Friday Miscellanea

Over at NewMusic a feature article on composer Kevin Puts: Kevin Puts: Keeping Secrets

Puts’s opera The Hours received an extraordinary lavish production that most composers can only dream of. It featured a huge cast headlined by three top operatic stars–Renée Fleming, Joyce DiDonato, and Kelli O’Hara–plus a gargantuan chorus which frequently takes center stage. When the production was announced it seemed to come out of nowhere, but it was in the works for five years. It grew directly out of Puts’s previous collaboration with Fleming, Letters From Georgia, a five moment song cycle based on letters that the painter Georgia O’Keeffe wrote to her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz. After Fleming announced she was no longer focusing on standard operatic repertoire and wanted to devote her energies to singing new roles, Puts casually asked her if she’d be amenable to singing in an opera if he wrote one for her. Within weeks she suggested an opera based on The Hours, a complex narrative that interweaves stories of women in three different time periods which had been a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel as well as a successful Hollywood film. Puts, who had read the book and saw the movie and loved them both, said that he instantly “could imagine the kinds of things that you could do on the operatic stage that are not possible in a book or in a film.” Soon thereafter she mentioned the idea to Peter Gelb who was immediately excited about a work that could star three major box office draws.

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Slipped Disc inquires: IS YOUR MUSIC DIVERSE ENOUGH FOR OXFORD TO PUBLISH? Yes, if you:

• live with a disability; and/or

• are women; and/or

• identify on the broader spectrum of gender; and/or

• are from under-represented ethnic groups; and/or

• are from a lower socio-economic group

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The economist Tyler Cowen asks Why has classical music declined? and offers some conjectures:

1. The advent of musical recording favored musical forms that allow for the direct communication of personality.  Mozart is mediated by sheet music, but the Rolling Stones are on record and the radio and now streaming.  You actually get “Mick Jagger,” and most listeners prefer this to a bunch of quarter notes.  So a lot of energy left the forms of music that are communicated through more abstract means, such as musical notation, and leapt into personality-specific musics.

1b. Eras have aesthetic centers of gravity.  So pushing a lot of talent in one direction does discourage some other directions from developing fully.  Dylan didn’t just pull people into folk, he pulled them away from trying to be the next Pat Boone.

2. Electrification favored a variety of musical styles that are not “classical” or even “contemporary classical,” with apologies to Glenn Branca.

3. The two World Wars ripped out the birthplaces of so much wonderful European culture.  It is not only classical music that suffered, but also European science, letters, entrepreneurship, and much more.

4. It is tough to top Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, etc., so eventually creators struck out in new directions.  And precisely because of the less abstract, more personality-laden nature of popular music, it is harder to have a very long career and attain the status of a true titan.  The Rolling Stones ran out of steam forty (?) years ago, but Bach could have kept on writing fugues, had he lived longer.  More recent musical times thus have many creators who are smaller in overall stature, even though the total of wonderful music has stayed very high.

5. Contemporary classical music (NB: not the best term, for one thing much of it is no longer contemporary) is much better than most people realize.  Much of it is designed for peers, and intended to be experienced live.  In the last decade I saw performances of Glass’s Satyagraha, Golijov’s St. Marc Passion, Boulez’s Le Marteau (at IRCAM), and Stockhausen’s Mantra, and it was all pretty amazing.  I doubt if those same pieces are very effective on streaming.  It may be unfortunate, but due to incentives emanating from peers, most non-peer listeners do not have the proper dimensionality of listening experience to proper appreciate those compositions.  To be clear, for the most part I don’t either, not living down here in northern Virginia, but at times I can overcome this (mostly through travel) and in any case I am aware of the phenomenon.  For these same reasons, it is wrong to think those works will have significantly higher reputations 50 or 100 years from now — some of them are already fairly old!

I hope this sparks a few comments. One thing for sure, these speculations are far more interesting than the usual "because contemporary classical music is all unmusical crap!"

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I have mentioned a few times that creativity in the arts is a balance between tradition and innovation and apparently the critic Jed Pearl agrees: Authority & Freedom: A Conversation with Jed Perl

you say that you have written your book “to release art from the stranglehold of relevance,” to challenge the notion that works of art can be “validated (or invalidated) by the extent to which they line up with (or fail to line up with) our current social and political concerns.”

Lots of other interesting stuff in the interview.

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Regarding the study of music: Addressing Classical Music’s Burnout Addiction

the institutional model of classical music education engineers us to fall in love with burnout from the very beginning. By stepping into a conservatory, we are encouraged to maintain packed-out schedules, work beyond the point of exhaustion, and have pristine social media accounts showcasing our highlight reel of repertoire in order to justify our choice in career. Even though I love what I do immensely, I have been conditioned to feel anxious when my days aren’t jam-packed as a result of what I was taught in school: that learning the notes on the page takes priority over my rest.

I didn't feel this when I was a student, but that was before social media and the unceasing pressure to be your own marketing agent and promoter.

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I was looking for fun and interesting articles about music and musicians, but I really didn't find many this week. Too much heavy thinking! So let's compensate with some listening. Let's start with a little YouTube clip that reminds me of a college seminar I took: Samuel Andreyev walks us through a Bach invention:

That's fun and interesting if you are into counterpoint, big time. Next is Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha from 1968:

Bob Dylan, "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight"? Sure, why not?

Yuja Wang: Rach One:

I think that is something for everyone?