The quote is from a 2002 BBC interview with Valery Gergiev introducing a performance of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5. This one, I believe:
In the surrounding context, Gergiev says that we need to move beyond the ideological dimensions, evil, the Soviet empire, simple tragic drama, to an understanding of the music qua music. Because, damn it, this is such interesting music.
To this end, David Fanning has made a huge contribution in an essay in the new Shostakovich Studies 2 volume titled "Shostakovich and structural hearing." In his introduction to the first volume he briefly offered a kind of Schenkerian graph of the first movement of this symphony. In this essay he fleshes that out at length and offers the best analytical interpretation of this music I have seen. I have done a lot of poking around in Shostakovich's music, including a long series of posts on the string quartets, but never got much past the surface. Fanning makes a good argument for the possibility that the methods of Heinrich Schenker might be applicable. He calls his approach neo-Schenkerian because, as he says, "I believe that enough of Shostakovich's music is sufficiently grounded in the 'Bach to Brahms' tradition to justify the application of what is -- at least by more or less common consent in the West -- the most powerful theoretical tool for explaining such works in musical terms." [op. cit. p.78]
I have to confess that I managed to get through two and three-quarters music degrees (bachelor's, concert diploma and all the seminars for a doctorate in musicology) without ever encountering Schenker except in disparaging terms, so I probably need to examine his methods in some detail. But I notice one large challenge in adapting Schenker to Shostakovich: the basic harmonic structures are different. How different? Well, in this movement, the second theme, which should be in the dominant in traditional first-movement sonata form, is actually in the minor flat super-tonic: the movement is in D minor and the second theme is in E flat minor. This is very far away in the circle of fifths, but that's not how Shostakovich rolls. For him, this is a very near key (though far away in key signature terms). Here is how Fanning describes it:
The relationship of Eb minor to D minor, i.e. flat supertonic minor to tonic, five degrees flatwards on the circle of fifths, may not sound like anything as dramatically potent as an evocation of Russian operatic fatefulness; but neither is it something purely formalitst. Think of musical distance: Eb minor is so near to, and yet so far from, D minor. So near diastematically -- in terms of up or down (the term derives from the theory of medieval notation prior to the invention of the musical staff, where position on the page conveyed an approximate intervallic relationship) -- but so far functionally, in terms of the circle of fifths.
A distematic relationship is one of vertical distance. In fact, I have noticed this interesting phenomenon in my own composition where I see it as a voice-leading situation. You can get from almost any harmony to any other harmony if you can join them by step. Here is Fanning's graph of the structural bass line and modal structure of the first movement:
I apologize for the tiny notes. I rotated the image so that I could make it larger. As you can see, the structural bass line is D, Eb, F, D, Eb, D, E, D. All movement by step. As he says, this is a diastematic structure, not one based on the circle of fifths. He also has a lot to say about the motivic relationships and the use of modes. I like his description of F Phrygian as being "darker than minor." [p. 87]
In fact, he broadens the scope of his discussion to show how the symphonies from five through ten (excepting six) all share certain structural similarities. And then he goes on to discuss how and why the Symphony No. 6 does not. Really great stuff.
Every time I listen to Shostakovich I have the feeling that one of the things that makes this music great is the structural power of it--something shared with Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, of course.
Now let's listen to the newer recording of Gergiev with the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater.
For much of his life Shostakovich kept a daily schedule of his activities which can be very useful in establishing biographical details. Shostakovich Studies 2 contains a fascinating essay on this by Ol'ga Dombrovskaya: "Notes on Shostakovich's Diary." In connection with entries on his work with film director Leonid Zakharovich Trauberg, Dombrovskaya quotes from a resolution of the All-Union Communist Party Central Committee on "art workers."
Art workers should understand that those who continue to have an irresponsible and frivolous attitude towards their work could well find themselves off-limits with respect to progressive Soviet art and be out of the picture. [op. cit. p 46]
This is from the entry for Sept. 21, 1946. Shostakovich was already familiar with what this could mean as he was made persona non grata in 1936 after Stalin, Molotov and others attended a performance of his opera Lady Macbeth and were not amused. He would experience another banning of his work in 1948. Of course "out of the picture" in the Soviet Union under Stalin could mean something rather more serious than simply having your music banned--you could be sent to a work camp or simply shot in the head.
Something I was not aware of was that Shostakovich was a fairly important film composer, having written music for eighteen films beginning in the late 1920s.
Putting my musicologist hat on, I can trace my interest in Dmitri Shostakovich in several stages. Long, long ago I heard a Shostakovich symphony on CBC radio one morning and thought it was pretty good and started wondering why he was never mentioned in my undergraduate classes. Then I heard the Piano Trio No. 2 with its eerie harmonics in the cello at the beginning in a summer chamber music concert. But the real involvement came as a result of a graduate seminar in the symphonies when I went back to school as a PhD candidate in musicology. Back then the professor lamented that the study of Shostakovich was in its very early and rudimentary stages as archival work in Russia had yet to be done and there were virtually no published studies of the works. In fact, just about all we had access to, other than the complete Soviet edition of the works, were the Musical Times articles that accompanied the London premieres of the symphonies. So we worked our way through the symphonies doing what little research we could. I came away from that class with a profound appreciation of the music of Shostakovich and in subsequent years acquainted myself with his remarkable sequence of string quartets, his piano music, and some of his vocal music. Oh, and some concertos as well, particularly those for violin, cello and piano. I'm still mostly unaware of his operas and film music.
Right around the time of my seminar, in the mid 90s, the first book of Shostakovich Studies was published by Cambridge University Press containing a superb paper on the Symphony No. 5 by Richard Taruskin, some interesting ones on Russian modes and other preliminary research. I don't think we were aware of it at the time as reviews and the library acquisition lagged a couple of years.
This excellent collection was followed by an excellent biography by Laurel Fay and other secondary materials. But the original archival research was still mostly missing due to a gulf between Russian musicology and the English speaking world.
But there is a newer collection, published in paperback in 2016 from Cambridge University Press: Shostakovich Studies 2, that goes quite a ways to improving our knowledge of Shostakovich with several archival studies as well as a lot more analysis, interpretation and context. I just got my copy and am reading it avidly. So you will likely find me delving into it in future posts.
One of the excellent papers in this new collection has to do with the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin on parody and irony and the way this could be used to examine Shostakovich's Symphony No. 14, a challenging one to interpret. Here is Valery Gergiev conducting the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre. The opening movement will haunt you down to your toes. This performance was just posted to YouTube less than a month ago.
A deeply researched warning about how the digital economy threatens artists' lives and work—the music, writing, and visual art that sustain our souls and societies—from an award-winning essayist and critic.
Toppin is challenging programmers to think beyond newsreel moments and, as she calls it, “formulaic programming.”
“We need to stop presenting one movement of Florence Price for Black History Month and giving no time to rehearse it,” she says, “and then spend two weeks on the Beethoven Ninth Symphony that everyone has played for the last 30 years.”
I just have one caveat: the Canadian Music Centre has been fulfilling a similar need for Canadian composers:
The Canadian Music Centre was founded in 1959 by a group of Canadian composers who saw a need to create a repository for Canadian music. It now holds Canada's largest collection of Canadian concert music, and works to promote the music of its Associate Composers in Canada and around the world.
Initially the Centre focused on collecting and cataloguing serious musical works, developing a catalogue of scores, copying and duplicating the music, and making it available for loan, nationally and internationally. The Centre currently has over 18,000 scores and/or works by almost 700 Canadian contemporary composers available through its lending library.[1] It sells more than 900 CD titles featuring the music of its Associate Composers and other Canadian independent recording producers.
Successful results have been limited, however.
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In graduate school I took a seminar on comic opera and, to my great sorrow, chose Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg to write a paper on. I figured that this would be a good way to get to know Wagner better without having to slog through The Ring. Alas and alack! Die Meistersinger is nearly six hours long. And writing a paper involved listening to it multiple times... The New Yorker provides a guide to how to manage that: An Operagoer’s Endurance Test: Matthew Aucoin at “Die Meistersinger”
Once Aucoin had hunkered down in an orchestra seat for “Die Meistersinger” ’s first act, he cautioned, “There’s a kind of opium haze that sets in with Wagner. If I end up keeling over into your shoulder, be warned.” Eighty-five minutes of keelinglessness later, during the first intermission, Aucoin said, “One down, two to go. We’re still at the base of the mountain.” He added, “I’m finding that one part of my brain is registering, Well, that’s a terrible line. But most of me is kind of hooked. It’s that narcotic quality I mentioned. And that’s opera’s ‘thing’: Can you overcome the skepticism that remains present in one part of your brain?”
As Richard Karabel documented in his monumental work The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (2005), the general raising of academic standards at elite universities is almost entirely due to the entrance of Jewish students at the beginning of the 20th century. Because Jewish kids took all this stuff seriously: they actually studied Latin and Greek; they actually studied and absorbed the Classics. In this devotion, they were continuing a process that’s occurred repeatedly throughout history: the children of the bourgeois exploiting brief periods when a Classical education might gain them an advantage in a changing world.
The simple truth is that, by and large, Americans elites have not been particularly cultured. Neither, despite the hype, were the English gentry. In this, we see a common phenomenon: after 1700, when the supply of literate people expanded, the political class stopped producing nearly so many writers, and writers now tended to come either from the gentry, who were so minor that they were nowhere near the halls of power, or from the upper echelons of tradespeople. For the former, see Henry Fielding or Samuel Johnson; for the latter, see Daniel Defoe or Samuel Richardson.
* * *
For our first envoi, the Prelude to Act 1 of Die Meistersinger:
And here is the Symphony No. 4 by Canadian composer Jacques Hétu:
I must have written about Adele before because I have an "Adele" tag. Don't remember when or why. She is such a major artist, though, that we should really have a go at her new album. So, in the spirit and tradition of Ozzy Man, here is my commentary on "Easy On Me."
Ok, well, at the beginning, before the music starts, it looks like we are going to have a black and white documentary on coal miners in Kentucky. But no, a heavily made-up Adele steps into frame, gazing pensively out the window of this rustic shack. Picking up a cheap, cardboard suitcase, she gathers herself and strides out the door. I guess this is all about her roots in the Deep South? This impression is shattered as she walks down the driveway, chatting on the phone in an almost impenetrable English accent, all glottal stops and compressed vowels. So, a Welsh coal-miner then? Hanging up, she walks past an abandoned old pick-up and a pile of trash, getting into a car (with a trailer, we've sold the family homestead) and sliding a cassette (a cassette!!) into the dashboard player. My favourite tiny detail is, just after she slides the cassette in, there is a moment of crackling imitating the sound when you place a phonograph stylus on a vinyl record! Then, almost a minute and three-quarters into the clip the music starts, pretending to be a diagetic part of the narrative. There follows a nice tune with acoustic grand piano accompaniment that is, well, exactly the kind of nice and oh gosh, heartfelt tune you would expect. Around the two-and-a-half minute mark I turned it off as I was bored.
So that's my Adele review. The efforts to seem "authentic" before the music even starts wore me out.
I was reading Paul Johnson's Art: A New History the other day and was struck by something he mentioned regarding the commissioning of a new set of bronze doors for the baptistry of the cathedral in Florence in 1401. There was a competition for the job and it was won by Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378 - 1455). He eventually did two sets of doors which took him fifty years! You have to understand that these were very large doors displaying scenes from the Bible in low-relief sculpture:
Click to enlarge
To give you an idea of the enormity of the project and the importance to the city-state of Florence, the cost came to 22,000 florins which was equal to the entire Florentine defence budget! [Johnson, op. cit. p. 233]
I mention this to point to the enormous significance the arts had in early modern European society. There is a musical connection, not to the bronze doors, but to the construction of the new cathedral itself, consecrated on March 25, 1436. The music commissioned for this event was Nuper rosarum flores by Guillaume Dufay. I can't track down what he was paid for this work, but I'm pretty sure that it was not anywhere near the cost of the cathedral, or even one of the doors. Dufay did pretty well, but music never paid as well as architecture or sculpture.
Still, it is sobering to realize that our ancestors placed such enormous value on both religion and the arts that ornamented and illustrated religion that they would compare with an item as huge as the budget for defence of the state. The arts in contemporary society are of very tiny significance in comparison. Even if you are Billie Eilish or Adele.
A couple of weeks ago I attended a chamber music recital that began with a lovely piece by Brahms, a scherzo, that was originally part of a rather odd piece written by three composers: Brahms, Robert Schumann and Albert Dietrich. It was a 21st birthday present for their mutual friend the violinist Joseph Joachim. Brahms contributed the scherzo movement and Schumann and Dietrich the other three movements of a four movement sonata for violin and piano. The sonata is often referred to as the "F-A-E" sonata because each movement uses the musical motif FAE which stands for a phrase in German that Brahms and Joachim adopted as a mutual pact: "frei aber einsam" which means "free but lonely" or "free but alone." The idea was that in order to fulfill one's potential as an artist one had to remain free from the bonds of marriage and other social institutions. While Brahms stuck to the pact, Joachim did not and fell in love with a soprano whom he married.
Brahms had an interesting counter to the motto: "frei aber froh" which means "free but happy." His Symphony No. 3 uses this as a musical motif as well in the form F A flat F. Now not all artists and musicians have wrestled with the potential conflicts between the demands of art and social traditions, not to mention sexual attraction. The Spanish opera singer Teresa Berganza has three children that she raised while pursuing an active career and there are a host of other examples. J. S. Bach was married twice and had thirteen children! But the sense that art is the kind of demanding vocation, like the Catholic priesthood, that may indeed require, if not actual celibacy, then something approaching it, has been around since the Romantic era. And modernism has not quite killed it off!
I have felt this in my personal life and although I married, we did not have children, something I sometimes regret! Especially living in Mexico where the second question people ask you, after your name, is "how many children do you have?" Artists often have a complex relationship with the wider society and I guess this is just one aspect of it.
Now let's listen. First, the scherzo for violin and piano which is catalogued as Sonatensatz, Woo2 (which means "Werk ohne opus." Maxim Bengerov is accompanied by Vahagn Papaian. Love the hemiolas.
And here is the Symphony No. 3 with Andrés Orozco-Estrada and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony:
Here is a really interesting piece. Raga Piloo, one of the very first East/West collaborations written by Ravi Shankar for himself and Yehudi Menuhin. Here played by Shankar's daughter Anoushka and Patricia Kopatchinskaja. The last time I saw Patricia she was sprechgesinging Schoenberg!
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And since last week I was kicking Ted Gioia for his methodology, it is only fair to mention a quite good piece he just did on Bach: Having Fun with Bach Cantatas. I find myself agreeing with quite a lot he has to say.
But the more deeply you probe into the aspirations and attitudes of this composer, the larger these works loom in his oeuvre. Bach scholar Christoph Wolff has argued that they stand out as the “most ambitious of all compositional projects”—especially the second cantata cycle of 1724-25. “The cantatas represent an almost superhuman artistic and spiritual achievement,” claims Mark Ringer in his new book Bach’s Operas of the Soul, adding that “they are at the absolute center of Bach’s creative life.” Yet, he notes sadly, “they are a closed book to a majority of serious listeners.”
This is a concept album, a “hymn to Mother Nature… a poetic, universal and timeless message”, with pictures of Desandre standing in yogic dancer pose. Don’t be put off. The music is beautifully performed, vivacious, and intelligently programmed. Desandre flies weightlessly around elaborate ornamentation, expressive and precise. The Jupiter players and Dunford excel. And hearing contributions from Desandre’s French and Italian senior star colleagues Véronique Gens and Cecilia Bartoli is a bonus.
Following a number of Corona cases in the ensemble Salzburg Landestheater has cancelled Richard Strauss’ opera Ariadne auf Naxos, as well as a play, Blood on My Hands, by Shlomo Moskovitz.
Alan Ayckbourn’s Season’s Greetings, due this weekend, has been postponed.
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As a reminder of the world pre-Covid, here is a chamber music concert by Gautier Capuçon and Yuja Wang from January 2020:
Cohen gave an account of interviewing Gould for Holiday magazine in the “late 1950s or early 1960s.” The pianist, having “apparently heard of a little book I [Cohen] had written, … accepted the interview.”
Cautioned not to shake his hand,Cohen met Gould in the lobby of Gould’s apartment building in Toronto.
This was before the days of tape recorders. ‘[I became] so engrossed by what [Gould] was saying, I stopped taking notes.’
The interview, scheduled for only a few minutes, lasted for a “couple of hours.” Cohen thanked Gould and returned to his Montreal home to write the article, at which time those words he thought “were burned into my soul” dissipated. As Leonard Cohen put it,
‘I couldn’t remember a word that he said.’
After stalling his editors over the phone for some time, Cohen ‘finally stopped answering the phone.’
Leonard Cohen and Glenn Gould between them constitute over 50% of interesting Canadian cultural figures.
Because this is a day ending in y, it’s time once again to take up the question of the classical music repertoire. Specifically, how long can an artistic culture survive and thrive on the work of the same circumscribed set of a dozen or so dead white European men?
Or, to put it another way: What is so damn terrifying about the possibility that exploring new and diverse musical sources — living composers, women, creators of color — might prove rewarding?
Of course, this is a straw man: the fact that a lot of performing organizations offer a lot of repertoire that much of their audience enjoys and is familiar with does not at all mean that they are resisting new and diverse musical sources. You can certainly do both. And refrain from being terrified as well. This over-hyping of a predetermined narrative is a sin committed by both the left and the right of course. Here the non-persons resisting the inevitable march of progress are cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han. I especially enjoyed the all-out assault on poor Joseph Haydn.
* * *
Here is a nice sample from the Lea Desandre album mentioned above:
And this is Symphonia: "Sum fluxae pretium spei" by Elliot Carter:
And finally Cantiga 105 by Alonso el Sabio, 13th century:
Ok, now tell me again about that "same circumscribed set of a dozen or so dead white European men"?
I want to preface this discussion by saying it is kind of an addendum to a post from five years ago when I took up the issue of objective aesthetic value at some length. That post is called Philosophy and Aesthetics and I recommend you read it first.
It has always seemed to be harder to talk about music than simply to play or listen to it. That shouldn't be surprising because once you get past, "wow" and "yetch," what in ethics is called the "boo-hoorah" theory, what can you say? Well, a lot, it turns out. I mention ethics because I have noticed, in investigating aesthetics, that it shares some interesting resonances with ethics or moral philosophy. They have both, at different times, resorted to a theory of subjectivism or relativism. Some have said that ethical values are nothing more than your personal opinion about right and wrong, They have no objective existence. Bertrand Russell criticized this by observing that "I cannot necessarily construct an argument to the contrary, but I refuse to believe that the only thing wrong with wanton cruelty is that I don't like it!" And I refuse to believe that the only difference between good music and bad music is that I prefer one to the other. Speaking of categorizing music in this way, Duke Ellington is reported to have said that "There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind."
But let me back up quite a ways and take a different approach to this. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was likely the most important philosopher of the 20th century. One of the things he is most known for is the "private language argument." This was discussed in his Philosophical Investigations. This work is divided into numbered paragraphs and the second part of #243 reads:
But is it also conceivable that there be a language in which a person could write down or give voice to his inner experiences--his feelings, moods, and so on--for his own use?--Well, can't we do so in our ordinary language?--But that is not what I mean. The words of this language are to refer to what only the speaker can know--to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language.
There has been a remarkable amount of discussion over this and the following passages and the reason is that there are wide ranging implications for epistemology. Some of them are linguistic: a language in principle unintelligible to anyone but its originating user is impossible. Because: language, by its very nature, is both public and communal. The existence of the rules governing the use of language and making communication possible depends on agreement in human behaviour, such as uniformity in normal human reaction.
To take a simple example, itching is a typical human experience that we would say is a private sensation, not shared with others. But we have a word for it because we do actually share the experience of having an itch. Both you and I seem to have similar itching experiences that we describe in similar ways. We are both acquainted with the sensation. Similarly, though we experience a C major chord and dotted rhythms subjectively, they are not just private phenomena because we can point to them, notate them, and play them in the objective physical world. With some specific exceptions, music is not a private language that refers to what only the composer or performer can know, but it is a public manifestation that, even though it may be experienced in a variety of ways, is still an objective event.
Going back to the language issue, one reason this is so important is that we want to talk about music. We say something like "It was quite a shock for me to get to college and hear a jazz professor say that Duke Ellington was the best composer of the twentieth century. Not the best jazz composer, the best composer, period." This is from a comment by Ethan Hein. When I asked what this opinion was based on he responded: "It was based on his belief that jazz was the condition to which all other music aspires. That belief is a highly subjective one, but no more or less subjective than any other hierarchy of value one might choose to have." Ok, so all hierarchies of value are wholly subjective, just like all opinions about good and bad in morality. As Ethan says in another comment: "Musical quality is always dependent on a subjective value system."
What is the problem with that? Well, first off, Ethan or his professor can say "Duke Ellington is the greatest composer of the 20th century" and I could respond, "no, Dmitri Shostakovich is the greatest composer of the 20th century." But if all we are exchanging is hoorahs, if, in other words, these are nothing but subjective utterances, then the conversation is over as from here on it will just be sterile exchanges of the "so's yo momma" variety. In other words, unless we can talk about things that we actually can refer to objectively, things that are not a private language, we can't even have a conversation.
But I very much think we can have a conversation. First however, we have to know what we are talking about. Foggy generalities won't get us very far, we need specifics. Music is a wonderful way to explore our own feelings and moods, but an overwhelming quality of good music is that it appeals to a wide range of people--or maybe just very deeply to a small group of people! But good music is NOT a private language. Though it may explore very intimate feelings.
Yes, we can have a conversation, but only if you give up the idea that your completely subjective perceptions are absolute truth.
I get frequent articles from Ted Gioia in my mailbox. I admire his energy and the breadth of his interests, but I often feel that he is somehow missing the point, or that we are at cross-purposes. His most recent article is about how most articles and books about music that interest him these days are from professionals in other fields. That in itself makes me squirm because I recall all the embarrassing and je-jeune things I have read by scholars who venture outside their fields. Believe me, a professional standing in economics does not give you any wisdom in music and vice-versa. This why I don't give you the benefit of my theories on economics in this blog.
But this gives no pause to Ted who forages on mentioning many people, but linking to few examples. Wait, one link is to one of his articles titled Face the Music with the revealing subtitle: "There’s growing evidence for musical universality. So why are music scholars ignoring it?" This is the kind of infuriating reader bait that journalism specializes in and that rarely leads to any actual knowledge. Ted takes as proven the idea that there are musical universals and then proceeds to beat up anyone with a contrary view. Hold up a minute! What do you mean by musical universals and what is the evidence for them? Well, we are not going to find out here as Ted goes on and on belaboring how the evidence is being ignored without actually providing any, you know, evidence.
This trait, by the way, is distressingly common. I have two labels for it: special pleading and motivated reasoning. In both instances there are non-evidentiary reasons for wanting to come to a particular conclusion so the possibility of evidence being weighed fairly is simply not on the table. For those who suspect that Ted simply delays the presentation of the evidence to later on, well, no, nope, didn't happen. He keeps telling us the evidence is there, but doesn't give us any. Hey, it's obvious!
And I'm still waiting to hear what he actually means by "musical universality" but I have given up on that. This is a typical paragraph:
Over the last two decades, I have found myself gradually forced to abandon the incommensurability doctrine and accept — at first begrudgingly, but over time with a growing confidence and certainty — the existence of a whole host of musical universals, ones that are typically ignored or downplayed in world music studies. My initial reasons for doing so had nothing to do with neuroscience or findings in related disciplines. All that came later. At first, I was simply trying to solve some intractable problems raised in the course of my research into music history. These problems could not be solved under the existing paradigm and forced me to look for answers elsewhere.
And this "whole host of musical universals" that you refer to, Ted, would you mind terribly actually mentioning one? Even in passing? Nope, it's on with the vague generalizations that assume conclusions never established. Reading this is liking eating meringue, you keep biting on air. When he does mention actual examples, like shamanistic rituals, they are not musical examples.
Ted goes on to reference neuroscience, but I have talked about so many of these claims regarding music here on the blog that I won't bore you with them further. The way Ted writes about these topics is like a man riding a merry-go-round who doesn't quite know how to get off. The ideas whirl by in dizzy confusion, but that's what happens when you start with your conclusion--you really have nowhere to go.
What could possibly serve as an envoi to this? Eliot Carter maybe? String Quartet No. 1.
Two performances of Bluebeard’s Castle on the same day have left me somewhat jittery. Bartók’s only opera, examining a marriage pulled apart by the exposure of secrets, memories and past emotional pain, admits of multiple approaches, and this contrasting pair of interpretations could not be further apart in stance and intention. At Stone Nest on London’s Shaftesbury Avenue – once a chapel, then, in the 1980s and 90s, the Limelight club – the newly formed Theatre of Sound are staging a chamber version by director Daisy Evans and conductor-arranger Stephen Higgins that reimagines the opera as study of a happily married couple facing the devastating reality of the wife’s dementia. At the Royal Festival Hall, meanwhile, Edward Gardner and the London Philharmonic gave a terrifying yet astonishingly beautiful account of Bartók’s original score – a more traditional treatment, inevitably, but no less disquieting by any means.
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Something I have long wondered about is why the costs of construction or renovation of concert halls are so poorly estimated: CONCERT HALL IS FOUR TIMES OVER BUDGET
The German Taxpayers Association has slammed the city of Bonn for letting costs of renovating the Beethoven Hall run from a budgeted 43 million Euros to a present estimate of 166 million. It is also three years behind schedule
Even worse is Cologne where a 230 million Euro budget for the rebuilt opera house is now estimated at 971 million, and no end in sight.
Is it because these are government projects and so cannot be canceled?
Many musicians have watched, cringing, as the term “gig economy” has become a defining term of the national economic Zeitgeist. Not just because the word “gig” is our word—it originated with jazz musicians in the 1910s—but because, in a larger sense, we are the original gig workers. From time immemorial, musicians—from the troubadours of medieval Europe to the blues visionaries of the Mississippi Delta—have traveled from crowd to crowd, city to city, in search of the next audience with some money to pay us for the sounds and songs we have to offer. We understand the attractions of the gigging life—the sense of freedom and flexibility it often gives us—and know the costs: unpredictability, uncertainty, and an ever-present risk of economic ruin. As an increasing number of American workers are pushed into similarly precarious labor situations, we see our own reflection, darkly. We feel for and identify with these new “gig workers”—the Uber driver, the TaskRabbit laborer, all the miscategorized “independent contractors”—but at the same time, and perhaps for the first time, there is now a mass of American workers who increasingly are able to identify with us.
Now, of course, this is just common sense and seasoned orchestras know what to do in a situation like this. But it is nice to see it handled so smoothly!
Why are so many tenured professors unhappy with their jobs yet unable to change careers?
I am able to restrain my compassion because, as far as I can see, humanities professors have so nuanced and problematized and decolonialized their disciplines that there is almost nothing left on the carcass of what was once the pinnacle of Western Civilization.
* * *
Here is a film of Bluebeard's Castle:
And the rest of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto:
Here is François Couperin, Troisième Leçon De Ténèbres À 2 Voix
This is one of a long string of posts on aesthetic questions that I periodically return to--possibly because I like to live dangerously! Let's look at a couple of statements about taste. First, from Pablo Picasso:
“Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.”
Very sensible thing to say for a modernist painter pursuing new avenues and techniques. The last thing he wants is some old fuddy-duddy telling him what he can or cannot do. But let's set aside this a essay that takes up the question from a more neutral position: On Taste from the Claremont Review.
...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.
When you look at it more closely you see that artists themselves are constantly making their own judgments--how else could they possibly function? I have sometimes used Jordan Peterson's metaphor of the campfire in the wilderness. The job of artists is to venture out from the comforting light and warmth of the campfire into the surrounding dark, perhaps taking a brand from the fire to light the way. You can certainly overwork the metaphor, but it captures an important part of the creative process: you have to venture into the unknown to find new things with which to create new art. But the newness is only part of the puzzle. You also have to take the new thing and work it into an art object. Perhaps this process is raw with really new ideas, but the artist has to use judgment all the time in selecting, modifying and developing whatever he may encounter away from the campfire.
The act of judgment is not only necessary to the creative artist, it is also part of what performers, critics and audiences do. A performer chooses one new concerto to learn for the coming season--out of a hundred possibilities. How? Through aesthetic judgment. The music director of the orchestra chooses certain repertoire over other repertoire through aesthetic judgment as well. Ok, sure, these days the marketing department may be demanding more pop, but that is just one more thing that needs to be judged. Then come the audience--they purchase tickets according to their best judgment as to what programs they will most enjoy. And so on.
What is the role of taste in all this? You might say that taste is just one way of looking at judgment. Good taste is either the enemy of creativity, as Picasso said, or perhaps taste that is based on good judgment. Sure, there is a good deal of personal or subjective reaction in judgments of taste and people often find it pleasurable to assert their independence from consensus judgments of taste. But it seems to be the case that taste is something that can be developed through increased exposure, study of history, study of the materials and practices of art and so on. Every music appreciation class, and indeed music education in general, is based on the idea that one's perceptions can be made more acute and sensitive.
Someone who has no taste or poor taste is perhaps someone who has no interest in art or who is inherently insensitive to it. More from the Claremont Review essay written by Thomas Kaminski:
Those who see what is going on in an Old Master painting “without being told” can do so only because they already know something about the form. Art is never transparent. There are no wholly intuitive responses to it, not even to the Old Masters. We assume, perhaps rightly, that anyone can enjoy the beauty of a sunset or the scent of peonies: the pleasures of nature must certainly be available to all. But the response to art is different. Art is not a part of the natural world; it is a human contrivance, and to appreciate it we must undergo some form of acculturation. Before Western music conquered the world, the shamisen (a three-stringed traditional instrument) would have sounded as natural to Japanese ears as the guitar does to our own. But nature had nothing to do with it: we hear a culture’s vibrations in the strings of each instrument. No one, in fact, is born a connoisseur of Old Master paintings, just as no one is born a reader of Alexander Pope or a devotee of Mozart. Our responses to art involve both nature and nurture, an inherent sensitivity shaped by experience. Taste must always be trained.
This is fairly obviously true; but at the same time it is like a truth that no-one wants to admit in public as it not only smacks of elitism, it is based on several things that are anathema to our current thinking. Everyone's taste is equal to everyone else's, there can be no hierarchy of value in the arts because that somehow goes against equity, and this is all probably somehow racist. Best not to even mention taste!
But it is something that we use every day. And it is something that is constantly changing as our experiences change.
Here are the Haydn Variations by Brahms played by Anastasia Gromoglasova and Lyubov Gromoglasova:
Click to enlarge. After the rainy season ends in the Fall, wild flowers still abound in Mexico. Here Morning Glory drapes itself over a huizache with another purple wild flower on the ground.
I've often thought that Shostakovich might have become known as one of the leading opera composers of the 20th century were it not for the derailing of his opera composing career by Stalin and his minions after they saw a production of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The New York Times has an extensive article on a new production of his early absurdist opera, The Nose, that illustrates why: A New Era Takes Shape at the World’s Opera Capital.
Jurowski said his preparations for “The Nose” involved a lot of conversations with Serebrennikov — especially in person, whenever Jurowski was in Russia for work — long before rehearsals began. “We are completely d’accord,” he added, “in terms of this production,” in which the hapless protagonist is depicted as being alone in having just one nose, while everyone else wears grotesque masks adorned with many of them. Serebrennikov’s staging subtly raises political questions like the one the German critic Bernhard Neuhoff posed in his review of the premiere: “Is it normal to be human when everyone is inhuman?”
Speaking by phone after opening night, Dorny said that what Jurowski and Serebrennikov achieved together was “powerful”: a production that offered a fresh visual and metaphorical take on the piece, and a musical performance that was “quite definitive.” He was pleased with the audience’s sustained applause, but even happier overhearing them discussing the opera afterward.
“It’s a very good opening piece for the Bayerische Staatsoper,” Dorny said. “It should not just be that you walk out and you forget what you’ve seen, but that you take it with you — that it stays with you. That is what I would like to achieve.”
It may be counterintuitive, but the consensus view is the best way to produce the emotional intensity of a live performance is to create programming distinctly different from the work being done onstage. That can mean everything from documentaries and mini-recitals to short films in which new music is paired with highly cinematic imagery.
“The power, the energy of a live orchestra is not something you can get on your flatscreen. We have no interest in trying to recreate that,” said Oliver Theil, head of digital innovation at the San Francisco Symphony. “We’re creating content that’s unique to the digital realm.”
For this season, that includes a new film of Stravinsky’s A Soldier’s Tale, featuring actors, musicians, and dancers, and an innovative offering entitled Ligeti Paradigms. To be released in early December, “It’ll be a half-hour program combining art and technology to explore creativity — a combination that will drive much of our work going forward,” Theil said.
The past 18 months have been pretty grim for music journalists covering the live-performance scene. Cancelation notices dominated SFCV news items during the spring and summer of 2020, and we turned our critics loose on recorded music and streaming performances to compensate for the lack of live concerts. Many musicians, however, were persisting — some even thriving — during lockdown, and one truly positive story in those first months was a report on new technology the Ragazzi Boys Chorus was using that enabled them to maintain real-time rehearsals with everyone singing safely from their own homes.
The technology in question, JackTrip Lab’s Virtual Studio, comprises software and a hardware interface that allows each participant to use a microphone, headphones, and a home computer to connect directly other musicians via a dedicated JackTrip server. The result dramatically reduces latency — that maddening little delay in time between connected parties over the internet than can make conversations stilted and music-making impossible. With JackTrip, audio is perceived as more-perfectly synched.
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Some really interesting musings on art from an economics blog (I read 'em all!):
COWEN: Yes, but just to be very concrete, let’s say someone asks you, “I want to take one actionable step tomorrow to learn more about art.” And they are a smart, highly educated person, but have not spent much time in the art world. What should they actually do other than look at art, on the reading level?
SALLE: On the reading level? Oh God, Tyler, that’s hard. I’ll have to think about it. I’ll have to come back with an answer in a few minutes. I’m not sure there’s anything concretely to do on the reading level. There probably is — just not coming to mind.
There’s Henry Geldzahler, who wrote a book very late in his life, at the end of his life. I can’t remember the title, but he addresses the problem of something which is almost a taboo — how do you acquire taste? — which is, in a sense, what we’re talking about. It’s something one can’t even speak about in polite society among art historians or art critics.
Taste is considered to be something not worth discussing. It’s simply, we’re all above that. Taste is, in a sense, something that has to do with Hallmark greeting cards — but it’s not true. Taste is what we have to work with. It’s a way of describing human experience.
My emphasis.
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Not a lot of interesting links today, so let's have some good envois! First up some rockin' harpsichord music from Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer played by Jean Rondeau:
Next Mozart Symphony 31 with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt:
Here is Isata Kanneh Mason playing the Scherzo No. 2 by Clara Schumann:
And finally here is Atmospheres by György Ligeti with Simon Rattle conducting the Berlin Philharmonic:
A while back the New York Times had an exhaustive survey of the best notebooks. They also had a section on the best pens and pencils, but completely omitted fountain pens. This was even though two fountain pens, a Lamy Safari and a TWSBI Eco were prominently shown in the photo illustration at the head of the article. They even talk about how some papers perform poorly with fountain pens. Whassamatta NYT? No love for the fountain pen? They probably decided that getting into fountain pens was too complicated considering how few people use them these days. Fie, I say! Look, it's simple. The Platinum Preppy is a terrific and very cheap fountain pen from Japan as is the Pilot Kaküno. Alas, it looks like Amazon is having a real problem carrying them right now. But they should cost between $5 and $10. Both use cartridges, but you can get converters so you can fill from a bottle. Moving up a step, I recommend pens from Lamy, made in Germany. They start about $20 and Amazon has a few in stock. Another great pen is the Platinum Prefounte which Amazon also seems out of. Goulet Pens would be a good alternate source. There are a host of Chinese pens out there, some good, like Moonman, but most unsatisfactory with scratchy nibs, leaking barrels or just poor ink flow.
Oh, speaking of notebooks, I like the Leuchtturm 1917, but it is rather expensive. "Leuchtturm" means "lighthouse" by the way. A good minimalist notebook for much less is the Midori from Japan. They both have nice paper that stands up well to fountain pens.
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Here is today's livestream from Wigmore Hall: Mischa Maisky, cello and his daughter, Lily Maisky, piano:
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If you have ever wondered how some corporations manage to pay almost nothing in tax even though they are very profitable, here is the explanation from a very entertaining Australian economist in which you will learn what a "Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich" is, and no, it isn't naughty.
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And that concludes our public service announcements for today.
