Friday Miscellanea

This has been a busy week, but there is always time to put together the Friday Miscellanea and I will have a new CD review up in a day or two as well.

Over at The Critic Norman Lebrecht says the unsayable about Yuja Wang: Spare us the skintight sonata

Onto a stage bounds a young woman in a backless gown slit up to the hip, or a micro-dress cut an inch below the butt. That’s right, I’ve turned into a fashion critic. And the moment these words appear I shall come under a social-media onslaught for committing the unforgivable male offence of reporting what a female artist wears, instead of how she plays.

My defence is that Yuja Wang does everything possible to draw attention to her appearance. She habitually changes costume in a concert interval to show more leg and she feeds the internet with a stream of selfies in halter tops and skimpy shorts.

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Afghan all-female orchestra keeps music alive in exile

For the first time in months, members of Afghanistan's all-female Zohra orchestra have reassembled in Doha, their music once again filling the air as they face an uncertain future.

While grateful to be safe in Qatar, their escape from Taliban rule is bittersweet, as the girls leave behind friends from the orchestra and their "old companions" -- their instruments.

Last week marked the first time in three months that Marzia Anwari, along with other members of the Afghan music community who escaped to Qatar, played live for an audience.

This reminds me of the Hungarian Philharmonic who reassembled in Vienna after fleeing Hungary during the Soviet repression in 1957.

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At the New York Times John McWhorter offers a comprehensive meditation on some recent opera: Go See These Black Operas — Several Times

I respect operas like these, am elated that they exist and am always up for sampling others. But the two pieces I have just seen leave me with a guilty feeling I suspect many share: a desire that they appropriated from white music a little less!

In Black music that’s fused with white music, I am more excited when the musical language is more viscerally embraceable beyond sheer beauty of texture. Give me quirky melody and dense harmony, yes, but with beginnings and endings that can be gleaned and appreciated in real time, not just after close study, and jazz and blues language (as well as, perhaps, composition from other Black musical traditions) not necessarily foregrounded, but not elusive either. A workout, yes, but one that leaves me with exercise-bike euphoria.

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Over at Ethan Hein's blog he discusses an intersection of Billie Eilish and classical music: Nahre Sol introduces Billie Eilish to the classical canon

The combination of Billie Eilish and Mozart is predictably weird, but not for any “musical” reason. There is not such a wide disconnect between Billie Eilish’s melody and classical music. The weirdness is due to the fact that Billie Eilish is a microphone singer, not a concert hall singer. It’s strange to hear microphone singing over classical-style accompaniment!

Classical voice comes from the time before microphones. Singers had to be heard and understood in every seat of a large auditorium, over all the instruments. This requires good strong breath support and control of tone, as well as exaggerated articulation. The typical way to record classical singing is to recreate the experience of being in the concert hall. You place the mics at a distance from the performer, so you are mainly capturing the sound of their voice bouncing off the walls and ceiling of the hall rather than the sound coming directly out of their mouth.

On a similar note, Rick Beato was waxing enthusiastic recently about the new Adele single "Easy On Me" because it starts with just voice and piano--real concert grand piano! Just wait until he discovers Schubert lieder.

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Alex Ross' latest at The New Yorker covers a voice recital: Jonas Kaufmann’s Gilded Voice

At Carnegie, the tenor rode waves of applause through no fewer than six encores, alternating lyrical purring with displays of heroic swagger. He ended with Strauss’s “Cäcilie,” though he stopped momentarily to berate an audience member who was recording a video. “I do everything for you,” he barked. “But please respect the rules and don’t film.” If Kaufmann were the kind of singer who really did give everything he had—a go-for-broke artist like Patti LuPone, who issues similar reprimands on Broadway—I would have admired the sentiment. In this case, though, it had more the flavor of a celebrity pout. And it is that scrim of celebrity which seems to have sealed off Kaufmann’s enormous talent and limited its expressive potential.

The great challenge for all performers these days is that they are constantly in competition with their studio-constructed selves who never make mistakes, who are never less than perfect because they are edited to be so. The raw spontaneity of live performance is to be avoided.

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This article on Music and sex is less interesting than you might think as it just rehashes all that stuff about dopamine levels that neuroscientists have been talking about for ages:

Why does music give us a sensation analogous to sexual climax? Neuroscience calls these physiological effects ‘frisson’ or ‘skin orgasm’. The brain’s motor and reward systems are united in the striatum, deep within the subcortical basal ganglia of the forebrain. The upper, dorsal part of the striatum is responsible for action and prediction. The lower, ventral striatum is connected to the oldest and most emotional part of the brain called the limbic system. A team of neuroscientists at McGill University in Montreal, led by Robert Zatorre, discovered a direct link between these brain regions and musical ‘chills’, based on the release of dopamine.

One wonders why neuroscientists don't seem to spend any time investigating why some music makes us want to run and hide while other music gives us feelings of nausea? Oh, right, those investigations are less "sexy." 

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We live in very strange times indeed if iTunes is the metric.

The #1 song on iTunes is an anti-vax anthem with lines like “the pandemic ain’t real they planned it” and shout outs to Nicki Minaj & Kyrie Irving. 

In fact 4 out of 10 of the top ten songs are remixes of the same “F**k Joe Biden”, anti-vax anthem. America is now Trump country.

Adele's new single has been pushed down to third place! 

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 Now for some suitable envois for a very patchy miscellanea. First, a collection of waltzes for classical guitar:

Two seasoned professionals play a Mozart Sonata for Two Pianos:

And finally, Yuja Wang playing Ligeti: