Alongside his career as a computer science professor and database software company founder, Fulton spent two decades amassing what was regarded by many as the world’s greatest collection of stringed instruments. In total he has owned 18 violins, six violas, and four cellos by makers including Antonio Stradivari; Andrea Guarneri; Guarneri’s grandson Bartolomeo Giuseppe Guarneri, known as del Gesù; and Giovanni Battista Guadagnini. These 17th- and 18th-century Italians are regarded as history’s finest luthiers, and their wares sell for millions, whether at auction or in private transactions facilitated by violin dealers.
A review of a new recording: Glenn Gould’s musical laboratory. This is Glenn Gould the composer, not the pianist and the piece is his String Quartet, op. 1. Norman Lebrecht opines:
So what are we to make of this revival by the Minguet Quartet on the eclectic German label CPO? Frankly, it’s a mess – but not an unattractive one. Gould opens with a growl of medieval groundbass, meanders into late Beethoven, swipes an indecent chunk of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht before lolloping around Bruckner’s little-known F-major quartet to no obvious conclusion. He might have empathised with Bruckner, a thoughtful loner with ideas larger than the trends of his time.
After twenty minutes, Gould reverts to the 1920s sound world of Alban Berg and Richard Strauss and stays there until he is done. The quartet, by no means uninteresting, will make a lively dinner-party game of spot the composer.
Reading that, I wonder what Lebrecht would make of my string quartet? If you stripped away the identifying bits, Gould might not even recognize that his piece is being discussed. This citing of inventory seems knowledgeable and clever, but, honestly, it is vague and generic.
* * *
Alex Ross has a new piece at The New Yorker: The Doleful Minimalism of Max Richter
The film scores of John Williams are beloved by untold millions. Philip Glass’s name is known to a good fraction of the population. Arvo Pärt’s sonic visions entrance audiences around the world. But, if cultural relevance is measured in sheer saturating ubiquity, the composer of our moment is the fifty-seven-year-old British minimalist Max Richter, who, according to his record label, Deutsche Grammophon, has produced the “most streamed classical record of all time.” That album, released in 2015, is titled “Sleep.” It lasts eight and a half hours and is designed to facilitate a full night’s slumber. Richter has also produced an extended compositional remix of “The Four Seasons,” transforming Vivaldi’s kinetic concertos into something spacey and amorphous. His customary mode, as in his soundtrack for the dystopian HBO series “The Leftovers,” is slowly unspooling, painstakingly repetitive melancholia.
Later on he mentions "the world première of Cassandra Miller’s “I cannot love without trembling,” a desolate, radiant concerto for viola and orchestra" which we linked to here a few weeks ago. We also talked about Max Richter, but that was years ago.
* * *
In a variation of the old saw "you have to be crazy to be a musician" we have: Are Music Engagement and Mental Illness Related? Lots of technical stuff there, but this quote is interesting:
Right now you are doing a study on the concept of flow while making music. What is that about?
This is actually mostly the work of Miriam Mosing. Flow is a state of ultimate concentration, and it has been associated with good mental health. We look at flow in general: both in work and in any leisure activity, not only in music making. We found that flow has a protective effect on mental health. We saw this in the sample with the monozygotic twins: the one who experiences more flow actually experiences less depression. That indicates that the reason is not overlapping genes, but that flow can be protective against mental health problems. So right now we are looking at whether therapy could tap into that: If you increase the prevalence of flow somebody experiences, might that help [fight] against depressive symptoms?
* * *
English National Opera to receive up to £24 million to support new base outside London. You know it is really hard not to equate this with paying a particularly annoying busker just to go away.
* * *
Ted Gioia takes on another jaunt into his Gnostic version of music history: How Musicians Were the First Heroes—And Their Songs a Kind of Superpower
We will encounter magical and musical chariots again in the next chapter. There we try to understand a fantastic journey described in the fragments of Parmenides, who is sometimes considered the founder of metaphysics and ontology in Western philosophy. But his sole surviving work is (as we shall see) a song about a mystical trip by chariot.
The curious thing here is that Parmenides and the other Greek pre-Socratics are not considered religious or mystical figures, but rather as the inventors of secular and scientific thinking. Yet even there, at the origin of our own logical conceptual framework—literally the birth of Western rational thought—we encounter the rhythmic propulsion of a flying chariot.
But the most useful Ted Gioia this week was this one: Spotify Gives 49 Different Names to the Same Song. Read the article and then explain to me why any serious music lover would ever use a streaming service.
* * *
So you can decide for yourself, here is an older recording of the Glenn Gould String Quartet, op. 1
Here is Max Richter's most well-known piece, On the Nature of Daylight:
Here is a piece I always wished I had taken the time to learn the Fantasia-Sonata by Joan Manén:
No comments:
Post a Comment