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.”
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Lea Desandre's new album is on my to-buy list, but still out of stock at Amazon. The Guardian has a nice review: Classical home listening: Lea Desandre’s Amazone; Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle.
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.
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Europe is going through a terrible resurgence of Covid right now: THREE SALZBURG PRODUCTIONS ARE SHUT BY COVID.
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:
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Here's something amusing: LEONARD COHEN INTERVIEWS GLENN GOULD.
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.
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No, this doesn't remind me of Lenin's propaganda vilifying "hoarders and wreckers" at all: Diversify the world of classical music? Some key players are digging in their heels.
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.
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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"?
helping premiere one of Joan Tower's string quartets while spending a career also playing Haydn wasn't good enough, I guess. Ignoring where artists are in the concert-giving foodchain seems specious. How many people have celebrated all the newly commissioned works Hilary Hahn has recorded in the last twenty years? I personally enjoyed the Higdon more than the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto but that Tchaikovsky was the selling point for the label without question.
ReplyDeleteHaydn gets it from the Romantics and anti-Romantics in weirdly even measures. Romantics fans dismiss him as having written for The Man and anti-Romantics diss him for supposedly embodying all "the rules" 19th century pedagogy imputed to him that, as Taruskin has pointed out, Haydn never even followed. The amount of unfair dogpiling on Haydn by people who talk about his music rather than engage it from rearguard and anglers for the new gets annoying. If anything, as I've blogged at some length, a deep dive into Haydn was what gave me a foundation for synthesizing ragtime with sonata forms--but I had to dig into what Haydn really did in his music in contrast to what theory textbooks and people writing ABOUT Haydn had to say about him.
The Gioia piece on Bach's cantatas was fun. It's good that he veers between the extremely speculative meta-theory stuff and concrete music appreciation because in the latter he's reliably great reading. :)
Christopher Small's Musicking helped me understand why the symphonic repertoire will never profoundly change as long as the art form persists: the point of it is reassurance of its audience, and new repertoire is fundamentally incapable of serving that function. (Small points out the irony that the works doing all this reassuring, Beethoven symphonies etc, were in their time the exact opposite of reassuring, but social contexts change.) By Small's logic, symphony programmers aren't trying to exclude works by people who aren't white men; the demands of their audience force them to exclude all new works by everyone. They might premiere new works but those are tolerated grudgingly by the paying customers, and are hardly ever repeated. The unfortunate result is the exclusion of nonwhite and nonmale composers, even if that was never the goal.
ReplyDeleteWenatchee, thanks for pointing out what we owe Haydn!
ReplyDeleteEthan, yes, I think you have captured the truth of it: ALL new music tends to be excluded from programs in contexts where an important function of the concert series is to reassure and give pleasure to the audience--let's not forget the latter! But in a different context, say, the Salzburg Festival, they pride themselves on presenting adventurous repertoire alongside the concert staples. The audience also derives pleasure from more challenging programming.
a similarly reassuring thing can happen in classical guitar as at symphonies. We get the usual Tarrega, Sor, Giuliani and Mertz et. al. music, and Villa-Lobos. I like Villa-Lobos just fine but Matanya Ophee used to complain that there were pieces of good music reduced to lollipop status by how pervasively they were played and how guitarists played them.
ReplyDeleteBut then it would be too easy to speak as though "comfort food music" only exists in classical music. In blues it's hard to beat the intimacy and innovations of the 1920s through 1940s blues guitarists who defined the styles of blues ever after. Blind Willie Johnson, Robert Johnson, Tampa Red and many others have taken on Beethovenian roles within the blues pantheon and, frankly, for good reasons!
If the symphonic repertoire has defaulted to dead white guys we guitarists have the opportunity to develop, promote, build upon and teach a musical repertoire that can far more readily and easily recognize POC contributions to the guitar's musical possibilities.
The Christopher Small book is on my sprawling "I should probably get to that book". He's coming up in the Jeremy Begbie books I've been reading lately.
Yeah, all the genres have their respective comfort foods. Maybe a definition of a "classical" music is when its main social function becomes reassuring powerful people. Jazz is well on the way, and rock is getting there too.
ReplyDeleteIf we look back at the long history of art, the patrons were usually the powerful: the Church, the nobility and the wealthy. From the 19th century, the middle class became a very important financial support through public concert halls, purchase of sheet music and so on. Now the music market is largely streaming except for the state support of uncommercial genres like classical music, opera and chamber music. The truly powerful such as the billionaire class don't seem very oriented towards patronage of the arts.
ReplyDeletewell, they sure don't seem to be NOW but they were back in the day. Were it not for aristocratic patronage we wouldn't have heard of Haydn, after all. In his scathing appraisal of contemporary art in technocratic societies Jacques Ellul claimed the arts critic emerged in relationship to the bourgeois and that prior to that era the aristocrats who funded the arts didn't need arts critics to tell them what they liked or, as Manfred Bukofzer (sic?) put it in his survey of the Baroque era, in the Baroque era the trained musical specialists and their patrons had similar musical educations and so there was nothing corresponding to music journalism or criticism to tell them what they liked. They heard stuff they liked and were willing to pay for it.
ReplyDeleteI think that for all my disagreements with Ted Gioia's master narratives he's correct to zero in on the possibility that ANY style of music can be consumed as comfort food or as something that challenges, even if he overstates the thesis that core observation has a moderately big kernel of truth to it in our time.
I think that a big difference between our day and previous eras as far as arts patronage goes is that the church and the nobility and the wealthy in previous times relied on the arts to enhance their prestige and to shape social hierarchies. Now we tend to rely on sheer material goods to do the same. Mansions, mega yachts, owning a tech company, whatever. The arts, especially music, are far less significant now than they were in the past.
ReplyDelete