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
10 comments:
Speaking for myself, the popular resentment against classical music isn't against the music, it's against its imperious fandom. "You kids like the wrong music" has been the dominant education strategy in the US for 100 years and was the tone of much of its highbrow arts criticism and scholarship until quite recently. Norman Lebrecht can whine all he wants about attempts by the institutions to back down from their previous cultural imperialist stance but it seems to me that some unilateral rhetorical disarmament is long overdue.
I could give you a long list of my friends who are very accomplished performers and creators of rock, country, dance or hip-hop who self-deprecatingly call themselves "not real musicians" because they washed out of middle school orchestra. Instead, I'll tell the story of a high school friend whose family is from the Dominican Republic. I interviewed him for a grad school project about people's music education experiences. He told me how he stopped playing music after he gave up classical flute after high school. Then about thirty seconds later he told me how every Christmas, his family gets together to sing carols and play drums, as is common in Latin America. He doesn't mentally categorize this as "real" music, though. That is the real harm being done by classical pedagogy, its persistent trope of dismissing and degrading all other forms of musicality. Those of us who escape that dismissal with a somewhat intact sense of ourselves as musical beings are naturally going to be resentful. I reconnected with Bach very deeply as an adult, but I did that in spite of my schooling and my subsequent contact with classical music's institutional culture, not because of it. Working in a few music schools puts me in daily contact with that institutional culture, and it is a profoundly sick one (though with tiny signs of growth and improvement in the past couple of years.) The commercial music industry has many pathologies of its own, but I have not felt an eighth as oppressed by it as I have by classical music spaces.
"I think we underestimate the resentment seething under the surface of the popular culture against classical music." Way too much drama, Bryan. Apathy, indifference, ignorance - on a good day. It's off the radar and completely nothing to 95% of people IMHO. Europe may save it, but in the US it is heading toward oblivion. Of course this is very saddening. I guess the 'elite' in cities and near universities will always have opportunity to hear it live. And there are always recordings. Or - learn an instrument and make it yourself. I have no idea what the solution is, but humility (always a good thing), rather than hubris, should be part of it.
Every child who watches Star Wars gets immersed in the language of the nineteenth century symphonic repertoire. They might not know the names of Stravinsky or Holst, but the music is alive and well in Hollywood.
I might have worded that differently because I recall a cartoon from years ago. I think it was a Dagwood strip. He is sitting in his living room strumming away on a ukulele and a passer-by just walks in, grabs the instrument, smashes it and goes on his way. There is this scorn in the popular culture, not only against classical music, which yes, Ethan, the more imperious supporters may well have provoked, but also against anyone who plays an instrument or sings.
And yes, the romantic orchestral tradition is strong in the blockbuster soundtracks, Harry Potter as well as Star Wars.
Bryan, was that Dagwood Bumstead? If so I haven't seen or heard a reference to that character in a long, long time!
Ukuleles, guitars and banjos might have their own unique history of being scorned in contrast to bowed string instruments. Matanya Ophee used to say he had collected a pile of invective against the guitar over the years and I kind of wish that he'd done a lexicon of musical invective against the guitar to prove his observation for the record. :)
Ophee once cited a particularly memorable invective against the guitar by a 19th century author who went on about how it was the inseparable companion of "every Spaniard" and suitable for a "maiden" but not a "serious" instrument. I'm working through an OUP compendium on the history of the invention of Beethoven vs Rossini lately and there are, well, overtly ethnic binaries that can play into these kinds of things, not necessarily the white /black binary of contemporary race discussions in the US but more the North/South or Anglo-Saxon/Mediterannean contrast of 19th century polemics.
And for folks into the northern European "serious" tradition the entire film score tradition is illegitimate because the music isn't autonomous. So never mind that John Williams has written a lot of perfectly fun singable tunes, none of that is "serious" music. But then we don't get exposure to the film and TV scores of Stravinsky or Shostakovich so much, do we?
That is probably not even likely to change. Even if I enjoy J G Thirwell's music for The Venture Bros or Yoko Kanno's music for Cowboy Bebop has anyone done any scholarly work on either of them?
The Baffler article reminds me I still have the book Industry laying around waiting to be read.
Ethan, I see that the Anna Bull book is starting to go down in price. Eventually plan to get to it.
Indeed it was Dagwood Bumstead. The destruction of the musical instrument of an amateur player was just good comic fun! Always remembered that. I think John Belushi destroyed someone's guitar in Animal House, another example.
I just watched the recent live version of Cowboy Bebop on Netflix and yes, the music was quite good.
I was referring to the original anime but I'm sure Kanno's "Tank!" remains one of the more spectacular opening theme songs to any show ever made either way. :)
Film music is starting to get attention from the more progressive corners of musicology. NYU has a terrific film music department, the classes I took from them were hugely more valuable than the required theory or composition core. One of my fellow doctoral students wrote an extraordinary dissertation about the growing role of the music editor. Film scores used to be composed and recorded after the edit was locked, but now they keep editing until the day the film is released. So John Williams writes his score, the London Symphony Orchestra records it, but they keep tweaking and rearrange shots after that, and each tweak requires adjustment to the recorded score. In Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, they made more than a thousand edits to the Duel of the Fates sequence after the score was recorded, and the music editor had to essentially remix the score to get it to match those thousand edits. Pretty fascinating stuff.
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