The New York Times has an article on a new recording of C. P. E Bach by Marc-André Hamelin:
C.P.E. Bach was a prolific composer and an important pedagogue, a significant influence on Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. (Hamelin’s new album is a welcome companion to the three volumes of solo Haydn that he set down, with ideal panache, a decade and more ago on the Hyperion label.) But if he was more widely appreciated than his father well into the 19th century, that has certainly not been the case more recently.
I have a box of C. P. E. (sometimes called the "Berlin" Bach) that is a delight. His symphonies and concertos are often surprising in their unusual phrasing and harmonies. The path from the late Baroque to the early Classical style took two roads, the southern one with Haydn and the northern one with C. P. E. Bach.
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Slipped Disc has a piece on Angelo Gilardino whose passing was mentioned in a comment here: ITALY’S ‘HEIR TO SEGOVIA’ DIES AT 80. Of course Gilardino, a very fine composer for guitar, was not really Segovia's Italian heir, that honor belongs to Oscar Ghiglia. However, the Slipped Disc item does have three YouTube clips of his music.
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Over at Musicology Now an item titled Music Writing Reconceived seems to imply that they are interested in every kind of music except the classical canon. Hmmm... It seems the American Musicological Society has lost its way.
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Ted Gioia has a new essay out: Is Old Music Killing New Music?
The people running the music industry have lost confidence in new music. They won’t admit it publicly—that would be like the priests of Jupiter and Apollo in ancient Rome admitting that their gods are dead. Even if they know it’s true, their job titles won’t allow such a humble and abject confession. Yet that is exactly what’s happening in the music business. The moguls have lost their faith in the redemptive and life-changing power of new music—how sad is that? Of course, the decision-makers need to pretend that they still believe in the future of their business, and want to discover the next revolutionary talent—but that’s not what they really think. Their actions speak much louder than their empty words.
A friend of mine once said that music has been in constant decline since 1733 (the death of François Couperin). Well, maybe he was right. The one thing that Ted does not mention is that popular music has been turned into an industry of mass production with less and less creativity and real character. Might that have something to do with it?
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Alex Ross has a hefty piece on Thomas Mann in The New Yorker: Thomas Mann’s Brush with Darkness.
It is impossible to talk seriously about the fate of Germany in the twentieth century without reference to Thomas Mann.
In America, however, one can coast through a liberal-arts education without having to deal with Mann. General readers are understandably hesitant to plunge into the Hanseatic decadence of “Buddenbrooks” or the sanatorium symposia of “The Magic Mountain,” never mind the musicological diabolism of “Doctor Faustus” or the Biblical mythography of “Joseph and His Brothers.”
Doctor Faustus is one of the most important novels ever written about music composition and it made a large impact on me when I read it decades ago. A copy sits on my shelf and every year I promise myself that I will re-read it.
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The Nightingale's Sonata has a piece musing about the contents of the standard repertoire: What is Lost When Musical Tastes Change? by Thomas Wolf
In my own life time, I have watched as so-called cornerstones of twentieth century repertoire have been superseded, much to my dismay. When I was a presenter of string quartet concerts in the second half of the 20th century, for example, it was assumed that I would cycle through all six of the string quartets of Béla Bartók over the course of several seasons, only to repeat the cycle when it was completed. These works were considered masterpieces in the tradition of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven string quartets. Today, Dmitri Shostakovich’s quartets have largely replaced Bartók’s as a core component of that period’s string quartet masterpieces. Similarly, today, one is far less likely to find seminal twelve-tone compositions from the twentieth century—so prevalent a generation ago—on concert programs as works by women composers and composers of color have come to be much more common, almost all written in very different styles.
Of course tastes are constantly changing and as they do they offer us two lovely opportunities: to discover new repertoire and to revive older repertoire that has been recently neglected. Hence the interest in C. P. E. Bach.
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The Guardian offers a paean to Hamburg's new concert hall: The modernist marvel that Hamburg took to its heart: ‘Elphi’ turns five
When the building opened it was mired in controversy. More than six years late, it was many hundreds of millions of euros over budget – costs had risen tenfold, taking the final bill to €866m, of which €789m came from the city. None denied its architectural splendours, but had its long and agonising birth ensured that it was toxic, an eye-wateringly expensive white elephant funded by public money, programming classical music concerts for an elite; or would Hamburgers take it to their hearts and learn to love this modernist marvel perched on the banks of the Elbe?
The answer seems to be a resounding vote for the latter. With “Elphi”, as it is affectionately known, the city has a new centre of gravity. More than three million concert-goers to date have visited; concert audiences in the city have tripled and subscription concert-series subscribers have quadrupled. And, 80% of these audiences are from Hamburg itself. Meanwhile, it’s estimated that by spring of this year, 15 million will have visited the Plaza, the viewing platform 37 metres above ground level.
This tends to confirm my belief that while classical music may be suffering in North America, it is hale and healthy in Europe.
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This seems an absurd project: Decolonising Shakespeare: setting Othello in Ghana and Pericles in Glasgow.
Decolonising Shakespeare, with its historic links to English national identity, language and culture is a particularly knotty challenge. Shakespeare was writing in a country that had begun to trade in slaves just two years before his birth, and the racist attitudes that enabled slavery to flourish can be seen in many of his plays. However, Shakespeare remains central to many national education systems around the world, including nations with historic colonial links to Britain.
The paragraph begins with a grammatical howler: it is not the decolonising of Shakespeare that has historic links, it is Shakespeare himself. Isn't the project one of simply denying or erasing simple historic truth? How ironic that those that complain about how some artists's roles have been concealed or "erased" now are attempting to do the same to Shakespeare.
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We really have to start with C. P. E. Bach, don't we? Here is a little teaser from the Hamelin album:
And here are two of Gilardino's Studi di Virtuosità e di Trascendenza played by Cristiano Porqueddu:
They do make the Villa-Lobos sound a bit rudimentary, don't they? Next, a really fine performance of the String Quartet No. 4 by Bartók from the Quatuor Ebène.
"Over at Musicology Now an item titled Music Writing Reconceived seems to imply that they are interested in every kind of music except the classical canon." I like this blog but it is exasperating to see this kind of claim asserted without evidence. A cursory glance at any recent issue of the Journal of the American Musicological Society would show it to be completely untrue. For example, the most recent issue has one article about Florence Price and otherwise is 100% devoted to canonical composers.
ReplyDeleteWell, you are correct that the Journal itself has solid content, but why do they strive to avoid that in the online blog?
ReplyDeleteThey don't "strive to avoid it", they want to broaden their focus from "only canonical composers" to "mostly canonical composers, plus a glancing acknowledgment that the rest of the world exists." Professional musicologists will still devote the vast majority of their attention to the canon no matter what, if only because that's the only way to be employed in the field. If you are committed to intellectual rigor and depth, however, then you should expect the community to have a slightly wider gaze than Western Europe 1700-1900.
ReplyDeleteThanks for keeping me honest, Ethan, but I went to the Musicology Now site looking for some interesting content and just couldn't find any. Am I just missing it?
ReplyDelete1700 to 1900 is the range of "common practice" harmonic language, but musicology ranges from 1000 AD to last week, at least it did when I was in the field.
Oh that CPE Bach disc sounds great. Hamelin I've loved since I first discovered his two superb Concord Sonata recordings, and CPE Bach since hearing one of his flute concertos live a few years back. For me CPE's charm isn't so much his novelty as the way he gives a Vivaldian sort of pleasure but with a bit more meat.
ReplyDeleteA copy of Doctor Faustus sits on my shelf and every year I promise myself I will read it (for the first time). It shares that pride of place with Richardson's Clarissa and Moby Dick...
I see we share similar literary burdens! I started to read Proust a few times and a few months back settled in to get to the end with renewed determination. I got about halfway through, 1,500 pages and decided it wasn't quite worth it.
ReplyDeleteI remember following your Proust blogs, until mysteriously there were no more..!
ReplyDeleteMusicology Now is the field talking to itself, and the blog is interested in new developments and emerging areas of scholarship, not the bread and butter. That's because the bread and butter is just a constant, it's everywhere, there's not much there to discuss in an extracurricular forum. They teach and analyze Beethoven the same way they taught and analyzed him last year. But they didn't teach J Dilla last year, so this is something that needs a lot of discussion.
ReplyDeleteYeah, that makes sense. The weird thing in my experience was that, despite quite a few years as a music student, I really did not get a good grounding in the major stuff: no analysis or discussion of the Well-Tempered Clavier or the Mass in B minor or the Brandenburg Concertos just to mention Bach. Mind you, in graduate school I did a seminar on fugue that was all Bach... But also no analysis or discussion of the Beethoven piano sonatas or string quartets. The symphonies yes. So I wonder if there is enough bread and butter?
ReplyDeleteThis tends to confirm my belief that while classical music may be suffering in North America, it is hale and healthy in Europe.
ReplyDeleteI asked some people living in Europe several years ago about the classical music industry status. Their consensus was that it was holding on well only in Germany. (Russia is a quite different matter.) At the state level there is widespread EU commitment to older culture, but my sources say at the local and regional level outside Germany there has been quite a lot of erosion of support and resources. The internet is a bit of a wildcard because it does allow scattered artists and musicians a worldwide platform, but it doesn't really speak to general resources tied to cultural support.
I would hope any blog readers in Europe here would weigh in on what the current situation is, recognizing the pandemic is a wrench in the gears at the moment. Japan and China are other questions that I don't have good sources for.
I have said before I think in the N and S Americas classical music will shrink to a very fringe status. Opera is a bit of an outlier so I don't know what will happen there. There is simply no serious cultural support for it and its influence post WW1 was artificially enhanced by the two wars and emigres that flooded the Americas. As we have noted before, even jazz is not supported much here.
The institutions where I teach and the ones that I'm familiar with have good jazz, ethnomusicology and musical theater programs, but that stuff is all elective. The core theory, history and aural skills requirements are the same for all music majors, regardless of specialty, and those classes are pure canonical white dudes. Even in music technology programs, which are made up of pop ignoramuses like me! They might glancingly mention a jazz guy or two at the tail end of the last semester of music history. This is even true at NYU, the wokest of the woke. This is why I find it so laughable to read that the canon is under any kind of threat, in US universities at least.
ReplyDeleteI don't think we are talking about exactly the same thing. The canon, considered as the list of composers and works considered to be core (whether in classical or jazz) is not threatened by the same forces as the health of classical music (or jazz) in society as a whole. These genres are not self-supporting and need consistent subsidy. In Europe there is considerable support in many countries. In North America the ongoing complaint is that audiences are getting older and older and it is hard to attract young people and for this reason, political support is weak and possibly diminishing. I'm not sure what I believe exactly, because hard data seems to be scarce. The forces that do seem to threaten the canon as such are not economic, but ideological, but that is a different discussion.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the canon is not an economic variable but more music community and education centric. But the unwillingness to even support and subsidize jazz which is undeniably a product of American culture, however leavened with outside influences, bodes very poorly for classical as well.
ReplyDeleteAnd with respect to the age of audiences, that would be less of an issue if there was constant recruitment as adults aged. I see some slight recruitment as some pop listeners over time get tired of it and move more to jazz and classical but it seems that fewer and fewer do that. In addition with recorded music there is no need to attend a concert to hear a classical work. The pandemic has hastened the general downward trend and the Dowager Empresses of the music organizations here seem determined to kill off any new idea and lay off the musicians as fast as they can to keep their personal entertainment budget going full blast.
It is hard to find data to support any position in this kind of debate, though Ethan has the veracity of his own experience in music departments to draw on. It was too long ago that I was part of a music school and that was in Canada anyway. So if anyone has data they can share, that would be great!
ReplyDeleteIt is certainly true that the US does a poor job of publicly subsidizing the arts (or publicly subsidizing much of anything, really, aside from the military, the prison system and the fossil fuel industry.) So that is a major problem. However, to the extent that the US supports any kind of music publicly, classical music has always been the main thing that gets supported. The perception among cultural conservatives that classical is somehow uniquely under threat is an overreaction to critical discourse on Twitter. Where the pedal meets the metal, in terms of actual spending, licensure requirements, curriculum standards, demographics of the education profession and every other metric other than Twitter sentiment, classical music is the alpha and omega of publicly funded music in the US, with a tiny marginal remnant left over for jazz and everything else. Given how marginal classical music is in the broader culture, in fact, it is totally extraordinary how central it remains to our public funding priorities and curriculum requirements.
ReplyDeleteSo given how small the pie is, what kind of monster am I for wanting to redirect part of it to Black American music? And not just jazz, but also (shudder) hip-hop? Because the commercial marketplace is not any more beneficial for these forms than it is for classical. Rap is well represented in pop culture, but only in its most shallow and venal forms, the ones supported by the dollars of white suburban teenagers. Those white suburban teenagers like cartoonishly exaggerated depictions of guns and drugs, so that's what the marketplace provides. The actual art form is vastly larger than that. One of the best rap songs I've heard in the past few years was about the experience of losing a pregnancy. You won't hear that on the radio, though; these songs are only being created and disseminated by self-funding, and the hip-hop community doesn't have the connections to wealth that "art" music composers do.
Lots of truths there, Ethan. I would guess that part of the reason that classical music continues to attract financial support is that it is the one musical genre that has very deep historical roots.
ReplyDeleteRe hip-hop, I read recently that Kanye West made $160 million dollars last year--I'm a fan of his music, by the way--why doesn't he and other prosperous artists set up a fund to support the less commercially viable artists?
I don't know what charitable giving Kanye is doing, but other Black celebrities do the bulk of the private arts funding in Black communities. So, for example, Chance the Rapper has given a ton of money to the Chicago schools, Jay-Z is establishing music programs in NYC, etc. It's worth pointing out, though, that while these guys are rich compared to you and me, their wealth is inconsequential compared to even second-tier rich white people. When I think about the names on the major concert halls and foundations, the Kochs and MacArthurs, there are no Black equivalents at all.
ReplyDeleteChris Rock talks about living in Alpine, New Jersey, where the only two Black people are him and Mary J. Blige. By comparison, his next door neighbor is a dentist. Rock says: "I'm sure he's a pretty good dentist, but if he was Black he would have had to have invented teeth." Part of the reason I hold Black music in such awe (aside from the music itself) is that it manages to be so continually fresh and innovative in spite of enjoying approximately zero institutional or philanthropic support until very recently, and not much of it now. Chopin could lounge around various people's villas and compose for most of his life; Monk and Coltrane were mainly funded by their wives' backbreaking blue-collar jobs.
Yes, but at least Monk and Coltrane didn't die of consumption at age 38 like Chopin.
ReplyDeleteLike Coltrane dying at 40 is much later than 38? ;) Monk, on the other hand, lived a fairly long life.
ReplyDeleteI finally slogged through all of Scruton's The Aesthetics of Music this last week and it seems like Scruton got some of his better ideas more or less from Adorno and Victor Zuckerkandl, weirdly. But I'm trying to take a break from actual blogging, which doesn't mean I won't comment here now and then.
Probably won't include score examples for the Gilardino blogging on the sonatas, in case folks were hoping for that.
So many major jazz musicians died young of preventable conditions, and in the era of modern medicine too, not in the 19th century. Monk did live to a reasonably old age but was substantially crippled after a certain point by undiagnosed mental illness, possibly bipolar disorder or schizophrenia or both.
ReplyDelete