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| Catalina Vicens playing an organetto |
This picture is from an article describing the revival of an obscure medieval instrument, the laptop organ called an "organetto."
What experts know today about the organetto comes from its depiction in hundreds of medieval paintings, illuminated manuscripts, and stained-glass windows, and well as the literature of the period. The instrument is mentioned, for example, in the Roman de la Rose, a famous medieval poem written in Old French, and the organetto playing of Francesco Landini, a famed 14th-century Italian composer and organist, is described in a novella by Giovanni da Prato.
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Those tireless music researchers have another study out: What does your music taste say about you? Nothing actuallyDoes music taste reflect personality? A study from the University of Cambridge involving 350,000 participants, from 50 countries, across six continents, posits that people with similar traits across the globe are drawn to similar music genres. So, “extroverts” love Ed Sheeran, Beyoncé and Justin Timberlake. The “open” thrill to Daft Punk, Radiohead and Jimi Hendrix. The “agreeable” are into Marvin Gaye, U2 and Taylor Swift. The “neurotic” enjoy, presumably as much they can, the work of David Bowie, Nirvana, and the Killers. And so on.
I think we can safely file this under pointless, academic make-work.
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Why is CBC radio forgetting its classical music lovers?
Growing up in Vancouver decades ago, I remember concerts by its national network of orchestras, offering often challenging music and often intelligent commentary. It was a serious business.
Those days are history now. The orchestras and concerts have disappeared and so has most of the critical commentary associated with them. To be blunt about it, from a musical point of view, CBC English-language radio has dumbed down.
Oh yes, I got a great deal of musical benefit from the CBC decades ago. Some of the first Bach I ever heard was performed by Glenn Gould on a Sunday afternoon television show. On CBC radio you could hear a great deal of new music on Two New Hours, a weekly program. Living in Montreal I got my first radio exposure as an artist on the program Banc d'Essai and later on Jeunes Artistes. As a more mature artist CBC Vancouver recorded my concerts quite often and I was a soloist with the CBC Vancouver Orchestra playing the Villa-Lobos Guitar Concerto. A lot of that has simply vanished--the CBC Vancouver Orchestra no longer exists.
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Ok, this is a little off our beaten path, but interesting nonetheless: Jordan Peterson’s Next Move? Taking Out the Universities
“I want to tell you a story. It’s a crazy story. I hope it’s interesting.”
Those were Jordan Peterson’s first words when he took the stage recently at a theater in Austin, Tex., as part of his “Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life” tour. What followed was a description of an encounter with a Canadian politician who believes that vaccination mandates violate that country’s charter of rights and who, not incidentally, helped draft the charter.
The rest is behind a paywall, but you can find a lot of Jordan Peterson at YouTube where he comments on just about everything. He has the kind of passionate, penetrating wisdom that makes you realize how rare these traits are in academia these days where so many seem to have transformed into petty careerists and outright cowards. I feel a certain affinity with Peterson for several reasons: he and I were born in the same part of remote northern Alberta and both graduated from McGill in Montreal. I also like his way of brilliantly striking to the heart of so many issues.
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On an Overgrown Path has a post up titled: New classical audiences need new music
Electronic dance music and related non-classical genres leave the listener's brain free to make its own interactions. Classical music want a new young audience. The starting point for bringing listeners across the classical/non-classical divide is giving the new audience music they can relate to. Once that relationship is established the new audience will move on to Mahler, Shostakovich and Beethoven. Giving the new audience music they can relate to doesn't mean dumbing down or exorcising the standard repertoire. It simply means being far more experimental and adventurous in classical programming. Because, despite the stereotyping of the classical marketeers, audiences - young and old - are not backward children. And new classical audiences don't just need new music: they also need new thinking.
That's the conclusion, but read the whole thing. I can find something to quibble about in nearly every sentence, but I'm probably just an old fuddy.duddy.
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Here is an interesting piece: the Cello Concerto by Friedrich Gulda:Something else really interesting: the Rite of Spring on two pianos:
And here is a piece by Francesco Landini, he of the famous Landini cadence, played on the organetto:
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ReplyDeleteThe premise of the Overgrown Path article is that people are attracted to EDM because of its non-linearity, and therefore the solution to bringing them into the classical music world is more works by non-linear composers like Arvo Pärt. A reasonable enough idea as far as it goes, but the reason that people really like EDM is its roots in West Africa. The timbres are superficially different, but the basic structures and functions of the music are perfectly continuous. The thing that keeps me out of the concert hall is the absence of Afrodiasporic grooves. Arvo Pärt doesn't help with that.
ReplyDeleteI don’t think that’s quite a fair reading of what the Overgrown Path article is saying. I’ve been following Bob Shingleton’s writing for a while, he does tend to speak off the cuff but one of his constant themes is exploring the edges of genres and places where certain genres of classical overlap with other genres from around the world. I can definitely say he’s well aware that classical music will always be something of a niche and he’s not really talking about ‘converting’ a large mass of EDM listeners to classical or anything like that. For a person who insists that all music must groove in a very specific way, he’s not seriously suggesting they’d be won over simply by programming Arvo Part. Rather he’s suggesting there are possibly people at the edges of that fanbase who like certain aspects (like say timbre, non-linearity, trance, etc) of that music and are open and often eager to explore music that does something totally different with those aspects.
ReplyDeleteI tend to think he’s spot on with this but that’s probably because I think he’s largely addressing people like me in his writing. I had basically zero exposure to classical music up to my 20s and my tastes stuck around the experimental side of various pop genres. I began getting tired of listening to what felt like the same set of grooves and timbres again and again and so I explored a lot of music from around the world until by chance I started listening to a bunch of 20th century classical composers (John Luther Adams and Arvo Part among them) and it was the most exciting thing in the world for me. It was largely the strangeness and the freedom of the music that drew me in initially, but I remember when I enrolled in a conservatory a little later all of the qualities that felt personally resonant to me seemed to be sucked out of the music. The music itself really excited me still but the way it was discussed in classes and presented in the concert hall was so sterile and dull. So personally I think leaning into the strangeness, the openness, and spiritual aspects of a lot of that music would be very attractive to some people. And eventually, it was looking at the the canon and earlier European art music through those lenses that really opened up that world for me as well. Like when I was teenager I was really excited by stuff like Boredoms, Dilla and Animal Collective, that aimed for this off beat, psychedelic/ethereal feel, and now it’s largely seeing those same qualities developed in a different way that makes me love Webern, Beethoven, Debussy, etc. I had do a lot of work on my own to discover the music and make that transition though because classical music culture in academia and the concert hall doesn’t encourage making those connections at all.
Certainly I don’t speak for a mass audience but I imagine there’s not an insignificant number of people like me who would be happy to dive into a strange and different musical world it was opened up for them more readily. Speaking of Arvo Part and someone at the edge of a genre, here’s a nice little interview with him and Bjork that I think ties in really nicely with the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AobXI3qozkg
Björk has an incredible ability to bridge the gap between Afrodiasporic groove and the aesthetic freedom of contemporary composition. I think she's one of the best and most significant composers/songwriters/producers/performers/whatever of my lifetime.
ReplyDeleteFunny, when Bjork started working that "contemporary composition" vibe (I think Vespertine was the kickoff) was exactly when her music became tedious to me, and I got off the ride. Vocal hooks disappeared and became all plodding recitative with every syllable drawn out and tortured. I check in when she puts out something new, Volta had a few good moments, but I think "fun" Bjork is a thing of the past.
ReplyDeleteI dug her work even up to Vespertine but after that I was less excited. Medulla was disappointing, though my brother told me the all choral versions of the songs she took on the road before the album was released were really good; he felt the studio release was over-produced and less effective. Vespertine itself still holds up, at least for me.
ReplyDeleteI might have to comment on the Path post because I commented about how academics and journalists have tended to cement boundaries rather than explore convergences between classical and popular styles. We have all the theoretical, conceptual and practical resources anyone could need to explore and develop fusions but too often scholars and polemicists WANT there to be no points of overlap and on this point I'd say folks like Lebrecht are key instigators and to a much lesser extent Ted Gioia's quest for convergences (which I favor) is undercut by his dualist master narrative of a would-be subversive history (which I find completely unpersuasive). Obviously with my interest in ragtime sonatas and slide guitar fugues I'm very invested in exploring style and genre convergence.
I admire a lot of Part's work but then I'm steeped in enough church music West and East from Christian traditions to have a fairly clear grasp of what he's been doing. I'm not saying that's a prerequisite but it DOES help to gave listeners a sense of what he's doing and why since his earlier work was more conventionally high modernist avant stuff.
Speaking of bridging gaps and blending genres, none of you listened to the Friedrich Gulda concerto, did you?
ReplyDeleteI've been out and about most of today but I will be able to give it a listen later this weekend. I know a tiny bit about some of Gulda's stuff but haven't heard a ton of his work yet.
ReplyDeleteI enjoy "fun Björk" too but I appreciate "art Björk" in the way that other people profess to enjoy contemporary composition. I don't throw it on to unwind at the end of a hard day, it's more like going to school. I love the production on Medulla, I thought it was the freshest approach to choral music I had heard in forever, and it makes everyone else's choral writing seem timid. Like, who else has multiple layers of beatboxing in their arrangements? Roomful of Teeth is cool and everything but they are a decade behind her at least. Utopia is all flutes and bird songs and yet manages not to be pretty or lightweight. Last time I went to one of her shows, she had Alarm Will Sound with her, and she projected all the scores in a kind of MIDI visualization so you could see what was coming and remember what had just happened. That was such an extraordinarily simple and effective idea I'm amazed that everyone isn't doing it.
ReplyDelete"I enjoy "fun Björk" too but I appreciate "art Björk" in the way that other people profess to enjoy contemporary composition."
ReplyDeleteWhat’s up with this tired and totally unnecessary sneer at people who like contemporary classical? Maybe your sense that they’re only ‘professing’ to enjoy the music is coming from an autobiographical place, but I promise you that people actually do enjoy all kinds of music. I listen to the 2nd Viennese composers, Ligeti, Feldman, Ferneyhough, Harvey and others in that genre not for any challenge, not for any sense of ‘vegetables for the mind’, but because I find them beautiful in a very direct and simple way. They do something for me that no other music does as well and I enjoy that. I listened to that kind of music throughout the day while working a 9-5 office job for several years, and usually that kind of stuff is exactly what I go to at the end of hard day to relax. I’m sure there are people who want to associate with the music for some feeling of being smart and ‘getting it’ or whatever, but I’ve never encountered a music scene where there aren’t a lot of people like that.
I wouldn't say the choral writing in Toby Twining's Chrysalid Requiem was timid. :) Or that Nuits by Iannis Xenakis had timid choral writing back in 1968. Folks who don't go out of their way to take in some of the choral music of the avant gardists from the last century might know this kind of stuff exists but it's been around for generations. Messiaen did the birdsong thing in Catalogue d'oiseaux more than half a century ago.
ReplyDeleteNow having said that the reason I am more likely to listen to Bjork songs again and again than to Caroline Shaw's Partita for 8 Voices is because even a weak entry Bjork song is about something whereas Partita struck me as being choral music about choral technique, or what Adorno vehemently denounced as Stravinsky ushering in an era of music about music.
Penderecki's Luke Passion is probably never going to come across as having choral writing that's timid (his Credo setting might be another matter but I get his reasoning for the musical-linguistic shift for that on literally confessional grounds). Ditto Ligeti's "Lux Aeterna".
The Gulda is okay. I'm less into concerti as a general rule but this concerto has a number of fun themes and yet, for me, manages to come off as a bit less than the sum of its parts--reminding me of Haydn's comments about his contemporaries having too many good ideas and not developing them in ways that let listeners have a sustained heartfelt response. I know memory sabotage can be a compositional technique but often in compositions that aim at eclectic synthesis memory sabotage is often the not-likely-intended result. Which is another way of saying what I admire about Ives was his cumulative setting/cumulative forms were a way of avoiding memory sabotage by having his developmental episodes and contrapuntal ornaments of known tunes culminate in the well-known tune finally emerging.
ReplyDeleteAlternately ... the Gulda reminds me of how Leonard Meyer put it, the conundrum of what organizing paradigms can be used in an age of pastiche eclecticism has continued to be an issue and not just for crossover.
My wife sang for many years in a high-end amateur chorus that only sang work by living composers, including some extremely avant-garde work (e.g. singing every chromatic pitch at once, that kind of thing.) I have heard people sing a lot of weird stuff. When I say that Björk is more adventurous, I don't mean weirdest, I mean transgressive. Xenakis never had beatboxing, much less beatboxing by the likes of Mike Patton.
ReplyDeleteMy observation is that few people "enjoy" contemporary composition the way they enjoy, like, Mozart or the Beatles. I have heard comparisons like "plunging into an icy lake" or "climbing a tall mountain." No doubt these things are enjoyable! But it's a different kind of enjoyment. If you get that immediate hedonic gratification from austere high modernism, that's great! You do you.
yeah, there is that difference between ultra modernist avant choral stuff and what Bjork has done. I like that she's done a lot to melt down the boundaries between concert music and popular song idioms in terms of production approaches and musical textures.
ReplyDeleteThis kind of gets back to what Overgrown Path was blogging about that I admit I had a hand in starting off by commenting on how convergences are things we should seek to create. I haven't always dug everything she's done since Vespertine (which, for me, was one of her creative peak points) but I like that she's made convergences between pop and concert music idioms.
Just saw you have the "Hidden Place post up. Thanks. Look forward to reading it.
I feel sheepish here about the Gulda Cello Concerto because I am the advocate for more attempts by classical composers to do something that uses some pop conventions or forms without the excessive repetition. However to me Gulda's piece is exactly what not to do - a happy face pastiche of cliches from every which place. I think Matthew Arnold was more successful at least in his middle period at writing lighter classical music even symphonies that had a certain pop or modern soundtrack sensibility.
ReplyDeleteSorry meant Malcolm Arnold.
ReplyDeleteMaury, did you mean Malcolm Arnold? The stuff I've been hearing so far I'm enjoying (still slowly going through that symphonies box set)
ReplyDeleteI think the Gulda is an example of how the synthesis attempts of the past leaned too hard on juxtaposition and contrast rather than, well, at the risk of using a hugely politically charged word, integration. It's as though all the styles got sharply delineated separate-but-equal structural units when the aspiration would be (to me) something more cohesive and seamless. The code-switching of harmonic/melodic idioms in Stevie Wonder's "Living for the City" is more what I think we need more of and less of the Rochberg's 3rd string quartet (not that I don't admire where Rochberg went when he did but his works are probably a premiere case study of emphasizing stylistic contrast a bit too much).
I think Claude Bolling and Nikolai Kapustin, on either side of the Iron Curtain, managed to strike a balance between classical and jazz influences. It surely didn't hurt that Bolling apparently sought and got some feedback from Ellington.
The Hatchet
ReplyDeleteEven in Living For The City there is an alternation of styles rather than a true integration. It is true that the transitions between the two are more skillfully managed by Wonder than by the classical composers cited.
There's a lot of admirable craft in the Gulda. He's a talented orchestrator, good voicing, clarity, however the content...
ReplyDelete" a happy face pastiche of cliches from every which place. "
that about nails the Gulda for me... All these styles seem to jostle with each other, rather than illuminate each other.
Maury, I think the reason Wonder's code-switching worked and works is because of his use of melodic and harmonic gestures that can span the boundaries between harmonic idioms. The minor third melodic movement you can hear within the blues vamping created an anticipation of the chain of chromatic mediant pivots in the famous synth break that features a descending octatonic bass line, and as Ethan Hein has discussed a bit over at his blog, the octatonic/diminished scale does show up in jazz if not necessarily blues.
ReplyDeleteStylistic juxtaposition and code-switching happened plenty in the Baroque era but we're probably most familiar with that from J S Bach combining elements of nascent galant with stile antico and ancient church chants and more vernacular Lutheran hymnody and operatic conventions. What sounds more like a cohesive whole to us in the present didn't necessarily sound so seamlessly clear to everyone in Bach's time, which was something I picked up from Laurence Dreyfus book on Bach and Patterns of Invention.
So in a sense not even J. S. Bach managed a "true integration" of styles but he used stylistic juxtaposition and juxtaposition of forms and techniques to great effect.