Friday Miscellanea

One of the most popular and successful music teaching methods for young children is this one: What the Suzuki Method Really Teaches.

 The Suzuki Method aims to bring elements of fun to otherwise tedious drilling. For instance, students are required to take group lessons in addition to private instruction, with the goal of impressing on youngsters the joy of making music with their peers. Early lessons are full of catchy melodies that appeal to preschoolers. The first of Suzuki’s 10 instructional books for violin starts with his arrangement of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” which has become something of a sacred hymn for his movement. The final two volumes feature demanding but equally hummable Mozart concertos.

The Suzuki method is also available for other instruments including the guitar. While more traditional music teachers have some criticisms, the Suzuki method has undeniably brought music to hosts of children worldwide.

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Another critic weighs in on the new concert hall: The Refreshed David Geffen Hall Hits the Right Notes.

The acoustic challenge is always to reflect sound while avoiding harsh echoes, and the great concert halls of the 19th century did this by means of their richly textured architecture, their columns, cornices and ornamental panels that serve to break up the sound. The architects of Geffen Hall achieve this by abstract means, balancing expanses of plain wood wall with passages that are gathered together in a linenfold pattern, like pleated drapes. The result is a warm enclosure of mellow beechwood that glows like a chalice of honey.

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 Countertenor Iestyn Davies gives us a list: How low can you go? Singer Iestyn Davies’s melancholic playlist.

Music is “a sovereign remedy against despair and melancholy, and will drive away the devil himself”, wrote Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621. Yet music is not simply a cure for sadness or grief; it speaks where words run out, it enables those in mourning to commune with the inexpressible, and possesses the unique ability to access and transfigure our feelings of lack and loss. Are we wallowing when we listen to sad songs or are we hearing a deeper truth behind the plain facts of minor chords and chromatic dissonances?

Today, the term “melancholy” has lost its currency in the psychological lexicon. “Depression” has emphatically replaced it as the diagnosis for our culture’s relationship with loss and suffering. Yet if one word best describes the experience of so many in the past few years of pandemic life, it is melancholy – and it is to music that so many were able to turn during those isolated months for solace and contemplation. As Burton wrote four centuries ago, “Sorrow is both mother and daughter of Melancholy, symptom and chief cause; they tread in a ring, Melancholy can only be overcome with Melancholy”.

The list goes from John Dowland to The Smiths, so worth a look.

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And here is the review of the thematically linked concert with Thomas Dunford: An Anatomy of Melancholy review – vivid musical study of an indefinable condition.

"If there be a hell upon earth, it is to be found in a melancholy man’s heart,” wrote Robert Burton, whose 1621 work The Anatomy of Melancholy attempted to pin down this elusive and then-fashionable condition. In the decades before, John Dowland had epitomised melancholy in his lute songs. Up close in the Pit theatre, the director and video artist Netia Jones brings Dowland together with Burton and other writers in a production for the countertenor Iestyn Davies and lutenist Thomas Dunford that is somewhere between a staged recital and a mini-opera. 

Jones punctuated Dowland’s songs with recorded readings from Burton, Freud, the psychoanalyst Darian Leader and others, and these seemed at times to be equating it with depression, which didn’t sit convincingly. Dowland’s music can indeed be bleak in such songs as In Darkness Let Me Dwell – which began and ended the programme here in complete blackout, an effective conceit. Yet elsewhere the music fights this: Dowland pins down so vividly the state of being miserably yet enjoyably in love, even with the occasional innuendo; and the way the lute keeps searching out the harmonies means the music has the opposite of the deadening effect of depression.

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Here is a piece about conductors moonlighting as accompanists: Don’t shoot the pianists, protect them

What harm is done by letting conductors into our chamber music? More than you’d suspect. Collaborative pianists — we only recently stopped calling them “accompanists” — have struggled to acquire a modicum of dignity for their vocation.

When a conductor pushes them off the stool and blags his way through a sonata or song cycle, an essential occupation is diminished and demoralised.

It hasn’t yet reached the point where we need a society for the protection of chamber pianists, but it is about time that soloists stood up more for their other halves. To his great credit, Jonas Kaufmann always insists on equal billing for Helmut Deutsch, who is not only his recital partner but also his former college professor.

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Life is not easy if you play certain instruments: Fury as double bassists barred from French trains

The French national train service SNCF continues to restrict musicians travelling with large instruments, including double basses, causing large public outcry within the musician community.

SNCF currently states the maximum size for an item of luggage is 130cm x 90cm (approximately 4ft 2in x 3ft), while a double bass typically stands at around 190cm in its case. In 2021, an open letter published in Le Monde was signed by 45,000 people, illustrating the struggles faced by those denied access on board trains with large instruments.

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Here is the story of an unlikely defector: The Defection of Mikhail Voskresensky

The idea of fleeing into exile had been stirring in his head for weeks. Now it was becoming more like a conviction.

He couldn’t shake the feeling of his own complicity. “I’m guilty if I live in this society,” he told me, many months later. “I had this feeling that was ethically hard to live with.” Although he was 87 years old, he had a 4-year-old son, and he wanted his youngest child “to grow up free of this feeling.” His wife, who shared his distaste for Moscow’s wartime oppressiveness, agreed.

To put it in the parlance of another time: Voskresensky—a beloved figure who had won many of his nation’s highest honors, including the People’s Artist of Russia—was ready to defect.

The last time Voskresensky engaged in a political act was in 1963.

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Let's start with a little melancholy: this is Iestyn Davies and Thomas Dunford with John Dowland's "In Darkness Let Me Dwell."

 Here is a much more cheerful song with Jonas Kaufman and Helmut Deutsch:

Finally, a concert by Mikhail Voskresensky from the Moscow Conservatory last year: