Friday Miscellanea

I've been a fan of Bob Dylan since the late 60s--and at eighty-two years old he is still going strong: The Inner Life of Transcendent Genius.

American popular music, however—if one excludes jazz—has arguably produced just one transcendent genius. Bob Dylan is now in his 82nd year, and over the course of 60 of those years, he has changed his medium as utterly and completely as Orson Welles changed cinema or Cervantes changed world literature. Dylan has effectively divided American popular music into the era before his emergence and the era that followed, in which everyone—willing or unwilling, consciously or unconsciously—trod in his footsteps.

You might as well read the rest.

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 That nexus of arts coverage, the Wall Street Journal, has a review of Stephen Walsh’s The Beloved Vision: A History of Nineteenth Century Music.

Historians speak of the long 19th century, from the French Revolution to the Great War, and that is more or less how Mr. Walsh uses the denomination. It was, he writes, an era “of stylistic diversity, a time when a composer asserted his or her existential being through a recognisable, even idiosyncratic musical language, after centuries during which composers”—think of Handel or J.S. Bach—“were generally less concerned with self than with craftsmanship.”

Hmm, that sounds interesting.

The 19th century was a time when the aristocracies that sponsored gifted musicians and composers died out and were replaced by public and private institutions—large professional orchestras, concert halls and conservatories. The conservatories dramatically improved the technical skill of musicians and offered a place for gifted composers to learn the newest techniques; orchestras and opera houses largely took over the job of commissioning new works. Many decades would pass before these institutions, grown sclerotic by government funding and no longer responsive to public tastes, would enforce banal orthodoxies on young ambitious composers.

European music, in other words, had not yet become overinstitutionalized and overcredentialed, as ours has been since the middle of the last century. In Vienna, we are reminded by Mr. Walsh, Mozart worked from 1781 as a freelance musician. Beethoven, too, survived on publishers’ commissions and charitable sponsorship. If they had been born two centuries later, both would have been appointed to endowed professorships, paid handsome salaries, feted by arts organizations, further subsidized with prestige prizes, and never heard from again.

My emphases. Now there is certainly a grain of truth there, especially the first passage that I have bolded. But while the second is certainly true of many composers who teach composition from comfortable tenured posts in universities and conservatories, there are many others who roam the musical universe, living on commissions and the sweat of their brow. Some names: Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Thomas Adès, Sofia Gubaidulina, Caroline Shaw and others. So, I find I have to strongly disagree that Mozart and Beethoven would have disappeared into the halls of academe, never to be heard from again.

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This seems to be a perennial theme: 7/11 stores are blaring out classical music to deter homeless individuals from loitering outside because the vagrants 'find opera annoying'

Jagat Patel, who owns a 7-Eleven in the Riverside neighborhood of Austin, told Fox 7: 'Studies have shown that the classical music is annoying. Opera is annoying, and I'm assuming they are correct because it's working'.

Ah, that other perennial theme: "studies have shown"! What we need are some studies showing how really annoying EDM is.

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 Here is a different take on the film Tár: Thank you, Cate Blanchett, for taking up the baton for female conductors.

And now Todd Field’s film Tár about a female conductor is the toast of Hollywood, anchored by Cate Blanchett’s firebrand performance. The film is a glinting prism in which everyone will see different things. For me it asks timely questions about the abuse, fragility and illusion of power. Chatting to Cate and Todd at my book launch, it’s no surprise to me, having spent 30 years in this profession, how enrapt they both remain by this most beguiling of art forms.

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From the BBC: Gen Z and young millennials' surprising obsession.

If asked to guess what under 25-year-olds are listening to, it's unlikely that many of us would land upon orchestral music. And yet a survey published in December 2022 by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO) found that 74% of UK residents aged under 25 were likely to be tuning into just that at Christmas-time, compared with a mere 46% of people aged 55 or more. These figures reflect not only the RPO's broader finding that under 35-year-olds are more likely to listen to orchestral music than their parents, but also the widespread surge in popularity of classical music in general, particularly among younger generations.

That is rather unexpected, given the constant complaints in North America about the aging classical audience. But I have been saying for a long time that things are different in Europe. Part of the story is the rise of young artists:

British concert pianist Harriet Stubbs is another avid proponent of classical music for modern audiences who has been finding her own ways of drawing in new listeners. During lockdown, the musician, who usually splits her time between London and New York, performed multiple 20-minute concerts from her ground-floor flat in West Kensington, opening the windows and using an amplifier to reach listeners outside. "I gave 250 concerts," Stubbs, who was awarded a British Empire Medal by the Queen for this mood-boosting act of service, tells BBC Culture. "I did a range of repertoire from my upcoming album, and also things like All By Myself, which I chose ironically for that audience. And the thing is, people who thought they didn't care for classical music came back every day because of the power of that music."

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We have to start with Bob, don't we. Here is "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" from Blonde on Blonde:

And here is Harriet Stubbs playing the Scherzo #2 by Chopin:

 Lastly, Dmitri Shostakovich playing his own Prelude and Fugue in E minor: