Friday Miscellanea

Our Municipal Christmas Tree

Mexico is a lot better at things like Day of the Dead and Holy Week than Christmas which is really a Northern European festival. Still, lots of parties are had and gifts exchanged and the municipality puts up an artificial Christmas tree in the central plaza. So Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all readers of The Music Salon. I am grateful for your interest and will do my best to put up at least one weekly post and hopefully more in the coming year. I have business responsibilities that take time and I am also spending a lot more time on the guitar, plus I am back composing. I am revising my String Quartet No. 2 which will finally have its much-postponed premiere in Vancouver next May. I hope you are all well and happy and looking forward to a better 2023 than 2022. Let's hope this year was not "average" in the Russian meaning: average year, worse than last year, better than next year! So, on with the regular Friday miscellanea.

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First up, the Salzburg Festival just announced their program for next summer which can be found here https://www.salzburgerfestspiele.at/cms/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/programmbuch_2023_72dpi.pdf

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This looks like a very interesting book and it goes on my list to read next year: The Northern Silence: Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture.

Andrew Mellor journeys to the heart of the Nordic cultural psyche. From Reykjavik to Rovaniemi, he examines the success of Nordic music’s performers, the attitude of its audiences, and the sound of its composers past and present—celebrating some of the most remarkable music ever written along the way. Mellor peers into the dark side of the Scandinavian utopia, from xenophobia and alcoholism to parochialism and the twilight of the social democratic dream. Drawing on a range of genres and firsthand encounters, he reveals that our fascination with Nordic societies and our love for Nordic music might be more intertwined than first thought.

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From an economics blog: My Conversation with John Adams

COWEN: How do you avoid what Harold Bloom called the anxiety of influence?

ADAMS: Harold Bloom was a very great literary critic, sometimes a little bit of a windbag, but his writings on Coleridge and Shelley, and especially on Shakespeare, were very important to me. He had a phrase that he coined, the anxiety of influence, which is interesting because he himself was not a creator. He was a critic, but he intuited that we creators, whether we’re painters or novelists or filmmakers or composers — that we live, so to speak, under the shadow of the greats that preceded us.

If you’re a poet, you’ve got all this great literature behind you, whether it’s Shakespeare or Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson. And likewise for me, I’ve got really heavyweight predecessors in Beethoven, in Bach, in Mahler, in Stravinsky. Maybe that’s what he meant, just the anxiety of, is what I do even comparable with this great art? Another thing is, if I have an idea, has somebody already thought of it before? Those are the neurotic aspects of my life, but I’m no different than anybody else. We just have to deal with those concerns.

COWEN: Are you more afraid of Mozart or of Charles Ives?

ADAMS: [laughs] I’m not afraid of either of them. I love them. I obviously love Mozart more than Charles Ives. Charles Ives is a very, very unusual figure. He was almost completely unknown in most of the 20th century until Leonard Bernstein, who was very glamorous and very well known — Bernstein brought him to the public notice, and he coined this idea that Charles Ives was the Abraham Lincoln of music. Of course, Americans love something they can grasp onto like, “Oh, yes, I can relate to that. He’s the Abraham Lincoln of music.”

Charles Ives was a hermit. He worked during the day in an insurance firm, at which he was very successful, but spent his weekends and his summer vacations composing. His work is very sentimental, also very avant-garde for its time. I’ve conducted quite a few of his pieces. They are not, I have to admit, 100 percent satisfying, and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that Ives never heard these pieces, or hardly ever heard them.

When you’re composing, you have to hear something and then realize, “Oh, that works and that doesn’t.” I think the fact that Ives — maybe he was just born before his time. He was born in Connecticut in the 1870s, and America at that time just was still a very raw country and not ready for a classical experimental composer.

COWEN: You seem to understand everything in music, from Indian ragas to popular songs, classical music, jazz. Do you ever worry that you have too many influences?

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Bach’s accidental masterpiece: The keyboard works of The Well-Tempered Clavier sound more novel and luminous 300 years later than in their composer’s day.

Unfortunately behind a paywall. But it provides me the opportunity to make an observation about Bach: his major works during his lifetime were overwhelmingly for the church and include hundreds of cantatas (composed on an almost weekly basis), plus the massive passions, oratorios and other works for soloists, chorus and orchestra. But while we certainly listen to these works today, we seem to derive the greatest enjoyment from his more mundane compositions such as the Well-Tempered Clavier, written to demonstrate a new tuning system, the inventions, written to educate his children, the Goldberg variations, written as a diversion to while away the hours and the solo music for cello and violin, written to demonstrate the potential of these relatively newish instruments. For the longest time these were regarded as little more than technical studies. But now, all of these works seem to represent to us the essence of Bach's craft, unlinked to any religious message.

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Alex Ross in the New Yorker: Looking Past the Celebrity Conductor

Some years ago, when I was interviewing the pianist Mitsuko Uchida, she poked fun at the idea of a youthful star conductor: “Do you want yourself to be operated on by a genius twenty-year-old heart surgeon? Do you want to go to the theatre and see a teen-ager play King Lear?” Uchida’s point was that practitioners of the arm-waving profession tend to grow better and wiser with age. Orchestras register not only the gestures a conductor makes in front of them but also the history of music-making that those gestures reflect. Herbert Blomstedt, who is ninety-five, can mesmerize a jaded first-tier ensemble with a gentle wave of his hands. It’s more than a question of personal mystique: it’s trust in a cumulative record of collective work.

That's an intriguing start to an excellent discussion of young conductors--especially their shortcomings.

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New research finds UK public ‘can’t live without music’, while musicians face brutal conditions

This data follows on from a survey released by the charity last month which showed that close to half of professional musicians think they will be forced to leave the industry, due to the ‘brutal’ impact of the cost of living crisis, alongside the ongoing impact of the pandemic and Brexit. 

At a time when music is more important to Brits than ever, six in ten professional musicians (60 per cent) say they are worse off financially now compared to the same time last year. Nine out of ten (90 per cent) are worried about affording food over the next six months, with 84 per cent concerned about paying their mortgage or rent.

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 The Cello Suite No 6 by Bach is probably the least well-known of the set. Here it is performed on a five-string cello for which it was originally written.

Here is the Symphony No. 5 by Sibelius with Jukka-Pekka Saraste & Lahti Symphony Orchestra:

And here is John Adams' Shaker Loops: