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: