I have to write this ahead of time because I will be traveling all day Friday. And it's likely to be skimpy as a result. The bonus is I will be in Vancouver next week attending the premiere of my second string quartet. There might be photos and later on, a recording.
In Escaping Netflix, the On An Overgrown Path blog reviews a documentary about Alma Mahler:
That is Alma Mahler in the photo. In July 1940 she fled from unoccupied Marseille in France across the Pyrenees to neutral Spain in an escape masterminded by American Varian Fry's Emergency Rescue Committee. She escaped with the Czech writer Franz Werfel , and in her luggage were several Mahler manuscripts, among them Das Lied von der Erde and the the score of the first three movements of Bruckner's Third Symphony.
Netflix docudramas are not my thing. But I watched the first episode of the strangely titled Transatlantic as I am familiar with the story of Varian Fry on which the series is very, very, very loosely based. I will say no more about Transatlantic, except that I won't be watching the other five episodes.
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Yannick Nézet-Séguin Condemns Cell Phone Use in Concerts:
Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin has expressed his frustration with cell phones interrupting orchestral concerts, after ringtones have ruined delicate musical moments twice in as many weeks.
Nézet-Séguin and the orchestra were about one minute into the devotional third movement of Bruckner's Symphony No. 9, when a cell phone rang — breaking the orchestra's focus and the audience's absorption. Nézet-Séguin then began the movement again, only for the same thing to happen at about the same part of the music.
Frustrated, he then turned to address the audience, asking "Can we live without the phone for just one damn hour?"
A few years ago there were a flurry of these kinds of incidents, but then it seemed to go away. In retrospect that was probably due to most concerts also going away during the Covid hiatus.
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And Wenatchee the Hatchet weighs in on the new Philip Ewell book: Don Baton reviewed Phil Ewell's book and this hobbyist composer considers a few things about arguments made and not made about tonal, racial and cognitive hierarchical appeals
It's been hard to shake a sense that Baton's main interest was dismissing Ewell's conflation of hierarchical taxonomies in Schenkerian thought as unproven when a more robust counter-argument would be to point that however Schenker's views may have reflected taxonomies of racial and tonal hierarchies this is not necessarily where the theory and interpretive historical use of the theory has stayed on the one hand and, on the other, that research into cognition and the relationships between the senses and the brain suggest that hierarchical information sifting and interpretive patterns are built in to how humans see and hear. Writing music that keeps these aspects of humanity in mind can respect that memory works in hierarchical ways without being implicitly or explicitly as racist as Heinrich Schenker was.
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Alex Ross comes up with another interesting essay: Yo-Yo Ma Goes Underground with the Louisville Orchestra
In 1948, the Louisville Orchestra, which had been founded eleven years earlier, was in financial crisis. Farnsley, who had audited classes with the émigré Jewish-German musicologist Gerhard Herz, at the University of Louisville, offered a radical suggestion: Why not use some of the money that had been slated for celebrity soloists to instead commission new works? Supporting composers, Farnsley said, would be “a much greater, more lasting service to music.” More practically, he believed that such a policy would attract national press and boost the city’s profile. He even spoke of establishing a record label, which, he thought, would drum up revenue. Robert Whitney, the orchestra’s gifted and furiously hardworking young music director, endorsed the plan, although he wondered whether the audience would be able to keep up with Farnsley’s enthusiasms. The mayor, one associate reported, “doesn’t like any music that was written before 1920.”
Thus began the Louisville revolution, which riveted the classical world in the nineteen-fifties.
My good friend and colleague Paul Kling had a stint as concertmaster in Louisville.
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The (classical) Empire Strikes Back: Turbocharge philanthropy, conga to Beethoven, ditch the ukuleles: 10 ways to save classical music
6. Nurture the grassroots, from choirs to brass bands
Growing up in Cumbria, opportunities to experience live music weren’t ample but I picked up the saxophone at the Barracudas Carnival Arts Centre aged seven and I was hooked. It was a place that embraced anyone who wanted to be part of dance, music or stilt-walking. Music is a living, breathing art form and, often, once experienced never forgotten. Letting young people be the music is often an ideal starting point.As with sport, the ecosystem of our community relies on music being supported at every level – from local choirs and county orchestras to symphony orchestras and brass bands. In a fragmented world, we need these musical spaces to allow communities to come together with a shared mission and so nurture the audiences of tomorrow. Jess Gillam, saxophonist and broadcaster
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Inspired by a review by Richard Taruskin, here are some very different performances of Bach's Sonatas for viola da gamba and harpsichord. First the early music version with Anner Bylsma and Bob van Asperen.
Next the contrapuntalist analytical version with Glenn Gould and Leonard Rose. The G minor sonata for comparison starts at the 28:29 mark:
Finally a recording with Misha Maisky and Martha Argerich:
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