Friday Miscellanea

The Grawemeyer Award is one of the most prestigious prizes for composition: Music Inspired by Notre-Dame Fire Wins a Top Prize.

When a fire broke out at the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris in 2019, the British composer Julian Anderson was devastated.

“Seeing a precise and beautiful and precious structure like that dissolving almost into the fire was very, very traumatizing,” he said in an interview.

Anderson soon began channeling some of his despondence into “Litanies,” a 25-minute meditation for cello and orchestra. In the second movement, a series of chords emerges then melts away, echoing the disaster.

The only clip available on YouTube is this one, an excerpt from the end of the work:

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A Path to Freedom is one of the best things I have read recently about the nature and function of art. Hard to excerpt so you should read it all. But here are some quotes:

Apart from the aesthetic pleasure it gives, what’s the relevance of Starry Night? Can we read it as a record of mental illness (Van Gogh loosely depicts his view from an asylum window), and thus as an indictment of a society that refuses to accommodate people who think differently? Or rather as an idealizing, idyllic picture of a lost harmony between humans and nature, a bond soon to be severed irrevocably by climate change?

In the opinion of Jed Perl, longtime art critic at the New Republic and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, that all misses the point. “I want us to release art from the stranglehold of relevance,” Perl writes in Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts (Knopf, $20, 176 pp.), the sharpest, most inspiring book of criticism I read this year. True, art can shed light on social problems and may indeed inspire us to work for change. But art’s primary task, Perl asserts, is not to “promote a particular idea of ideology, or perform some clearly defined civic or community service.” Art is meaningful, valuable, and exciting precisely because of its irrelevance to our most immediate, surface-level concerns.

At the center of Perl’s analysis is the notion that all art is the result of a tension between the authority of tradition on the one hand and the freedom of creativity and invention on the other.

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One blogger takes on the issue of nationalism in music during wartime.

Unless the music somehow expresses the enemy country's commitment to its war, the music — and other art — created by human beings from that country heightens the awareness of what is lost in war. But, yes, it may move us to love Russian people, and Ukraine may be intentionally demanding that we hate the enemy — not merely its government, but its people.

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A couple of years ago I decided to de-digitize parts of my life. I took up sketching with pens and pencils on actual paper (sadly, that didn't last); I switched from doing preliminary sketches for compositions using my music software to doing them with pencil on paper and I started writing a journal and a sequence of haiku using fountain pens instead of, you know, a word processor. It has been a fulfilling and I think inspiring choice. Here is someone musing on one aspect: On the Gift of Longhand.

I’m a longtime longhand writer. I’m old enough to remember writing by hand when it was the only choice. Then I fell to the seductions of these newfangled things called laptops, like so many others. I was delighted by the convenience and by the final-draft look of even the messiest prose. But I switched back to longhand several years ago, and now it’s the only way I write my drafts. When I returned to pen and paper, I did so with the zeal of a convert. Not content to have just one or two good pens, I’ve amassed a small collection of mostly fountain pens. I’m catholic in my tastes, and cherish my Paper Mate Ink Joy, Pilot G-1, and Pilot Varsity, along with two ‘40s-era Parker 51s, one of which belonged to my father. But it’s the fountain pens I really prefer to use when writing first drafts.

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More data on the problems of music and economics: Flutist Mary Barto on the Mannes School of Music strike.

Our base salary is some $70 per hour, as opposed to other parts of the university, where the average is about $130 an hour. Somebody might say, “$130, that’s incredible!” But this includes hundreds of hours of preparation, grading, and writing recommendations. I stopped counting up how many hours I spent prepping my chamber music class when I got to 53. Some of the faculty who teach classes that meet three times a week stopped when they got to 150. This is not an accurate hourly wage; it includes a huge amount of outside time.

The whole interview is worth having a look at. Private music teachers are perhaps the most critical element in music education and they are usually not well-compensated.

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And you might want to have a look at this: Climate Activists Threaten to Start Slashing Paintings as They ‘Escalate’ Their Campaign to Model the Suffragist Movement

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I was also struck by the Notre Dame fire and I took a piece by François Couperin for harpsichord and recomposed it for violin and guitar. Here is the original:

And here is the first page of my recomposition. When I get a chance I will try to do a recording.

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Now for some music clips. Here is Toward the Sea by Toru Takemitsu for alto flute and guitar:

And here is Le rossignol-en-amour by Couperin:

And finally, a really unusual cover of The Rolling Stones Satisfaction: