog's Cakewalk" a "jazz pastiche" is anachronistic. Jazz hadn't yet crossed the Atlantic at the time Debussy wrote it.
ReplyDeleteYou can split hairs about the definition of "jazz" if you want but Debussy had most certainly heard Black American vernacular music, or he thought he had. "Cakewalk" was a popular African-American dance style and "Golliwog" was a then widely used slur similar to the n-word. Bryan, are you really going to equate Debussy quoting another European with his clumsy racist caricatures? As to the musical merit of this stuff, I guess tastes vary, I never need to hear it again though.
ReplyDeleteWhite people can play Black music if they do it with care, attention and respect. I was just listening to Gil Evans' arrangement of Willie Dixon's "Spoonful" and it's magnificent. There's a reason that Miles Davis thought so highly of Evans in spite of his well-motivated contempt for white people generally. Evans wasn't making a lazy caricature of the music, he was a deep student of it. I am perfectly happy to have white kids learn about jazz from him.
ReplyDeleteI don't like crude ideological claims no matter what the source.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of Debussy
ReplyDeletehttps://youtu.be/UKO-ebWS4Ko
Oh, god!! Well, I think you won this thread...
ReplyDeleteBryan, if you have any interest in Huitzilopochtli then you would be thrilled to read the book The Hummingbird and the Hawk by R.C. Padden. A history of the rise of the Mexica tribe in the decades before Cortes, having been treated as savage dogs by the neighboring tribes and chased into the swamps where they built Tenochitlan (Mexico City) and then burst out to conquer their neighbors and create an Aztec empire complete with mass human sacrifice and cannibalism as religious methods of power and control over their own people and the conquered neighbors. He portrays the mythology as key ideological support of the Aztecs and then contributing to their defeat by Cortes because he seemed to be the return of Quetzelcoatl.
ReplyDeleteThe book reads like a novel but is heavily researched from period sources.
I've only read the first 66 pages so far but already recommend the book Dvorak to Ellington: A Conductor Explores America's Music and Its African American Roots, by Maurice Peress. European romantic composers were mining their local peasant dances and melodies for themes for their symphonic works. When Dvorak came to the USA, he soon recognized American Negro music as rich material for American national music. And he actively supported and taught and collaborated with African American musicians and composers while here.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Will. If I find some time I will have a look at these!
ReplyDelete