In journalism the headline often writes a check that the article itself cannot cash. So it is with this piece from the New York Times: What Happened to One of Classical Music’s Most Popular Pieces?
Quiet, sincere and more famous in his lifetime as an organist and teacher than as a composer, Franck celebrates the bicentenary of his birth this year. But it’s unlikely that American orchestras will bring to the celebration the fervor with which they once performed his sole symphony. In one of the stranger stories in the history of the canon, the work — which from the 1920s until the ’60s was such a hit that the New York Philharmonic thought it a solid bet to fill Lewisohn Stadium on a hot summer’s night — is now all but absent from concert halls.
And the conclusion?
And if newer music by the likes of Sibelius and Stravinsky pushed the Franck aside — although not brand-new music, which American orchestras have played less of over time — the past also struck back. The Boston Symphony has performed Dvorak three times as often in the second half of its history as in its first, according to the orchestra; Mozart’s fortunes have risen almost as dramatically.
Facts like that convey the lasting conservatism of much of the orchestra world, and they make it hard to argue too strenuously that the Franck should be resurrected. The righteous call now is to diversify what ensembles play, in all senses of the verb. Inevitably, some works will rise to prominence in the process, and some will drift away.
And if that’s the moral of the tale, it’s all right. The rise and fall of Franck’s symphony shows that the canon can change — that the canon can be changed.
Ah, so that's the answer: canons change!
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Slipped Disc has a somewhat surprising bit of news: AN ENGLISH COMPOSER MAKES HIS VIENNA PHILHARMONIC DEBUT. The composer is Thomas Adès and it turns out that this is not the first time his music has been heard in Vienna, but the first time in a very, very long time--if ever--that an English composer has conducted the Vienna Phillies:
The composer Thomas Adès will break new ground this weekend when he conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in a subscription concert.
Who was the last British composer to earn that honour? Was there ever one.
Adès had experience of the orchestra when conducting his Shakesperean opera The Tempest at the Vienna State Opera in 2015. He says: ‘I admired the sound that the orchestra got out of my music, an understanding of my tonal language was immediately noticeable. Not only were the notes played back exactly. You heard the meaning of the phrases, understood what they were saying…. Because of this understanding, the musicians also asked very good questions.’
This weekend’s programme is Berg, Three Orchestral Pieces, Op. 6; Ravel, La Valse; Adès, Dance of death.
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Answering the musical question, how many musicians actually made real money from streaming last year, the BBC tells us: Spotify paid 130 artists more than $5m last year
The streaming giant said 52,600 artists earned more than $10,000 (£7,500) from Spotify in 2021.
Of those, 130 were paid more than $5m (£3.8m) over the last 12 months.
Spotify didn't name any of the artists involved, but its most-streamed acts last year were Bad Bunny, Taylor Swift, BTS, Drake and Justin Bieber; while the most streamed-song was Olivia Rodrigo's Drivers License.
It would be interesting to see the numbers for the five highest-paid composers, wouldn't it? Though I can only imagine how depressing it would be. Back when I was a traveling guitar virtuoso I might have been one of the five most active classical guitarists in Canada--and it would be a rare year when I made $30,000. Canadian. At that time there were probably only five really successful classical guitarists in the world including Pepe Romero, Julian Bream, Manuel Barrueco, John Williams and someone else who I have forgotten. And they might have made as much as $500,000 in a year. It's a tough business.
How tough? Here are the other numbers:
Spotify says about eight million people have uploaded tracks to its service, with 60,000 new songs arriving every day. As a result, 99.3% of the artists on Spotify are generating less than $10,000 a year.
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We were talking about ideologically oriented music the other day. Here's an example: "Potato Pride": Inside the Secret World of North Korean Music
The most popular ensemble in North Korea is the Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble. It’s hard to describe the keytar-loving electro-band’s work, but try to imagine a mashup between a communist Kraftwerk and an authoritarian Abba. Many of Pochonbo’s songs are developed to prop up the personality cult. (“Longing for the General” and “We Always Live Under His Love.”) Other tunes are more militaristic. (“Peace Is On Our Bayonet” and “When Our Ranks Advance.”) Meanwhile, others are more political. (“Let's Defend Socialism” and “Labor Is a Song.”)
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As one would expect, The New Yorker takes a considered look at the politics of blacklisting: Classical Music’s Iron Curtain
To discuss this issue, and the politics that have always swirled around the world of classical music, I recently spoke by phone with two musicologists. Kira Thurman, an assistant professor of history and German at the University of Michigan, is the author of “Singing like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.” Emily Richmond Pollock is an associate professor of music at M.I.T. and the author of “Opera After the Zero Hour: The Problem of Tradition and the Possibility of Renewal in Postwar West Germany.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how classical music was understood in Germany after the Second World War, the different ways that art and politics can mix, and the dangers of associating musical traditions with specific nationalities.
Probably worth reading the whole thing. I wish they had called up Richard Taruskin as I'm sure he would have had something to say.
emily richmond pollock: I think one of the things that Kira and I have noticed, because we’ve been talking about it, is that some of the discussion of these issues has fallen into some old patterns of thinking that we as musicologists are alert to, and want to warn against, which includes reacting to these kinds of bans by insisting that music is apolitical, or that there’s something fundamentally and inherently apolitical about music, which is a really problematic and untrue statement, and a knee-jerk response.
But on the other side of the coin:
But I would also say that the idea of moral complicity that we’re seeing with this and trying to make shades—this conductor supports Putin, so he’s a bad guy; this other kid just plays piano well, so he’s a victim of this—those kinds of distinctions that are being made, in terms of complicity and culpability, are also very familiar to me as a scholar of de-Nazification. So this idea that you can determine, based on some number of factors, exactly how in bed with the government someone is, and how much to hold them responsible for, is not a question without historical precedent. And what we know from de-Nazification is that it was super messy, and it didn’t make any sense. And it came across in different ways.
It's messy all right! But examining the specifics of moral agency does indeed make sense and it is in fact what we do.
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Lots of other interesting stuff out there this week, like this one: The Political Economy of Classical Music
Over the last century, classical music has grown increasingly estranged from a mass audience or popular musical forms, retreating into an elitist silo. This is not the fault of individual musicians: the development of their art is inseparable from wider social and political trends. Capitalism first created the space in which such music could flourish, and then took it away, leaving behind a frozen, formalized tradition.
The problem with this and other approaches is that once you have completely reduced classical music to its social context then all you have left is sociology.
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On to the music! I mean, the envois. First up, the once-popular now neglected Franck Symphony in D minor here is the Frankfurt Radio Symphony.
And here is the premiere of the Thomas Adès Totentanz:
And finally, one of my favorite Bach albums on guitar, Pepe Romero playing all of the Violin Partita No. 2, not just the Chaconne, followed by the Cello Suite No. 3.
paradoxically from within the Anglo-American leftist scenes the UK scholar Ian Pace pointed out that people keep forgetting that while the patronage classes tended to be upper class the composers themselves tended to actually be working class in their socio-economic origins, especially Haydn, for instance. Pace has argued that because patronage systems changed a quasi-Marxist reading that misses the nuances of which social stratum composers comes from is too common in contemporary progressive and quasi-leftist appraisals of classical music.
ReplyDeleteI.e. we shouldn't expect the usual contributors to Jacobin to get those details right. Now if someone like Matanya Ophee pointed out that most classical guitarist composers were soldiers and yet we rarely ever see any discussion of the martial employment of someone like Sor as having any impact on his composing that suggests another element, that in ages past many a composer had a day job that, on paper, had nothing much to do with their writing music.
I'm not sensing much interest in Biedermeier era Vienna where middling bureaucrats hosted musical parties and the petit bourgeois played a role in promoting music ... but in Marxist readings the PB might as well be full bore throne and altar ideologues. ;)
I thought that a recent Current Affairs piece on music education was better handled than the Jacobin piece.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/03/can-music-theory-education-overcome-its-whiteness-problem
The whole of the Simon Behrman piece was worth reading, but he does a lot of picking and choosing to reach a rather predetermined conclusion. The classical music tradition and practice began long before capitalism and exists in many places capitalism doesn't.
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid that just the subhead of the Current Affairs piece gives me intellectual hives: "White European classical music dominates music education in the U.S. at all levels. Achieving racial justice in the field means diversifying personnel, curricula, and repertoires. Only then will students be able to enjoy and create the rich array of music created by the world’s people."
Good grief, I've been enjoying the music of non-white, non-European music all my life without the "benefits" of woke ideology.
That US music educators see their problems as the problems of the world I've simply gotten used to. It is, in its way, more concrete than a sweeping narrative in which classical music has been beholden to capitalism ... as though Zhdanov style socialist realism never happened.
ReplyDeleteThe doppleganger of woke polemic would be what John Borstlap and the Future SYmphony Institute have been doing ... or ... not doing so much since Scruton died.
I try to keep in mind that these battles for master narratives are not necessarily the same as advocating for variety in music education and that people who want more diverse options in music theory and education are not necessarily being woke just as an ideological concern. How many people who study music will EVER get jobs in the field? The older I get the more I think Hindemith and Sousa had a point in arguing that the musical life of a culture is better measured by the amateurs and hobbyists than the professionals.
Aside from social justice concerns, my main motivation to want to shake up Eurocentrism in American music education is because specialized training in classical music is such poor preparation for supporting future amateurs and hobbyists (unless they are amateur and hobbyist classical musicians.) We're certifying all these music teachers who took four semesters each of classical music history, theory and aural skills, who took ten years of private lessons in classical performance, etc etc etc, and they don't know how to write a song, make a beat, learn by ear, make a recording, or function in any popular form of music at all (unless they happen to be doing that in their spare time.) I can't speak to how well the status quo serves the professional classical music world, but it serves other forms of professional music unevenly at best, and is not helpful at all for supporting (non-classical) amateurs.
ReplyDeleteHistorically speaking, I think we have passed a major turning point in music history. As Taruskin suggests, we are moving into a post-literate musical world where, as you say, there are many skills that are not well-addressed by current curricula which focus on notation skills. My own musical career started in a rock band so I was writing songs and playing by ear long before I learned notation, so I guess I was swimming against the flow of history.
ReplyDelete