Monday, May 1, 2023

Today's Listening

I've got a couple of unusual ones for you today. First up, the Mischa Elman Quartet that Taruskin cites as an example of how late-19th century players actually played:

To our ears the frequent portamenti just sound overdone, too much. Of course, this is why early music specialists are now setting their sights on 19th century music to adapt it as well to our modern taste. Next up an album talked about in today's New York Times: Abdul Wadud’s Cosmic Cello Music Gets Another Moment in the Sun

This leads me to mention one point Taruskin made about the nature of our modern taste: it is text-centered, hence literalistic. I can support this in my own experience. When I was making the transition, which took a couple of years, from a rock and blues guitarist to a classical guitarist there were a couple of elements. One was the shift from an aural environment where you play everything by ear, to a text oriented environment where you, basically, follow the text (though not without interpretation). While I was going through this I remember attending an evening of jazz piano which I found excessively self-indulgent. Why would I want to listen to this overlong, poorly thought-out performance? All it was, mostly, was random noodling. I was developing a love for the texts, those wonderfully mysterious books that contained an unimaginable wealth of musical ideas. So when I listen to Abdul Wadud's album, it sounds to me, mostly, like random noodling.

But lately I have been doing more random noodling of my own in connection with composing a new guitar piece: I'm trying out all sorts of things on the instrument before I write anything down. But, as a transitioned musician (heh) I do in fact write it down. Finally, let's have one of those more solid, traditional, weighty performances of Bach, done before all this music was lightened and brightened according to our latest taste. Otto Klemperer, Matthew Passion, 1961:



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