Friday Miscellanea

“I have yet to find a genre of music I enjoy; it’s basically audible physics, waves and energized particles, and, like most sane people, I have no interest in physics.” 

― Gail Honeyman

Which is better, to my mind, than someone saying, "oh, I like all kinds of music."

* * *

For aficionados of The Simpsons: Cypress Hill to finally make ‘The Simpsons’ orchestra joke “a reality”

In the 1996 Simpsons episode Homerpalooza, Homer took his family on a road trip to an alternative rock festival Hullabalooza in a bid to prove to his children, Bart and Lisa, that he was still the cool and in touch with popular culture. However, he soon embarrassed them when he became a sideshow who had cannonballs aimed at his stomach – before proving a hit with bands and festival-goers. 

Among the likes of Smashing Pumpkins and Sonic Youth, Cypress Hill made a cameo in the show, during which they joked about performing with a classical orchestra.

There's even a clip, proving that sooner or later, reality does copy art.

* * * 

I've said a few times that the canon, however you define it as the repertoire advocated by academics, by performers or by public taste, is always in constant flux as the influence of each group waxes and wanes. Therefore, I tend to see pronouncements, by academics in particular, as being potentially just attempts to sway the dispute in their favor. Lately there seems to be an attempt to re-evaluate the most famous 20th century artist, Picasso: How good, really, was Pablo Picasso? First of all, trigger warning, is this "good" a suggestion that there are objective standards in aesthetics?

Blue Picasso, pink Picasso, cubist Picasso, society Picasso, surreal Picasso, ceramist Picasso, late Picasso. Picasso in his underwear, Picasso in a bow tie. Harlequin Picasso, bullfight Picasso, the poets’ Picasso, the GIs’ Picasso. Anti-fascist Picasso, communist Picasso, peace dove Picasso. Prankster Picasso, heartsick Picasso, lecherous Picasso.

Yes, Pablo Picasso was all over the place. He died 50 years ago this month at 91, and we’re still trying to clean up his mess.

Adam Gopnik wrote a critical essay twenty-five years ago:

One of Gopnik’s most contentious claims was that Picasso’s best work was confined to the “fifteen-year period centered on cubism, the First World War, and its immediate aftermath.” Surrounding this high period, he wrote, “was a vast sea of kitsch, an almost bottomless vulgarity of imagination, an ugliness that was not the honest Medusa’s-head ugliness of modernism but the glaring ugliness of falseness and sentimentality.” “What made cubism great,” he declared, “is not that it gave Picasso a means of self-expression, but that it acted as a barrier to self-expression — pretty much the only one he ever met.”

We might, after Philip Ewell, just say that Picasso was an above-average painter and leave it at that. But one starts to wonder, how soon will we start to ask how good, really, was Igor Stravinsky?

* * *

Headlines and titles so often over-promise: Quartet review: did four women really change the world of classical music?

The subtitle of Quartet, historian Leah Broad’s book about four UK women composers, reads boldly: How Four Women Changed the Musical World.

But I am unsure that the musical world – for Broad, classical music – was changed in any meaningful way by composers Ethel Smyth (b.1858) Rebecca Clarke (b.1886), Dorothy Howell (b.1898) and Doreen Carwithen (b.1922), however fascinating their lives and careers, and however much their music deserves to be more widely heard.

Although Broad is a passionate advocate for these women’s music, convincingly arguing that it should be heard far more, she never really explains how her chosen women might have changed their or our musical worlds – or even what changing the musical world might mean. Given the book’s title, this is a fundamental flaw.

The reviewer mentions some significant omissions, including my favorite UK woman composer Elizabeth Maconchy.

* * *

The Nation tells us about The End of the Music Business. The article gives a fairly comprehensive history of recorded sound. Favorite quote, the ever-popular one from Hunter S. Thompson: “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.” The conclusion:

No one outside of the inner corporate circles really knows how the economics of the streaming world works. It pays, but what does it pay, and to whom? Reasonably high-profile artists in many genres have not been shy about posting their meager Spotify royalty checks to social media. Many of those artists then encourage listeners to buy their music on Bandcamp as a moral choice. That’s when you know the old model is truly dead: “Buy my music as a moral choice.” The music business as we knew it lasted about a century, from 1903 to 2003.

The biggest check I ever got in my career was from my record company for copyright infringement. They settled.

* * *

We need to be grateful to Rick Beato who listens to pop music so we don't have to. In the process of listening to the top ten, he shows what a great ear he has (and how weak the songs are).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD_DoKo5Dg8

Out of the top ten songs in the world, he finds that only three of them are actual, you know, songs. He and I agree on Miley Cyrus: she is a good singer and "Flowers" is an actual song. But wow, most of this stuff isn't even bad, it's just ... nothing.

* * *

Reviewing a couple of books on lives well lived, Psyche comes to sound rather Aristotelian: A life of splendid uselessness is a life well lived

The good human life demands meaning and purpose, which cannot be won in any stable sense from things – like wealth or pleasure – that can only ever be means. Mere living might be possible under the solitary law of instrumentality; living well, however, is not. ‘The freedom from small utilities and large ones,’ Hitz observes, ‘from colourless surroundings, from the human diminishment offered in given social roles – this freedom grounds a vast variety of human possibilities.’ The Homo faber hypothesis of the early modern anthropologists and the US pragmatists was always an insufficient account of the human being: chimpanzees and orangutans use tools and weapons; ants and termites build elaborate supercities. No ape or insect, however, has been observed writing poems, philosophising or singing the blues.

Much as I appreciate Taruskin's long battle to restore music's social context, it is good to hear, now and then, about some individuals' lonely pursuit of something out of the ordinary.

* * *

An article on modernism and politics: Modernists can be monarchists. The subhead summarizes it nicely: There’s an assumption that atonalists must be anarchists, but musical radicals often have conservative politics.

To Craft — and you can almost see him shaking his bespectacled, all-American head — Stravinsky’s enduring respect for Russian royalty was literally beyond belief.

Great modernists aren’t supposed to think like that, are they? They’re meant to be radicals, revolutionaries — and in fairness, few composers have worked more diligently to present themselves in that light than Stravinsky, or found a more willing enabler than Craft. Meanwhile a profoundly conservative spirit was hiding in plain sight. I still remember my surprise when I first read that Stravinsky dedicated his Symphony in C — that brisk, brilliant deconstruction of art and emotion — “to the glory of God”. Craft witnessed him lying prostrated before the altar of a Los Angeles Russian Orthodox church for a full hour on the morning of his 68th birthday. The great musical iconoclast actually carried an ikon of Saint Gerasimus with him wherever he travelled.

 * * *

For our first envoi, the Symphony in C by Stravinsky:

Next the Suffolk Suite by Dorothy Carwithen:

And while we are in a mellow mode, here is some Brahms played by Grigory Sokolov:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb8QPgQHsag