Friday Miscellanea

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I often enjoy criticizing Alex Ross, but I never go into the kind of detail we find in this article: Moving on From Alex Ross. The writer deplores the progressive politicization of Ross' criticism.

Ross trained with composers, and his calling card has always been his interest in composers and repertoire, not just performers. It was in this arena that the new woke Alex Ross first caught my attention. In February 2018, Ross penned a column on the work of Florence Price, a then relatively unknown early-twentieth-century black female composer from Arkansas. “The Rediscovery of Florence Price,” Ross’s apologia for Price’s charming but musically undistinguished output, would set the agenda for a Price revival across the American classical music landscape—one that continues to this day.

In the article, Ross test-drove several arguments that music organizations and music media would employ over the ensuing years to keep criticism of Price’s music at bay. There was Price’s political significance. (“She seems to speak from an imaginary past, from an alternative history of an America that lived up to its stated ideals.”) There was the idea that we ought to regard racism and sexism as the exclusive reasons why we don’t all know the name Florence Price. (“The reasons for the shocking neglect of Price’s legacy are not hard to find. In a 1943 letter to the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, she introduced herself thus: ‘My dear Dr. Koussevitzky, To begin with I have two handicaps—those of sex and race.’”) And lastly there was the idea that the absence of Price and other minorities from the classical music canon invalidated the canon itself. (“If racism and misogyny had not so profoundly defined European and American culture, would as many white male composers have prospered?”)

I'm sure that will start an argument here, but let me offer one more quote that I want to contest:

taste in American classical music is a signaling cascade, and that the man upstream of everyone else is Alex Ross.

Now sure, there is a grain of truth here, but I really don't think those scattered few music critics still active these days take their marching orders from Alex Ross. Instead, what I think is the case is that Ross' success is partly built on his conformity with the views of enlightened inhabitants of Manhattan regarding race, gender and justice. Which is fair enough--that is his community audience. It underlines how cultural taste in the US tends to flow from just a few few nodes of which New York tends to be predominant, in classical music if not in movies and pop music. Canada has the same problem to an even greater extent. Quebec aside, which has its own independent culture, cultural taste in Canada largely flows from Toronto.

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Review: Kronos Quartet Offers a Creative Snapshot of a Global Pandemic. I doubt that there is another string quartet that have contributed anything near the sheer quantity and quality of commissions and performances of new music for the medium. Sitting on my CD shelves is a hefty box issued by Nonesuch to celebrate their first twenty-five years of recording. Soon we will need another for the second twenty-five years. In the meantime, the New York Times reviews a recent concert of innovative new works:

Many of the works on the Zankel program were brief but transporting. The Benin-born composer and singer Angélique Kidjo’s “YanYanKliYan Senamido #2,” arranged by Jacob Garchik, provided an easefully exuberant start to the evening, with interlocked melodies and rhythms playing call-and-response. The Iranian composer Aftab Darvishi’s “Daughters of Sol” was a profoundly meditative study on shade and color, with each layer unfolding slowly into another. The Armenian-American composer Mary Kouyoumdjian’s “I Haven’t the Words” was a restless, questioning susurration precipitated by the tumults of 2020, including the pandemic lockdowns and George Floyd’s murder.

Kronos are an interesting anomaly as they exemplify that much of the most progressive artistic thinking in the US has, for a long time now, come from the West Coast. 

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 An excellent piece by Ted Gioia on how critics get things so disastrously wrong: Why Did the Beatles Get So Many Bad Reviews? Here is one reviewer talking about the White Album:

The reviewer admits that the Beatles were once good in the past—an unusual, albeit revealing claim, because this same periodical had ridiculed them in those early days—but not anymore. The Less-Than-Fab Four have been reduced to creating music with an empty cover, and the same emptiness inside. “The blankness extends into the records within,” the reviewer scornfully declares; the music is “uptight” and “dull.” Although these musicians “could have turned out a real fine album” somehow they couldn’t come close in 1968.

I could give numerous other examples. And it’s fun to laugh at such wrong-headed opinions. But I think it’s more valuable to ask how these critics, specialists in their field, not only missed the mark, but in such an absurd way. They literally were handed the greatest recordings of their era to review, and blew them off. Every classic song on these albums was not only attacked, but actually mocked.

It would have been even more interesting to look around and see if any critics of the time did good evaluations and who they were exactly--especially what was their methodology. That might be useful. And here is another datum: I remember hearing the White Album the day it came out in 1968, on the radio, and my seventeen-year-old self thought it was terrific, as I still do. I imagine there was a host of seventeen-year-olds with similar opinions. So, a lot of people at the time got it right. But it seems most music critics got it wrong. What this tells me is that the music critics were using the wrong criteria but the rest of us were using better criteria. Let's talk about that.

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 One of the things about the mass media I enjoy is the divergence between headlines and content: rarely does the latter fulfill the promise of the former. The New York Times series "Five Minutes That Will Make You Love X" is one of my contrarian favorites. This week it is the particularly challenging Five Minutes That Will Make You Love 21st-Century Jazz. It is no secret that I don't like jazz, though I certainly respect certain artists, but out of sheer curiosity I devoted five minutes of my life to the exercise. I do admit that there were some interesting textures and there was a certain amount of variety. I even liked the fragment by Immanuel Wilkins. The format here, by the way is to offer up a 29 second bleeding hunk chosen by another jazz artist. This would not favor musical genres with a longer structural reach, but it doesn't seem to help jazz either. I usually think of jazz as aimless noodling and these selections don't change my mind much. It is remarkable how much this 21st century jazz sounds like 20th century jazz: chaotic Bebop free jazz with occasional touches of smooth and a bit of post-modern juxtaposition. I can agree with one quote, this is rather the “the nowhere of utopia.”

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The mechanization of music continues:

https://twitter.com/bleedingedgeai/status/1619081383477137408

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The most amazing things sometimes happen in the opera house: HOW I FLIPPED FROM MEZZO TO TENOR AND BACK

Tuesday 19:40. Another phone call. Another tenor can’t jump in tomorrow. The options are dwindling. I mention half-jokingly to the Stage-Manager if technically he thinks I could do it? Venus and Orpheus don’t share much stage time and when they are both on stage together they sing very similar lines in big ensemble, shouldn’t it be possible that one person does both? He starts to seriously think about it and says it depends how fast I am with learning all the text, but with 3 hours of staging rehearsal before the show he thinks it could be doable… I have another look into the score. It really doesn’t look that difficult… sure I’d have to jump between singing some things an octave lower to sound like a tenor and sing some things in my octave to be able to be heard… but… I think… I could actually do it…

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From The Atlantic: The People Who Don’t Read Books

During Kanye West’s spectacular plummet last fall, my friends and I would often marvel at the latest outrageous thing he’d said. And we would send around clips of what were, in hindsight, terribly suspect comments he’d previously made. One such example was “I am not a fan of books,” which Ye told an interviewer upon the publication of his own book, Thank You and You’re Welcome. “I am a proud non-reader of books,” he continued. That statement strikes me as one of the more disturbing things he’s ever said. Ye’s patently reprehensible anti-Semitic tirades rightly drew the world’s scorn. But his anti-book stance is disturbing because it says something about not only Ye’s character but the smugly solipsistic tenor of this cultural moment.

I suspect people who avoid books also have little awareness of history, which tends to explain a lot.

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Alex Ross' latest: Hildegard of Bingen Composes the Cosmos

In the course of the twentieth century, the abbey’s nuns helped to bring about a surge of interest in Hildegard, preparing editions of her writings and recording her music. She had never been forgotten, but modern Catholicism has embraced her as a symbol of piety and creativity intertwined. In 2012, Pope Benedict XVI announced Hildegard’s canonization and named her a Doctor of the Church—a title that has been bestowed on only thirty-six other figures.

Hildegard’s fame has also crossed over into zones of New Age spirituality, environmental discourse, and feminist thought. In the gift shop at the Hildegard Abbey, you can find self-help texts along the lines of “Strengthen the Immune System with Hildegard of Bingen.” Fiction about Hildegard is a genre unto itself: there have been at least twenty novels in various languages, including two crime stories. The growth of the phenomenon had much to do with the serene allure of Hildegard’s music. In 1982, the British group Gothic Voices released a rapt album titled “A Feather on the Breath of God: Sequences and Hymns by Abbess Hildegard of Bingen,” which became a cult item. The Sequentia ensemble followed with a nine-CD survey of Hildegard’s output. These and other releases have sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

One of Alex Ross' greatest strengths is his energy as a researcher.

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Forensic musicologists race to rescue works lost after the Holocaust. "Forensic musicologist," now there's a cool profession: CSI: Vienna!

In 2006, Haas co-founded the Exilarte Center for Banned Music in Vienna, which locates, preserves and presents music lost during the Holocaust. The impetus began when Haas, a Grammy-winning classical producer for Decca Records, recorded music by Kurt Weill — the German Jewish emigré who wrote "The Threepenny Opera."

"I kept stumbling across names of other composers who were just as famous as Kurt Weill," Haas says. He points to the Jewish composers who fled Hitler's Europe and found success in Hollywood.

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And finally: Music Finance: Where The Real Money Is Being Made

After investing in yesterday’s catalogues, the next stop is the future — or rather, a futures index. It would mean that investors could put their money on which songs would become the next streaming stars.

Chicago-based company Clouty — “at the intersection of data, music and finance, re-imagining the value of music by making it a tradable asset” — introduced the world’s first music trading index, MUSIQ™, launched in the summer of 2022.

Because of online streaming, metrics are now readily available to measure and analyze activity in the music sector. It’s led to the next step of the company’s vision, which is the release of the MUSIQ 500 composite index that will track various genres of music and their current market value. The company uses a proprietary method with multiple inputs to calculate the value of the top 500 songs at any given time.

Clouty is currently looking for an exchange-traded fund to make it easy for investors to jump into the game. Futures could be linked to specific genres, artists or even songs.

"Bob, I want you to get me into some call options on Billie Eilish's next three albums."

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And now for some music as, you know, music. We begin, of course, with Hildegard von Bingen:

And something from the White Album:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdvnOH060Qg

Here is the Violin Concerto No. 2 by Florence Price:

Finally, one of my favorite encores from Kronos: