Friday Miscellanea

Another week comes to a close which means it is time for the Friday Miscellanea. Over at his blog, Alex Ross offers a moving tribute to the great pianist Radu Lupu who passed away a few days ago:

In 1970, he made a recording of Brahms’s Intermezzos Opus 117 that is in my personal pantheon of the most beautiful piano records ever made. At a Carnegie recital in 1996, Lupu offered as his last encore the slow movement of Schubert’s “Little” A-Major Sonata, and it wasn’t so much a performance as a glimpse of a perfect world. No pianist gets a lovelier tone out of the instrument. How he does it is a bit of a mystery: the piano is, after all, an impersonal machine of levers and hammers. But an A above middle C sounds different under Lupu’s finger. It glows from within.

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The Baffler has a big think piece on the contemporary role of the composer: A Catastrophic Purity

Most of us belong to three worlds, each with its roots in a different era. The pose of artistic brilliance that I tried to strike in my biography came from the classical music world, which largely took shape in the nineteenth century. The academic program I was enrolled in had its roots in the Cold War university. And the assignment itself was practice for entering the twenty-first-century marketplace. These spheres of activity correspond to the primary social roles that composers since Beethoven have filled: the genius, the technocrat, and the entrepreneur. Composers now are an amalgam of all three, nested inside each other like cartoon fish. The technocrat, who swallowed the genius in the fifties, has been engulfed in recent decades by the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur swims contentedly, predecessors in its belly, disturbed only by occasional bouts of indigestion.

There is a great deal of profound thought in the piece, so read the whole thing.

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Here is a weird twist in music history: Seizing the Means of Audio Production

Approaching the end of his rule, Anwar Sadat issued a series of decrees intended to curtail traffic and to combat noise pollution in Cairo. The ordinances, which officially went into effect on November 8, 1980, and remained a topic of conversa­tion for weeks to come, outlawed the use of car horns and criminalized “blaring loudspeakers, televisions at high volumes, and impromptu tape cassette sidewalk concerts.” Courtesy of the president’s executive actions, audiocassettes, enjoyed loudly by many Egyptians in public spaces, were no longer simply a nuisance. Noisy cassette recordings were now illegal.

The noise unleashed by “vulgar” cassettes alone piqued the interest of re­searchers, artists, politicians, doctors, and security officials, who ostensibly strove to protect the hearing of their compatriots by pushing for certain sounds to be silenced.

The timing makes one wonder: was this part of the reason Sadat was assassinated?

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Norman Lebrecht has a bone to pick with current orchestral programming:

In 2022 Beethoven is unperformable alone and in his own right. In order to play his music in any concert hall you have to furnish it with freshly minted drivel by Wordsmith — “positive vibes”, he calls it, in a pathetic closing cliché.

Every leading American orchestra now has a vice-president for DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion. This person has as much clout as the music director, who is required to sign off programming by a non-musician with social justice as their flag of conviction.

London’s South Bank calls its approach a “new classical music strategy”. The aim is clearly to please schoolmates of Toks Dada, the centre’s young Head of Classical Music, at the expense of the committed, if much older, classical audience. Nobody has shown any projection that this wheeze will succeed.

The pressures for change are driven mostly from without. Arts Council England has a cash-for-equality agenda that it quickly denies when caught red-handed.

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John McWhorter, for me the most readable of the New York Times columnists, avers that Classical Music Doesn’t Have to Be Ugly to Be Good. Mind you, he starts off with the almost obligatory bash at modernism:

Quite a bit of (relatively) recent classical music strikes people that way. And if it does, there’s a chance that what they’re hearing — whether they know it or not — is music composed with the notoriously listener-unfriendly 12-tone method of composition (one type of what’s known as serialism) pioneered by the composer Arnold Schoenberg in the early 20th century. What the bland name 12-tone doesn’t really tell you is that the technique replaces tonality with atonality. As a lay-friendly description in Encyclopaedia Britannica explains, in such a system, “no notes would predominate as focal points, nor would any hierarchy of importance be assigned to the individual tones.” What you wind up with is something like this. The “William Tell” overture or Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, it is not.

Yet some of the method’s practitioners have been given to an idea that this kind of music was an inevitable progress, dismissing a more intuitive yearning for nice-sounding music as a lack of sophistication: The composer Pierre Boulez once declared, “Any musician who has not experienced — I do not say understood, but, in all exactness, experienced — the necessity for the dodecaphonic language is useless” — “dodecaphonic” meaning 12-tone and “useless” meaning you, the rube.

Of course, some of the loveliest music I know was written by that monster Schoenberg... McWhorter's tastes remain rather selective, but I'm just glad he is talking about music at all.

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that William Bolcom wrote modern ragtime pieces. The young composer Vincent Matthew Johnson has done so more recently, and a recording of several of his works by the pianist Max Keenlyside reveals a composer who has taken the torch passed on since Scott Joplin and created ragtime that continues in the Bolcom spirit and keeps the genre ever moving.

There’s nothing quaint here — some of Johnson’s pieces would be beyond the ability of anyone who’s not a seasoned musician. However, one of his pieces is, to me, just ragtime to a T written in modern language: The whole CD is splendid, but I can’t get enough of “Blue-Berry Pancakes,” my favorite five minutes of classical music for this month.

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I think we underestimate the resentment seething under the surface of the popular culture against classical music. Here is an illustrative story: Youth orchestra strikes back at car ad that pokes fun at young players

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I've been listening to a lot of Monteverdi in the last couple of days. Here is a remarkable solo madrigal from his seventh book of madrigals, Lettera amorosa sung by Lea Desandre accompanied by Ensemble Pygmalion:

Here is Radu Lupu with the Brahms Intermezzo op. 118 no. 2:

And here is John McWhorter's favorite piece of contemporary music, Blue-Berry Pancakes by Vincent Matthew Johnson:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-ojufj9C8M

The Art of Time

I just started the second volume of Taruskin's massive Oxford History of Western Music and he reprints the introduction to the whole series at the beginning which I re-read because it is a fairly dense meditation on the problems of music historiography.

History is, of course, all about time and music is the time art. Everything in music is about time: the pulse of the music is reiterated beats in time, the melodic pitches themselves are just reiterated pulses at a faster speed: A pulses at 440 times a second, for example. And harmony? Well, harmony is just melodic notes sounding together. So it is all about time.

We perceive music in time as well in layer after layer. There are layers of immediate sensation that might make us want to dance, that's the somatic element. Some melodies might make us melancholy or cheerful. Here's a couple of pieces from John Dowland to illustrate: first Semper Dowland, Semper Dolens played by Nigel North:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi7c5S4_97E

And for the cheerful example, My Lady Hunsdon's Puffe, also by John Dowland played by Cecilio Perera (with some church bells):

But there are many layers to our perceptions. Both of these pieces are what we call "early music" because they were composed quite a while ago--four hundred years in this case. Wonder why we don't call it "old music"? Marketing reasons, I guess.

But an important binary in the whole welter of our perceptions of music, and everything else, is that old/new division. We like old things and new things for different reasons. I bought a little jar of jam the other day and the name of the producer was La Vieja Fábrica. For marketing reasons again, they tell us that this is from the old factory, which presumably makes better jam than the new factory just as grandmother's cookies were presumably better than those from Megacorp. And who knows, there may be some truth to it.

We like old things for a variety of reasons: over long stretches of time the wheat separates from the chaff and perhaps that is true of jam as it seems to be of music and art in general. But as I have mentioned several times before, we are moving through time as well and our tastes change so perhaps over time our love for Mendelssohn wanes and our love for Schubert waxes.

But what about our love for new stuff? I suspect that a lot of so-called "new" music is actually quite familiar music with a shiny veneer. But occasionally there is some genuinely new music with a lot of novel features even though, as in the case of the Rite of Spring, for example, there was a fair amount of Russian folk music tucked in here and there.

There is no denying the invigorating shock of something truly new in music and that is the attraction of new music--the possibility of hearing something really unlike anything you have ever heard before.

When it came out this was a pretty good example: Partita for 8 Voices by Caroline Shaw:

Today's Listening

San Marco Basilica, Venice

I'm reading a bit of Richard Taruskin's magisterial Oxford History of Western Music every morning and I'm nearing the end of volume one. Today the discussion was on the magnificent multi-choral, multi-instrumental "sacred symphonies" of Giovanni Gabrieli, some of the first genuinely "orchestrated" music in history. This was written especially to be performed in the San Marco Basilica in Venice with its multiple choir stalls. This piece dates from around 1608:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kZ_Ld9-wH4

Friday Miscellanea

As a retired classical guitar virtuoso (and people always look at me strangely when I say that, but it is just the simple truth) I am fascinated by the stories of other musicians who have drifted out of public life. And here is an article on that very topic: ‘That’s it? It’s over? I was 30. What a brutal business’: pop stars on life after the spotlight moves on.

In her classic memoir, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine recounts not only the time she spent as a punk during the 1970s in her pioneering band the Slits, but also documents her life after the band had ended. This is unusual. Most music books don’t venture into this territory, tending to stop when the hits stop, thereby drawing a veil over what happens next. The unspoken suggestion seems to be that, were it to continue, the story would descend helplessly into misery memoir.

“The pain I feel from the Slits ending is worse than splitting up with a boyfriend,” Albertine wrote, “This feels like the death of a huge part of myself, two whole thirds gone … I’ve got nowhere to go, nothing to do; I’m cast back into the world like a sycamore seed spinning into the wind.”

Classical musicians may not make the huge amounts in their youth that pop musicians do, but the compensation is that their careers usually go on a lot longer. Andrés Segovia played his first concert in Grenada in 1909 when he was sixteen and his last concert in, if I recall correctly, Los Angeles in 1987. He died just a few months later, in Madrid. That is seventy-eight years of giving concerts, which is almost a record. Another musician with a long career was pianist Arthur Rubinstein who played his first concert in 1894 when he was seven years old. His last concert was in 1976 at Wigmore Hall in London. That's a career of eighty-two years! I saw Rubinstein play a concert in Alicante, Spain in 1974 and Segovia play a concert in Montreal in 1976. Both amazing experiences.

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Here is a different take on an ongoing discussion: Fashion, fabrics and fishtails – why we need to talk about what female classical performers wear

Last November, pianist and scholar Dr Samantha Ege gave a recital of works by Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, and Vítězslava Kaprálová at Milton Court Concert Hall. It’s music that’s rarely heard on UK stages, and critics welcomed “the emotional pull to these works” while Ege was praised for her “finely honed performances born of deep study and analysis.

What none mentioned, though, was Ege’s outfit. She was radiant in what she described to me as “a muted red fishtail dress, influenced by west African styles.” The bodice was nipped in at the waist with a customised appliqué belt that glimmered under the spotlights, emphasising hints of silver in the large ammonite-like swirls covering the fabric.

‘I think about colours and moods’ Samantha Ege performing at Milton Court in November 2021. Photograph: Mark Allan/Mark Allan/Barbican

For Ege, as for many other soloists, her outfits are an important part of her performance. “It gives me even more of an opportunity to express myself”, she says. “I think about colours and moods, and how those will make me and the audience feel.”

The writer goes on to discuss other performers including Yuja Wang.

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I don't know whether I should post this or not--I usually try to avoid journalistic sensationalism whenever possible. But I admit to being curious: The Maestro’s ATM. This is a report by the Russian opposition about the finances of conductor Valery Gergiev.

According to the investigation, most of Gergiev’s extensive properties are located in Italy, including a villa in Olgiata Country Club, a luxury apartment complex located an hour outside of Rome; land in the coastal city of Massa Lubrense near Naples; a little over an acre of farmland—plus an amusement park, basketball court, and restaurant called the United Tastes of Hamerica’s—in Rimini; a 200-acre estate in Milan; and the Palazzo Barbarigo, another 15th-century palace, and the Grancaffè Quadri, established in 1775 on Piazza San Marco, in Venice.

Lots more there if you are curious as well.

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The Wall Street Journal has a piece for audiophiles: ‘The Perfect Sound’ Review: Quest for a Groove

He continues to experiment. Listening to Handel’s “Semele” through a pair of deHavilland KE50A monoblock amplifiers, it pays off. “Fleming struck a crazy coloratura note, ornamented and vibrant, lyric and sweetly piercing, testing the upper reach of the amps’ extension. The KE50As nailed it—no spike, no glare, no hole in the voice, and no ornaments of melisma and vibrato disappearing and breaking up Fleming’s supple rendering of the aria’s most dramatic moment.”

I used to have a pair of Cerwin Vega speakers that were pretty nice...

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Here is a bit of music reviewing from The Spectator: The awfulness of the Red Hot Chili Peppers has always felt weirdly personal

Squaring up to the prospect of a new Red Hot Chili Peppers album, I’m reminded of a vintage quote by Nick Cave: ‘I’m forever near a stereo saying, “What… is this garbage?” And the answer is always the Red Hot Chili Peppers.’ I can empathise. I don’t habitually harbour animus against artists I dislike, but something about the sheer scale of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ awfulness has always felt weirdly personal.

Well that's certainly a brisk opening! And?

The music is an ugly Frankenstein’s monster constructed from all the least likeable, least groovy bits of rock, funk, psychedelia and hip hop, with an added patina of plain stupidity. Singer Anthony Kiedis radiates the kind of braggadocious bro vibes that, aurally speaking, make me want to cross the road for my own safety. Kiedis writes terrible lyrics, flatlining melodies and has a horrible shouty voice. It goes without saying that he possesses the kind of swaggering confidence inversely proportional to all these impediments. Do the sums and you could reasonably claim that Red Hot Chili Peppers have waged a 40-year campaign of brute bone-headed idiocy upon the world and yet somehow emerged triumphant.

That's clear enough, I suppose.

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We haven't heard a lot about Franz Liszt recently: Franz Liszt: Superstar, Sinner, Saint

For a long time, Franz Liszt had been two men. In his days as a touring pianist, he was a hedonist, a scoundrel, and a homewrecker; he was also a generous soul who always pined for a life of peace and prayer. Now, on this sacred hill, things were simplifying themselves. For the first time, he was becoming one person. Underneath his years of superficial celebrity lay a desire still deeper than that which drove him after fame.

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So-so sound quality, but here is "Endless Pleasure" from Handel's Semele in a concert performance by Renee Fleming:

 Here is one of the most popular late pieces from Franz Liszt: "Jeux d' eau a la villa d' Este"

And I think, just for today, we will skip the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

O Tempora

There is no shortage of cultural commentators out there. One is Jonathan Haidt and he writes in The Atlantic: WHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID

It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.

One blogger comments that Allan Bloom was saying something similar back in the 80s. I have a weird perspective on this because I moved to Mexico over 20 years ago so I have only been seeing these trends from afar. Mexico seems on rather a different path, though influenced, of course.

Social media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous. Is our democracy any healthier now that we’ve had Twitter brawls over Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s tax the rich dress at the annual Met Gala, and Melania Trump’s dress at a 9/11 memorial event, which had stitching that kind of looked like a skyscraper? How about Senator Ted Cruz’s tweet criticizing Big Bird for tweeting about getting his COVID vaccine?

I notice this trend on YouTube where the presenters seem to get more and more ridiculous all the time, mugging for the camera and dumbing down their content. Even a very serious fellow like Samuel Andreyev puts up clips like this:

There are music clips like Sonata Form, explained in ten minutes:

There are music theory courses in ten minutes or, a more expansive one, in sixteen minutes. These are from other authors. It reminds me of guitar courses from decades ago: learn guitar in ten easy lessons! Back then I used to laugh at them. We're not laughing any more.

Samuel Andreyev is a brilliant presenter on music who really knows his stuff, so he must be looking at his traffic and concluding that this is the only way to go.

So it seems that there is a whole trend towards, well, can we call it stupidity like Jonathan Haidt? I don't know. Is it lack of attention span? Is that just a different kind of stupidity? I read a study from a British university years ago that concluded that being in the typical interrupt-driven work environment with various phone lines, text messages, emails and other interruptions knocks about 10 points off your IQ--about the same as if you have smoked marijuana.

Some other things I notice, but I'm not sure of their significance. When I was young it was not uncommon for people to write poetry. It was a fairly normal thing to do to get out your angst or whatever. Also, a lot of people played musical instruments fairly casually. These things seem to have dwindled precipitously. These days it seems that everyone is headed for business school as quick as they can. But as I say, I have no data on this, just a few personal impressions.

Some music to inspire your thoughts. Silvius Leopold Weiss:

A Guitarist's Nails

It is sobering to think back on how much of my life I have spent taking care of and worrying about my fingernails. This started about five minutes after I got my first nylon-string guitar when I realized that classical guitarists are too classy to use fingerpicks.

No, I'm kidding, it is not that we are too classy, it is that the right hand technique is different. I have never played the banjo and only had a brief exposure to fingerpicks when I played steel-string guitar so I really don't know anything about those techniques. But just looking at how those picks are structured I can tell they really won't work for classical guitarists. Actually, there is a whole school of classical guitarists, following the maestro Emilio Pujol, who eschew the use of fingernails and just play with the flesh. But the vast majority of classical guitarists, including all the names you have probably heard, use their fingernails to produce the sound much as a clarinet or oboe player uses a reed.

At this point I am going to consult an outstanding book on guitar technique--my own, of course! The Guitarist's Complete Technique Kit published by Mel Bay. Here is a little note about the nails:

That tells you how to shape the nails, but not why. What you want is for the nail to be a ramp that pushes the string towards the soundboard and then releases it smoothly. The reason for this is that how the guitar soundboard works is by flexing up and down. To make this happen you need to make the bridge flex up and down so for a full, warm sound, you want to depress the string towards the soundboard before releasing it.

I bring all this up because when I was moving house two weeks ago I managed to break all of my nails over the course of a few days. I'm still settling in to my new place and my nails have still not grown back all the way, but I think have just enough nail to be able to get practicing again. Just before I moved I was working on the Bach Chaconne and had the first page memorized. Lots more to go so I want to get back to it!

I recorded very little Bach in my career, but here are the Prelude, Allemande and Courante from the Cello Suite No. 1 in my transcription in A major:

The Political Stain

Music and politics is a perennial topic here even though I try to avoid the grosser manifestations of politics. An article in The New York Times expresses the complexity of the issue: When Classical Music Was an Alibi.

Performing classical music, or listening to it, has never been an apolitical act. But the idea that it might be flourished in the wake of World War II, thanks in part to the process of denazification, the Allied initiative to purge German-speaking Europe of Nazi political, social and cultural influence. 

Musicians slipped through the denazification process with relative ease. Many rank-and-file artists had been required to join Nazi organizations in order to remained employed, and the correlation of such membership to ideological commitment was often ambiguous. Individuals tended to lie on their forms to obtain a more advantageous status. And artists such as the eminent conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler referred to music’s apolitical status as a kind of alibi, even when they had performed on occasions, and as part of institutions, with deep ties to the regime. 

The more uncomfortable truth may be that the ambiguity of classical musicians’ status under Nazism makes them prime examples of “implicated subjects,” to use the theorist Michael Rothberg’s phrase. Rothberg writes that “implicated subjects occupy positions aligned with power and privilege without being themselves direct agents of harm; they contribute to, inhabit, inherit or benefit from regimes of domination, but do not originate or control such regimes.”

Many German and Austrian musicians occupied this liminal place, neither victim nor perpetrator but a participant in the history that produced both those positions. The well-meaning but blunt categories of denazification after 1945 actually blurred our understanding of the complex systems that led to war and genocide and how musicians operated within them.

I don't want to quote any more excerpts because you should read the whole thing. But I do want to make a few comments: yes, most classical musicians did have an ambiguous status under Nazism. Some were supporters of the regime, like Furtwängler, others were opposed (and Jewish) like Schoenberg and had to leave Germany, but most simply went along in order to continue their careers. The idea of "implicated subjects" is a misty one if you start to look at musicians in less extreme contexts. All musicians, after all, seek work in a social context, indeed, like all artists the product of their work is always social. Does music have political aspects? Some music very much so, but other music, much less so. The authors of the article acknowledge this to their credit.

I think it is also the case that music can communicate, support or even oppose political elements in a crude or subtle way. The truth is that there is always a complex interchange between ordinary political events and the world of music, but the complexity is revealed in how music might respond or interact. Some music is deeply patriotic, which might be seen as crudely political depending on your views on patriotism. Other music satirizes patriotism. Still other music ignores it entirely. Often art is more about art than anything else, extending and developing artistic traditions for new ages. At the same time it might be exemplifying deeper cultural elements. You can see Bach's music, like the Art of Fugue, as being an expression of the rationalism of the Enlightenment, but then you can listen to a cantata or a passion and feel the emotionalism of the music and text.

In our current time's focus on politics we tend to ignore that most music in the Western world over the last millennium was more about religion than about politics (ignoring, if we can, the political aspects of religion).

One interesting figure mentioned in the article is Winfried Zillig who was both a modernist, 12-tone composer and who managed to pursue a successful career in Germany both during and after the Nazi years. Let's listen to some of his music. This is his "Prager Barock" Suite in Old Style composed at the height of Nazism in 1943:

That sounds like fairly bad neo-classicism to my ear. His Violin Concerto of 1949 sounds more modern:

Friday Miscellanea

Sometimes I wish I lived in Europe: One Opera, Three Acts, Three Different Stagings. I still have not heard any Wagner opera in an actual opera house and this looks like an interesting bet.

Each of the three acts in [Stuttgart State Opera's] new production of “Die Walküre,” the second opera in Wagner’s tetralogy, which opens on Sunday, has a highly different staging, each devised by a different creative team.

Three unrelated interpretations, overseen by three groups of directors and designers, performed by one cast and one orchestra, for a single audience. Cornelius Meister, the company’s music director, said the term used in-house to describe the situation is “multi-perspectival.” But it’s also been a grand juggling act, with overlapping rehearsals, many rounds of costume fittings and a mounting air of suspense, with the company only getting a clear sense of how — or if — the acts might coalesce at the first full dress rehearsal, two weeks before the premiere.

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I was thinking more about Marin Alsop's Beethoven 9th project: Marin’s Ode to Joy

The thing that always struck me about the symphony is that you have the sense that the listeners are enduring the first three movements in order to get to the choir. People didn’t understand that the way Beethoven opens the symphony impacts the way he ends it. It’s an arc. It’s a whole story. I want people to understand the narrative.

I have to admit to a bit of skepticism when conductors go off on projects like this--is the main goal simply pumping up one's career or are some real revelations to be presented? If listeners are indeed squirming in their seats waiting for the choir to come it, it is undoubtedly either because of pre-concert publicity or, more likely, because a hundred or so singers have been sitting silently at the back for almost an hour. I can't think of any musical reason why. And I'm trying to understand what she means by "the way Beethoven opens the symphony impacts the way he ends it." This kind of mysterious opening had been done many times, especially by Haydn in his oratorio The Creation as well as some slow introductions to symphonies.

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And Alex Ross has another excellent piece in The New Yorker, this time a review of the superb ensemble The L.A. Master Chorale’s Pyramids of Sound. A typical paragraph:

No less stirring was a performance of Frank Martin’s Mass for Double Choir, in February. This was under the direction of Jenny Wong, the Master Chorale’s associate artistic director, who wrote a dissertation about Martin’s choral music. The Mass was composed in the nineteen-twenties but withheld from circulation for decades; Martin explained that he had considered the piece “a matter between God and myself.” Wong has identified clandestine allusions to Bach’s B-Minor Mass, especially in the Agnus Dei. Her scholarly insights no doubt contributed to a rendition that was pristine in sound and purposeful in motion.

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Here is another take on this important issue: Fake artists are what happens when fandom dies It's a long and complex discussion, but here are some highlights:

Streaming music soundtracks our everyday lives. There are playlists for everything we do (study, fitness, relaxing, cooking, working, etc.). By becoming pervasive, music has lost some of its magic. The fandom that was inherent in people buying music because they loved it is gone. The biproduct of ubiquity is utility. In the immortal words of Syndrome from the Incredibles: “When everyone is super, no one will be…”

The problem is that, from the ground up, Western streaming is geared for consumption not fandom. From playlists through to economics, streaming is all about consumption at scale. Songs fuel consumption, not artists. Which is the breeding ground for mood music, of which ‘fake artists’ are but one sub-strand. 

In fact, mood music is the natural evolution of a consumption-first system. A system in which artists get washed away by streaming’s torrent of ubiquity. 

Add poor remuneration for mid and long-tail artists into the mix, and you have a perfect storm. Why? Because artists are compelled to diversify their income mix to eke out every extra dollar they can get from their creativity, with production music libraries being eager customers of their ancillary work.

What strikes me here is that we seem to be at the other end of a long, historic era, the beginning of which is around 1500. Music printing did things like reify music, turn it into a physical product that could be purchased and easily disseminated. One of the earliest beneficiaries was the composer Josquin des Prez who became widely famous through printed volumes of his music. He was the first example of the creation of a musical legend as stories of his genius and personality accumulated and were disseminated along with the music. Now we seem to be at the end of that era when the individuality, character and creativity of artists seems to be being leached away into the anonymous stream of "mood music."

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But we still have some rich musical personalities and The Guardian reviewed concerts by two of them. Igor Levit gave two concerts devoted to the repertoire on his recent CD that we reviewed here and guitarist Sean Shibe gave a spectacularly varied guitar recital:

The Edinburgh-born virtuoso Sean Shibe opened his recital – entitled “Baroque meets Minimalism” – with a selection from the Scottish lute manuscripts of the 17th century, remade in this guitarist’s own subtly ornamented and poetic fashion. In Bach’s lute Suite in E minor, BWV 996, every twist of counterpoint, each voice, was clear and unforced. For this part of the recital, Shibe used an instrument made by Simon Ambridge in 2011, a copy of the classic Hauser played by pioneer guitarists of the past, Segovia and Julian Bream.

He then switched to electric guitar, first to the cutaway Fender Stratocaster, then to a PRS Custom 24-08. You need to be an insider to appreciate the different specs, but enjoying the variety is part of the Shibe experience. Messiaen’s motet O sacrum convivium (1937) was freshly ecstatic, resonating around the building. In Pushing my thumb through a plate by Oliver Leith (b1990), originally for harp, now in a new version for guitar, Shibe used the tuning pegs to whoop slowly in and out of aural focus, a meditation on flux and inconstancy.

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How about some music? Here is the Ride of the Valkyries from Wagner's Die Walküre in a 2019 production at the Met:

Another of the pieces in that choral concert was the Te Deum by Arvo Pärt:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU7TVEscPcc

And let's have some Josquin des Prez as well, Here is his justly famous Missa Pange Lingua:

The Trickiest Music

Composers over the centuries have from time to time indulged themselves in musical tricks and jokes--Mozart even wrote a canon the text for which is too obscene to even mention in this family-oriented blog! But for sheer ingenious complexity it is hard to beat the 15th century, though Bach certainly tried. Perhaps the trickiest of a whole bunch of tricky pieces is the Agnus Dei II from Josquin des Prez's Missa L'Homme Armé super voces musicales.

Composers of the time, like Ockeghem, were famous for feats of contrapuntal virtuosity such as composing canons in which one voice is identical to another voice--just as in "Row, row, row your boat"--but with the second voice being in a different tempo, which in the 15th century was achieved through a different time signature. The other voice could even be a transposition of the first voice! And in a different tempo. Here is the complete score to the Agnus Dei II from Josquin's Missa L'Homme Armé super voces musicales:

This is a canon for three voices, which is much, much harder than one for two. We know it is for three voices because it has three time signatures, what we nowadays would call "cut" time, "common" time and a funny one, "cut" time with a dot. These stand for three different "prolations" or divisions of the long notes. From where they are placed on the staff we can see that the three voices start on three different pitches. The rhythmic values of the lowest voice are divided in half in a second voice and into three in a third voice. Here is a very clever video first showing how the voices perform from the original notation and second, how it looks in modern staff notation.

The Argument for Aesthetics

 The prolific Ted Gioia has just done us a very big favor in digging into the issue of fake artists on streaming media. I'll refer you to his post to get the whole story: The Fake Artists Problem Is Much Worse Than You Realize. Here is a key segment:

The streaming model allows for abuses beyond anything a pirate ever envisioned. Algorithms now determine how a huge portion of song royalties are allocated, and if you can manipulate the algorithms you can send enormous sums of money into your bank account.

The root of the problem is the increasingly passive nature of music consumption. People will often ask Alexa, or some other digital assistant, to find background music for a specific task—studying, workout, housework, relaxation, etc. Or they will rely on a pre-curated playlist for that purpose. They don’t pay close attention to the artists or song titles, and this is what creates an opportunity for abuse.

What kind of abuse? Ted got a lot of information for his story from this source: AN MBW READER JUST BLEW OPEN THE SPOTIFY FAKE ARTISTS STORY. HERE’S WHAT THEY HAVE TO SAY.

Long before your first article about fake artists in 2016 there was already a huge growth trend in people listening to mostly instrumental “mood music”. Even Sony and Universal Music created playlists for these types of use cases under their Digster and Filtr brands long before Spotify ever did. In fact many majors started releasing music by “fake artists” in the early 2010s and have continued to do so... 

Interestingly, all of these ‘artists’ are all discovered on Sony-controlled playlists with very generic search-optimized titles, and millions of followers if you add all the small niche playlists together.

There is a lot more material there, but the bottom line seems to be that there are huge revenues to be earned by creating generic music that will turn up in typical searches. Back to Ted:

Hara Noda seems to be a real person, working as a producer and drummer in Sweden—which, by pure coincidence, is the same place where Spotify has its headquarters. In fact, the number of fake artists whose music comes out of Sweden is extraordinary. But even the numbers may be misleading. According to one survey, “about 20 people are behind over 500 artist names.”

And keep doing it over and over. At the end of the day, these "artists" can get more plays and hence more royalties than Grammy winners. As Ted says, the world has changed.

This kind of scam wasn’t possible before streaming. People obviously listened to music while studying or working, but they either picked out the record themselves, or relied on a radio station to make the choice. Radio stations were sometimes guilty of taking payola, but even in those instances a human being could be held accountable. But with AI now making the decisions, everything can be hidden away in the code.

Music is especially susceptible to passive consumption and in that regard it is like wallpaper or commercial design, something that is designed to be just a comforting background. This is a useful function in many, or perhaps most, people's lives. Music is something to relax to.

What is different today is that this kind of generic, fairly easily cranked out music, is now getting more and more revenues even as it preserves an essential anonymity. Historically, that's new. The pick-up band at the medieval banquet got paid a lot less than the famous composer writing masses for the cathedral. In the medieval world (here I am using "medieval" as a generic term for that period before the middle class became an important economic factor) the high, middle and low musical forms were compensated similarly. But in the world of algorithms, the most generic and least original, the least creative, in other words, can win the biggest earnings.

I think that this is, in an odd way, an argument for aesthetics. People who develop their aesthetic sensitivities become more active listeners and would tend to skip over the generic and seek out the original and stimulating. They look for music that challenges more and rewards more. They are actively engaged in listening. With engagement comes judgement, aesthetic judgement in particular.

This sounds rather elitist, doesn't it? Yes, I'm afraid it does and elitism has a bad name these days. But passivity can also be bad, apparently.

Here is Hara Noda with "The Beauty of Everyday Things". Four million plays on Spotify.

  

 

 

 

 

Two Great Songs

As I may have mentioned here before, sometimes I think of some music as being like a time machine we can take into the expressive world of people of distant times. Of course this time machine only goes into the past. When we try to imagine the music of the far future, the results are usually hilarious:

But we can travel into the past--sort of. There are a few caveats: our knowledge of the past is fragmentary especially when it comes to performance practice. There are innumerable attempts at performing ancient Greek music, but they so often sound like they were recorded in a Bulgarian village in 1932:

You have to bear in mind that all the ancient notation reveals is a suggestion of the pitches--and they had no way of notating rhythms.

But by the 15th century all these notational problems had been ironed out (mind you, those useful devices of the tie and the barline were still to be invented) and we can have a fairly good idea of what music might have sounded like. There are still fierce arguments about things like what to do with a part that is fully notated, but with no text. Use instruments? Which ones? Use singers going "ah"?

In any case, some ensembles have been working with this repertoire for decades and have developed their own performing practices. So let's hear a couple of songs by the greatest songwriters of the middle of the 15th century, Guillaume Du Fay and Gilles de Binche, usually known as Binchois. I mentioned two great songs and the term is accurate. Both these composers wrote chansons which is simply the French word for "song" though the first one we are going to hear, by Du Fay, is technically a rondeau cinquain because of the structure of the poetic text. Here is the first stanza:

I wish to fear you sweet and precis

Love, honor, praise in acts and words

As long as I may live, wherever I may

And give to you my love and only joy

My heart for as long as I may live

The song has two texts, Italian and French. The French one begins

Craindre vous veuil, doulce dame de pris

And here is the song (sorry, Blogger doesn't want to embed the version I prefer):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd9sieU7Qiw

This music is sounding more lush because of the more extensive use of thirds and sixths that were the specialty of English choirs and composers like John Dunstable.

Du Fay wrote in many genres but Binchois was more of a chanson specialist. One of his most famous songs is a setting of a text by Christine de Pisane (1364 - c. 1430) sometimes called France's first professional literary woman. The poem is a lament on the death of her husband and begins:

Anguished grief, immoderate fury,

grievous despair, full of madness,

endless langour and a life of misfortune

full of tears, anguish and torment

and in French:

Deuil angoisseux, rage desmesuree,

Grief desespoir, plein de forsennement,

Langour sanz fin et vie male, ree

Plein de plour, d'angoisse et de tourment

(I suspect some accents have been left out--I'm quoting from Taruskin, Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 1, p. 451.) Now let's hear it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_snuhaYa-J4

What is so remarkable aesthetically is that none of the kinds of devices we would expect are present, given the emotions described in the text. As Taruskin says:

Our present-day musical "instincts" demand that laments be set to extra slow, extra low music, harmonically dark ("minor") or dissonant. (We also expect such music to be sung and played with covered timbre and a greater than ordinary range of dynamic and tempo fluctuation.) Binchois's setting frankly contradicts these assumptions with its bright F-majorish (English) tonality, and its very wide vocal ranges. [op. cit. p. 448]

By the way, the social context of both of these songs is the courts of the nobility in France and Italy.

Friday Miscellanea

We have spent a lot of time in the 14th century this week, so let's look around and see what's shaking in the world of music today. There was something called the Grammys I understand? But never mind: The Guardian reviews a new recording of the Diabelli Variations by Mitsuko Uchida:

t has taken until now for Mitsuko Uchida to lay down a recording of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. This colossal work, which grew out of a publisher’s request for one single variation on a fairly naff little tune, encapsulates so many of Beethoven’s contradictions – and Uchida, so adept at putting across music’s humour without diminishing its depth, is made for it.

Her playing conveys a keen sense of the music’s absurdities without exaggerating its quirks, gently raising an eyebrow at Beethoven’s passages of deliberate heavy-footedness and revealing that there is always a sincere, profound truth right behind them. It’s not so much that her sudden changes of inflection turn the music itself around, more that she lets us see through things to what’s waiting behind.

I think it was Joseph Kerman years ago who made the point that with Beethoven the music is so strongly characterized that it almost seems as if each piece has its own personality--and especially ones like the Diabelli Variations.

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 Over at Slipped Disc MARIN ALSOP EXPLAINS HER UPDATES TO BEETHOVEN’S 9TH

I heard that the piece is going to include African drumming and jazz? This is not the Beethoven’s Ninth I know!

The idea is not just a new text. I’m also trying to enable the listener to understand why Beethoven wrote those first three movements. To that end, I’ve inserted music that segues from the first movement to the second movement and the second to the third. And then it goes attaca [straight] into the fourth. I tried to insert music that was culturally relevant to the location where I’m doing it. Here in Baltimore, between the first and second movements, I have African drumming. Just three minutes. But it takes the motif and it evolves it. Because I think that’s what Beethoven was thinking. And then between the second and third movements, I have a jazz ensemble that’s going to play these close harmonies that are going to take us into the opening of the third movement.

What do you say to people who think it’s audacious to try to “improve” upon a masterpiece?

I’m not improving upon it! But you know, one of the challenges with classical music and art that is put up on such a pedestal is that people can’t feel close to it because it’s so untouchable. I think that Beethoven would be intrigued by this. Because the most important thing to him was the narrative and the message. And this is what I wanted to celebrate about Beethoven. He was not just a musician, he was really a philosopher. And I think that it’s valid because it’s bringing us closer to his masterpiece.

We live in complex times when it comes to musical performance. We have the whole multifarious world of music from everywhere. We also have various kinds of popular music from all over: K-pop to hip-hop and everything else. Then there is classical music which is also a world in itself. There seem to be, broadly, three different approaches. There is the historical which aims through study of manuscripts and contemporary accounts as well as instruction manuals to uncover clues as to how music might have been performed centuries ago as most of these performance practice traditions have been lost as soon as you look back earlier than the 19th century. There have been critiques of some aspects of this "early music" movement, but its success is undeniable. Roger Norrington's Beethoven symphonies is one example. Here is his 9th:

 Then there is what we might call the "mainstream" approach which largely adheres to long-standing traditions of orchestral performance. My example here is the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein:

Or we can take a very contemporary approach as opera directors have in recent years and adapt the work to our current tastes. That is what Marin Alsop is doing. Is it "valid"? I'm not quite sure what that means, but the only thing to do is hear her performance. Alas, YouTube does not seem to have a clip of this new interpretation, just older more conventional ones:

I do wonder if this is true, though: "people can’t feel close to it because it’s so untouchable." I suppose this could be true, but Beethoven seems the last composer one would want to accuse of being remote and untouchable.

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Ever wondered which were THE WORLD’S TOP 7 MUSIC COLLEGES According to Quacquarelli Symonds they are:

1 Royal College of Music, London

2 University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna

3 Juilliard, New York

4 Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris (CNSMD de Paris)

5 Royal Conservatoire of Scotland

6 Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London

7 Royal Academy of Music, London

Yes, some great schools there. I wonder about who's missing: the Mozarteum in Salzburg, the Moscow Conservatory and the one in St. Petersburg?

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A long essay at The American Scholar is titled A Prophecy Unfulfilled? There is a lot in it, including a history of the place of classical music in American culture over the last one hundred years. There are some solid observaions:

Perversely, the instantaneous click-access to all historical knowledge on the web seems to have given rise to a general indifference to history among the young. Millennials who have known only the postdigital environment tend to interpret history only through their current cultural biases and social media shares. As a result, the very concept of a historical canon has become toxic, and with classical music no longer the player it was 75 years ago, this antihistorical attitude threatens to drive appreciation of classical music even further from its one-time pride of place in general culture. Classical music has been especially susceptible to charges of a toxic canonicalism that shortchanges other cultures’ contributions. 

Can anything be done to effect a rapprochement between the old and the new paradigms so that the heritage of classical music can be revivified for younger generations? One possible answer is being suggested by the scholar and critic Joseph Horowitz in his new book Dvořák’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music. Horowitz seems to say that it’s not necessary to topple canonical classical music idols as if they were the Buddhas of Bamiyan, because a rich parallel heritage of African-American classical music has been hiding in plain sight all along.

Read the whole thing!

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One composer mentioned in the Horowitz book is Canadian-born Nathaniel Dett. Here is his suite for piano In the Bottoms from 1913:

 

Here is the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 4 played by Mitsuko Uchida:

Renaissance Serendipity

Is this a propos or what? The day after I put up a post explaining why the idea of "Renaissance" music should be, on the advice of Richard Taruskin, laid to rest, the New York Times puts up an article 5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Renaissance Music. There is a long and impressive list of performers, critics and even musicologists that offer suggestions as to "Renaissance" music you should be listening to.

Laurie Stras, musicologist

I’ve spent a significant portion of my adulthood living — in my imagination — in the Renaissance, with women from history who are now as much a part of my life as the women in my ensemble, Musica Secreta. By reconstructing their lives and their music, I’ve felt their humanity reaching across the centuries.

Another sample:

Andrea Bayer, Metropolitan Museum of Art deputy director

In Renaissance and Baroque Italy, the visual arts, music and poetry were often intertwined aspects of a unified enterprise that ennobled the human spirit. Music has always been a component of my approach as a museum curator, particularly in my research on Evaristo Baschenis, the great 17th-century painter of still lifes of musical instruments, and as a current running through my 2008 Met exhibition “Art and Love in Renaissance Italy.” I particularly love Cecilia Bartoli’s version of Caccini’s song “Amarilli, mia bella.” It may not be the most historically precise performance, but it exquisitely captures the intimacy of the verse.

Now don't get me wrong, there is a lot of lovely music here that would be worth your while to listen to. But it is pretty obvious that, like certain aspects of the early music movement and their claims to "authenticity," there are powerful commercial and marketing reasons for promoting the idea of "Renaissance music." Here we see how that works in practice. How do you sell early music to the general public? Well, some good marketing tactics are to claim historical authenticity and package it together with the more familiar works of Renaissance art and literature. Otherwise you are faced with the messy details of how music follows its own path quite different from the other arts. Reality, in other words.

Oh, and Caccini's song "Amarilli mia bella," which I have performed on numerous occasions, is an excellent example of early 17th century music and typically categorized as "Baroque," not "Renaissance" music. Heh!

This realization of the lute part is from Robert Dowland's 1610 collection A Musical Banquet. Robert is the son of John Dowland, the great English "Renaissance" lutenist and composer. Just to add a few more messy details.

UPDATE: Andrea Bayer provides a great example of what I described (following Taruskin) as the fallacy of essentialism, or the idea that there are certain inherent or immanent qualities that define an age or style when these are often no more than intellectual conveniences. The quote is:

In Renaissance and Baroque Italy, the visual arts, music and poetry were often intertwined aspects of a unified enterprise that ennobled the human spirit.

This is pure empty culture-babble, popping like a soap bubble as soon as examined. The histories of the visual arts, literature and music are very different from one another as even a brief acquaintance will show and were anything but a unified enterprise, though an international style in music did develop--though by "international" we are only talking about French, English and Italian music.

Musing on Music

 Here are a couple of interesting thinkers talking about music. 

Jordan Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist and hugely popular author and lecturer. John McWhorter is a linguistics professor and opinion writer at the New York Times.

Some observations: The quote about all art aspiring to the condition of music is from Walter Pater, the 19th century English literary critic.

Is music "immune from rational criticism"? Ok, let's break that down. It certainly seems the case that performances of music are certainly open to criticism--that is what music critics mostly do. What about the pieces themselves? Certainly it seems that one can praise various pieces of music. Most current journalism, especially of popular music, does nothing but. So if you can praise a piece of music, can you not criticize one? Could you do so on the basis of being pleasing to the audience or not, being incoherently constructed, having grating timbres, having little or no interest and so on? One of the goals of the modernist movement in music was probably to make music immune from criticism, though I'm not sure they entirely succeeded.

What does it mean for meaning to be "subverted by criticism." Certainly by bad criticism, poorly framed, inappropriate or simply incorrect criticism, but valid or justified criticism? How would that subvert the meaning of music? Surely it would be more likely to reveal the meaning? At least that has traditionally been one of the goals of good criticism.

Peterson in his discussion of music as the harmonious interplay of patterns reflecting the true nature of reality is actually reviving the Medieval and earlier conception of the relationship between music and the universe. I'm not saying he's wrong, but wow.

Saying that music is "existentially engaging" is not so far from my own rather inchoate view.

And then McWhorter comes in and says that "a good beat implies truth" and I go wow squared. That's about fourteen bridges too far. Is then rubato misinformation? The mind boggles.

But I'm on board when Peterson says. "the greater the piece of music the longer it takes to exhaust it." I did a post many years ago in which I tried to place different pieces of music on a scale of how many times you needed to listen before you exhausted--or started to--the musical content. Some pop songs, about 10% of one hearing. Some great pop songs like "Strawberry Fields Forever," perhaps one hundred times. A little divertimento by Mozart, maybe 75 times. The Bach B minor Mass? I dunno, I've been listening to it for fifty years now and I'm a very long way from exhausting that piece!

McWhorter gets into some interesting territory when he starts talking about harmony: "Harmony is a funny thing..." Also, "the flatted sixth reminds me of the past -- why?"

But you know, at the end of the day, these two very wise and educated gentlemen are just music-loving amateurs with no actual musical training. As Peterson says at the end, "yes, probably someone knows this and we are just ignorant about it." Well, yeah, I guess so.

I am regularly surprised at how interested scientists, and these two are essentially scientists, though in the humanities end, often get in music, but never feel the slightest need to actually consult a musicologist or two. Because, yes, there are people that know stuff.

I guess this might be a good place to post "Strawberry Fields Forever." With my favorite nine-note guitar solo.

"Renaissance" Music?

One of the most radical things about Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music is the titles of the volumes. The first is Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century. To people who grew up with the excellent set of histories from Norton, like the one titled Music in the Renaissance by Gustave Reese first published in 1959, something seems to be missing. There were also, of course, volumes devoted to the Middle Ages and the Baroque Era. I especially enjoyed a little quote in the Medieval music volume which has an introductory chapter on ancient music from a scholar of classics who advised the musicologist not to study ancient Greek music theory because "that way lies madness."

So what is missing? The, as Taruskin calls it, "periodization" of music history into stylistic epochs derived from the histories of literature and visual art. While acknowledging that "artificial conceptual structures" are necessary simply to enable the processing of the wealth of information that presents itself. But there is always the risk of these structures become mental habits, hardening into fixed categories. This is the fallacy of essentialism, or the idea that there are certain inherent or immanent qualities that define an age or style when these are often no more than intellectual conveniences. This is the fallacy that Ted Gioia was implicitly falling into in his recent post that I discussed the other day. The "Renaissance" has no more essential essence than does "Classical music" in general.

One way in which these mental habits lead us astray is in referring to certain stylistic traits as "progressive" if they turn up in advance of their assigned period and "regressive" if they show up afterward. History does not come with a big teleological arrow pointing "this way forward!" The idea of a Zeitgeist is one that we impose on history. He points out that this periodizing tendency also comes into play in the analysis of the work of individual composers who always seem to have early, middle and late periods even if they die at age 35!

He drives the final nail in the coffin by looking at how art historians place the beginning of the "Renaissance"--with Giotto di Bondone (ca. 1266 - ca. 1337) for his realism, and with Dante (1265 - 1321) in literature for his use of the Italian vernacular. This is far earlier than where the "Renaissance" in music is judged to begin. Another aspect characteristic of the Renaissance is the use of the classical models of antiquity, an option not available to musicians. In fact, the first operas, which were an attempt to reinvent classical drama with musical accompaniment, don't come until around 1600.

Taruskin concludes:

As already hinted, the fifteenth-century watershed came about as the result of the internationalization of musical practices--what might be called the musical unification of Europe. But it was not a "Renaissance," and there is no point in calling it that. We may as well admit that the term serves no purpose for music history except to keep music in an artificial lockstep with the other arts--a lockstep for which there is a need only insofar as one needs to construct a Zeitgeist, an "essential spirit of the age." So as far as this book is concerned, then, the answer is no: there was no musical Renaissance and therefore no "Renaissance music." [op. cit. pp. 384-5]

I hope no-one feels unjustly deprived of anything! Let's listen to some Francesco Landini (c. 1325 - 1397) to ease the hurt:

No True Scotsman

Ted Gioia churns out a remarkable number of posts full of interesting and diverting information. So usually all I have to say, is more power to him. But occasionally I have to stop and ponder, as I did with his latest: Naysayers Will Tell You This Isn't Really Classical Music—Don't Believe Them (the link goes to a substack article the whole of which is only available to subscribers--but I am only going to talk about the first part).

Here is the interesting bit:

I almost feel I have to apologize every time I use the term classical music. That label carries such a heavy burden nowadays, and inevitably conveys a sense of tepid conformity.

But not today.

I don’t need to make apologies for any of this music. Each of these albums pushes beyond the tight definitions of concert hall fare. Even better, they sound great. I just wish every evening at the philharmonic was this much fun.

Of course, around here we don't use the term apologetically, but simply understand it to be a kind of shorthand for "music in the Western European tradition associated with the development of music notation from around the year 1000 CE and subsequent developments of that tradition as it has been emulated outside Western Europe to the present day." Or, more simply, "classical music."

But I want to use the occasion of Ted's post to look at the methodology of names and terms, which is why I chose the weird title of this post: "no true Scotsman." This is a reference to an old and venerable fallacy where counterexamples are excluded through rhetorical means. The Wikipedia example is:

Person A: "No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."

Person B: "But my uncle Angus is a Scotsman and he puts sugar on his porridge."

Person A: "But no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge."

Adapting to Ted's post, he puts up some music clips that he suggests we accept as "classical music," but just more fun than the "tepid conformity" of the usual fare. He anticipates the shoddy defence that "this is not real or authentic classical music because no true classical music does what this does." That's a "no true Scotsman" riposte. You always have to beware of words like "true" or "authentic" because they attempt to win an argument by not having one! But we also have to beware of Ted's rhetoric as well. He goes on to say:

Naysayers will tell you this isn’t classical music, but don’t believe them. Their carping is all the more reason to listen.

Anyone who is of a different opinion is a "naysayer" and hence mistaken. This is also an attempt to win the argument by not having it. There is also a nod in the same direction when he refers to "tight definitions of concert hall fare." That is loaded with assumptions. Time to get away from the tedium of dreary concert hall fare governed by tight definitions of classical music!

Well sure, there is some truth in that, a grain or two. But I strongly suspect that most concert organizers from sea to sea are actually striving to tread the path between programming too many old favorites and programming too few. They are in the business, after all, of getting "bums in seats" as I have heard it described. Ted's argument for listening to the clips he puts up is simply "they sound great," there was actually no need for the low swipes at classical music fuddy-duddies. He could have simply said, "here are some really great clips of music that is partially inspired by classical music." That says the same thing without insulting anyone.

A different kind of issue that comes up is that of the problem of universals. In philosophy this is a long-standing debate as to the nature of qualities that seem to have existence in many entities. These things, like roundness or color, are found in many objects so they have a universal quality. For Plato, these universals are real, more real than their imperfect instantiations in the world. Aristotle thought of them more as formal causes, blueprints or essences of individual things. In the middle ages some thinkers solved the problem by saying that universals had no existence other than labels, this position is called nominalism. It should be obvious that, given the nature of both art and history, the idea of a "tight definition" of classical music or any other artform, is absurd and not one actually held by anyone--a straw man in other words.

So, in order to avoid falling into either the unwarranted insinuations of Ted's post or the fallacious defence of a "no true Scotsman" argument, I rely once again on reference to a tradition that is easily traceable from the early compositions of the Notre Dame school, to the somewhat different tradition of the Aquitanian trobadors, to the Italian trecento madrigalists and on and on. The tradition always was open to different influences, especially from popular and folk sources, usually an oral tradition that began to be notated when it was used in "classical music." This tradition has just gone on and on and thinking of it just in terms of "tightly defined concert hall fare" is remarkably short-sighted.

Here is an early trecento Italian madrigal by Jacopo da Bologna:

Saturday Miscellanea

One day late for your listening and reading pleasure.

The Wall Street Journal has a recurring series about artistic masterpieces. This week the work in question is John Coltrane's 1965 album A Love Supreme, a four movement suite written over five days of seclusion in the family home in Dix Hills, N.Y.

In his book “John Coltrane: His Life and Music,” Mr. Porter describes the four sections of “A Love Supreme”—“Acknowledgement,” in which variations on the theme move through all 12 musical keys; “Resolution,” which arrives like a declaration and swings smoothly; “Pursuance,” a fast-paced, minor-key blues; and “Psalm,” the recitation, for which Jones switches to timpani—as suggesting “a kind of pilgrim’s progress, in which the pilgrim acknowledges the divine, resolves to pursue it, searches, and eventually, celebrates what has been attained in song.”

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Over at The Guardian we find a trio of reviews: The week in classical: Peter Grimes; Emerson Quartet; RPO/Petrenko

Long after his encounters with Lady Macbeth, in 1960, Britten met Shostakovich. They became friends. Britten especially admired Shostakovich’s 15 string quartets, saying his fellow composer “speaks most closely and most personally in his chamber music”. The Emerson Quartet have performed these works throughout their long career. Founded in 1976, with changes in personnel along the way, the gold-standard American group have announced their forthcoming retirement next year. As part of a long farewell between now and October 2023, they played the first nine Shostakovich quartets at Queen Elizabeth Hall over three evenings. I heard the last, in which No 7, dedicated to his late wife, and No 9, to his then current wife, provided ideal context to the centrepiece, Quartet No 8 in C minor Op 110 (1960).

There is a wonderful box of all the Shostakovich quartets performed by the Emerson Quartet and recorded live at the Aspen Festival. Interesting that while Tchaikovsky has recently been banned from performance and Anna Netrebko's career seems to be on the rocks, Shostakovich and Vasily Petrenko seem to be unaffected. Could someone provide a list of which Russian artists are to be banned and which not?

* * *

 Slipped Disc has a tiny note on Glenn Gould's early years:

The fall of 1952 was to be a major period of Gould’s life. First, he decided it was time to leave his teacher Alberto Guerrero. It was a difficult but inevitable decision that had to be taken sooner or later. Gould was torn between performing and composing. He then made another crucial decision: moving out of his parents home. Taking along books, music, a tape recorder and his dog, Gould ensconced himself at the cottage with his beloved Chickering piano to find out if he really had it in him to become a pianist of worth. This period of introspection lasted for over two years, allowing him little opportunity for public performace. From September to December he gave only radio recitals the first one 3 days after his 20th b/day. The Beethoven Bagatelles op.126 were part of the concert.

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Perhaps announcements of the death of classical music are premature: Classical stations see audience, fundraising successes as listeners seek refuge during pandemic

WDAV GM Frank Dominguez was eating lunch at his desk when he opened a monthly email report from the Radio Research Consortium, showing audience and listening statistics from January 2022.

“I had to look at it closely two or three times,” Dominguez said, laughing. “… I thought maybe they changed the format and things were being listed alphabetically.”

It wasn’t a mistake or a new format — for the first time ever, WDAV had reached number one in market share for the Charlotte market. Dominguez was stunned. Sure, they’d had some success in individual dayparts, and in a few years they’d gradually moved from number 18 to 20 in market share to number 10 or 12.

I can't be the only person to feel that classical music--of whatever flavour--can offer a certain kind of consolation, transcendence and diversion that is found in no other art form or genre.

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John McWhorter explains: Scott Joplin’s Ragtime Is Ambrosia. Here’s Why It Matters.

Joplin is more than just someone who wrote some great piano pieces, was Black and died. He is part of the story of American classical music that has never quite captured popular attention, where classical drinks in the musical substratum born here of Black and Native American and immigrant peoples and becomes something new. The Czech composer Antonin Dvorak sounded the call for such a music, wrote some examples, such as his Symphony No. 9, “From the New World,” but then went home. Gershwin, as I have written, pointed the way with “Porgy and Bess” but then died young. Black composers such as William Grant Still, Florence Price, Margaret Bonds and William Levi Dawson continued the mission in the mid-20th century, but racism kept all but a few from hearing or knowing what they did.

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One little-known detail of the history of the holocaust is the existence of Terezín, a Nazi concentration camp devoted, yes, to the arts. The Philadelphia Inquirer has a review: Compositions by Jewish artists and musicians held at Terezín are revealed in new book

The focus of the book, though, is Terezín, which was not a death camp like Auschwitz, though there were many deaths among the 142,000 Jews who passed through this remote Bohemian fortress town (aka Theresienstadt), en route to Auschwitz. The fact that 23,000 survived — some living long enough to be interviewed by Ludwig — is partly due to the camp’s use for Nazi propaganda purposes. International Red Cross inspections were periodic. A documentary film that tried to tell the world that Jews were not exterminated, and possibly had adequate treatment, included a glimpse of the children’s opera Brundibár, performed in the camp (and heard in the book’s playlist). But photos of those children don’t lie: However spirited their performance, sorrow is embedded in their faces.

My dear friend, violinist Paul Kling, was interned there when a child prodigy and was later transferred to Auschwitz. He survived and we performed many pieces by Jacques Ibert, Giuliani and Paganini for violin and guitar. He once joked that when he went to Terezín he only took his violin with him, no musical scores. The reason was. "I already had everything memorized and besides, I wasn't planning a long vacation..."

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And finally, Alex Ross tries to shed some light on the subject: Listening to Russian Music in Putin’s Shadow. Referring to scenes of protest at concerts including Russian music around the time of the Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 Ross continues:

Such scenes were fairly routine in classical music through most of the twentieth century, as one country or another took its turn in the role of arch-villain on the international stage. Today, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has created a cultural panic of a kind that has not been seen in generations. Several performers with strong ties to Vladimir Putin—Valery Gergiev, Anna Netrebko, Denis Matsuev—have seen their careers in Europe and America evaporate. In a few isolated cases, classic Russian works have been pulled from programs. At the beginning of March, the Polish National Opera called off a staging of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov” that had been scheduled for the spring. A few days later, Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” and his Second Symphony were dropped from a concert by the Cardiff Philharmonic—a decision that elicited worldwide mockery on social media.

This is a very fine long piece on the occasion of a mostly Russian concert of the Los Angeles Philharmonic with works by Prokofiev and Shostakovich. The whole is worth reading. His conclusion:

Proust wrote, “Every artist seems to be the citizen of an unknown homeland, one that he himself has forgotten.” Shostakovich carries that sense of a lost homeland through his work, its contours becoming visible in just a few bars of music. It may overlap with the Russia of his birth, but it also borders on the music of other lands and on the inner landscape of his imagination. As time passes, the artist’s private world merges with the worlds of its listeners. It no longer belongs to one land or one time. Which is why videos of high-school bands playing the Tenth at halftime give a giddy kind of delight: they mean that Shostakovich has escaped the nightmare of history.

An excellent reminder of the complexity of artists' relationship with the surrounding society.

Now to some envois and this week the choices are easy. First Coltrane's A Love Supreme:

And here, with so-so audio quality is Gould's 1952 recording of the late Beethoven bagatelles:

And Joshua Rifkin with Scott Joplin's Magnetic Rag:

Finally, Shostakovich, Symphony 10 with Stanisław Skrowaczewski conducting the Frankfurt Radio Symphony: