Friday Miscellanea

Scholar Philip Ewell continues his campaign: US music education has a history of anti-Blackness that is finally being confronted

What is considered harmony in the U.S. is based on European notions of tonality, pitch, scale, mode, key and melody.

The three composers the books most commonly represented were Germans Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven and Austrian Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

We found that of the nearly 3,000 musical examples cited in the textbooks, only 49 were written by composers who were not white and only 68 were written by composers who were not men.

I guess you could say that aesthetics has a disparate impact.

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WIGMORE HALL 2023/24 SEASON OPENS IN SEPTEMBER

Don’t miss the opening of the 2023/24 Season at Wigmore Hall this September with a spectacular week of performances to kick off a captivating season.

Acclaimed pianist Stephen Hough performs on opening night, and Mitsuko Uchida and Jonathan Biss follow shortly after in a programme of Schubert piano duets across two evenings. The extraordinary Lithuanian soprano Asmik Grigorian is sure to delight with songs from Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov, while Sir George Benjamin returns to the Hall with Ensemble Modern for a programme of 21st Century works alongside Benjamin’s own arrangement of Bach’s Canon and Fugue.

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A thoughtful consideration of the collision of art and ideology: The Conquest of Art.

Art is becoming once more what it was during the classical period, and again in the 1930s and 1940s—a dangerous, or at least delicate, concern that can’t be left to just anyone. Elites can retain unrestricted access to the great works, in this new environment; the plebes, though, should stick with diversion and consumerism—comic books, sanitized paintings, and industrialized music. In a perspective on the future, proposed as part of the Venice Biennale of 2022, curator Cecilia Alemani wrote: “This selection of 213 artists includes a majority of ‘women or artists of non-conforming gender who challenge the supposedly universal figure of the white man guided by reason.’ ” The importance of a work, on this view, is no longer tied to the talent or creativity of artists but to their gender, skin color, or sexual orientation.

Should we introduce ethnic or gender quotas into art, at the risk of denaturing it? After all, if a work of art is required only to be representative of a fraction of the population, then it is no longer a creation but an election by proportional representation. Every film, book, or opera would then automatically include a fixed percentage of minorities. We thereby confuse good intentions and talent. But talent has nothing to do with justice. To recover a certain equilibrium in the creative world entails the creation of true works of art. A bad film produced by the staunchest feminist is still a bad film. 

Read the whole thing.

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 In the annals of performance: A relaxed, inclusive ‘La Traviata’ at Seattle Opera

Going to the theater can seem like it comes with a long list of don’ts: Don’t be late, don’t be on your phone, don’t talk, and don’t allow anything to distract from the performance. To address these barriers, on May 21, Seattle Opera offered a “relaxed performance” of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera “La Traviata.” The performance invited the audience to enjoy Verdi’s music in any way that was comfortable for them: The house lights were brought down to a dim, rather than fully dark, setting, and attendees were free to talk to each other and vocalize as they pleased without fear of being “shushed” by their neighbors. Special sections of the auditorium allowed for movement and technology use, and ushers permitted audience members to exit and re-enter the theater for breaks in designated quiet spaces.

Before concluding that this was an unalloyed success, wouldn't it be interesting to hear how the performers felt about it?

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A note on the economics of music: Cradle Of Filth's Dani Filth: "Spotify are the biggest criminals in the world...we had 26 million plays last year and I got about 20 pounds"

"It's been deteriorating ever since… I think 2006 was the year that everything swapped from being comfortable for musicians — well, not necessarily comfortable; it was never comfortable.

"But [it went to] just being a lot harder with the onset of the digital age, the onset of music streaming platforms that don't pay anybody. Like Spotify are the biggest criminals in the world."

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Whew, we need some nice envois after that! Speaking of Stephen Hough and Wigmore Hall, here is a concert of Brahms from a couple of years ago with the Castalian String Quartet:

Here is the big hit from La Traviata: "Brindisi" with Pavarotti and friends.

We haven't had any Debussy for a while so here are movements from Nocturnes and Images for orchestra with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony:

Hey, at least he's not German.

Today's Listening: a late Mozart trio

 

Friday Miscellanea

 Let's start with an unusual article on the sense of hearing: The Sounds Of Invisible Worlds.

As McLuhan noted, the printing press changed human behaviors and cultural habits, and also our perceptual patterns. Oral traditions receded; visual culture became ascendant. As the written word permeated our lifeworld, the importance of the spoken word — and the use of hearing as a method for exploring and understanding the world — dwindled. 

Senses that are not cultivated tend to atrophy. Ethnographers have long commented on the seeming deafness of Western peoples — raised in a culture obsessed with vision and the written word, whose sense of hearing is less developed than peoples of other cultures. 

The painstaking work of bio-acousticians has revealed that many more species than we previously realized actually make noise. Moreover, we are realizing that many species that are vocally active are capable of conveying complex information through acoustic communication.

A good example is elephant infrasound. Elephants emit powerful, very low sound waves (well below human hearing range) that travel long distances through both forest and savannah and help herds and families coordinate behavior across vast expanses of terrain. Even more surprising are the specific signals and sounds that elephants convey for certain situations, which scientists have compiled into a dictionary with thousands of sounds. African elephants, for example, have a specific signal for honeybees. They are keen listeners too, able to distinguish between humans from tribes that hunt them and those that don’t merely by listening to their voices and discerning their dialects.

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The Guardian has an excellent piece on an unusual music festival: ‘Festivals have to be slightly different and magical’: Orkney’s St Magnus festival

The St Magnus festival was co-founded by Maxwell Davies, Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown, arts campaigner Marjorie Linklater and Norman Mitchell, music teacher and cathedral organist. Ticket sales have always been split equally between visitors and residents, but the local community was and remains at its heart, and the islands’ rich past is a tangible part of the midsummer festival, which takes in classical, contemporary and traditional music, literature and dance as well as drama. 

The festival has always positioned emerging artists, says Nicolson, who also cites Dutch pianist Nikola Meeuwsen as among the names to watch. “Sometimes I feel like it’s a bit like being a football scout. Come to my world before I can’t afford you!” he laughs. Previous performers who came at the beginning of their now stellar careers have included Sean Shibe, Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy, and a teenage Nicola Benedetti.

Contemporary music is less of a presence than it was in Maxwell Davies’s day; this year’s festival features only a single premiere, from the Scottish composer Pàdruig Morrison. “Max’s music comes and goes from the programming when it’s appropriate,” says Nicolson. “I want to do things that aren’t just a token throw in; things that aren’t done very often, such as the Medium that was performed last year, a 50-minute unaccompanied monodrama for soprano. It’s an extraordinary and fascinating piece but very rarely done.”

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Two good pieces in The Guardian this week: ‘Extraordinary historical jewels’: the cantatas of Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre

Born in Paris in 1665, Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre was a musical prodigy, a talented singer and harpsichordist. She was presented to Louis XIV at Versailles as a teenager, and taken under the wing of his mistress Madame de Montespan. Lauded by the elite, her opera Céphale et Procris (1694) was the first ever by a woman to be performed at the Paris Opera. But most remarkably of all, even though it wasn’t a success, she continued to compose and sustained a professional career into middle age and widowhood. In the new century, she experimented with new forms such as the sonata and the cantata, becoming riskier and more distinctive in her style. She remained among the most respected of French composers until her death in 1729 and was included in guides to the best music for the remainder of the 18th century, before disappearing from view.

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From the CBC: Is Taylor Swift saving the economy? I remember how shocked I was a decade or so ago, to read that a musician that I, at the time, had never heard of was a billionaire. This was Jay-Z and it was in the Wall Street Journal. Previously I had only been aware of Paul McCartney in the billionaire club and certainly he deserved it. But Jay-Z? I had never even heard the name, let alone the music. But it is more and more amazing what a large place music seems to occupy in the economy.

The online research group QuestionPro crunched the numbers and found the Eras Tour will generate billions of dollars in economic activity in the United States. 

"If the current spending pace continues through the end of the tour, the Eras Tour will have generated an estimated $5 billion [US] in economic impact, more than the gross domestic product of 50 countries," QuestionPro wrote in a news release.

Plus, over at the New York Times, Paul Krugman weighs in: Is Taylor Swift Underpaid?

Still, there are many talented artists. Why do a few earn so much? There’s a standard economic theory about that, laid out in a famous paper by the economist Sherwin Rosen, “The Economics of Superstars.” Rosen argued that modern technology meant that the potential reach of performers was much larger than it had been when live performance was the only way to entertain an audience, so that a musician (or, his example, a comedian) who was, or was perceived to be, even a bit better than his or her rivals could earn large sums by performing on mass media, selling records, and so on.

But on the surface, that’s not what’s happening with Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. They’re making huge sums not mainly from record or streaming royalties but from concerts — which is, by the way, normal. One of the lessons I learned from Alan Krueger is that musicians have always made their money mainly by touring; this was true even during the CD era, when record companies were making money hand over fist but passing very little on to the artists. It’s even more true now, in this age of streaming.

But there are live performances, and then there are live performances; ticket sales for each of Swift’s concerts are expected to be $11 million to $12 million.

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Kronos Quartet spreads the word for contemporary music to a new generation of performers

The idea, according to founding first violinist and Artistic Director David Harrington, was to commission 50 quartets from a variety of composers, and make those easily accessible, free of charge, to anyone who wanted to tackle them.

The project, announced in 2015, has now been completed, creating a broad and eclectic repertoire by composers with wildly different stylistic approaches. The quartet’s annual three-day festival, scheduled for Thursday through Saturday, June 22-24, at SFJazz, will be devoted to the fruits of the project.

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More on the business of music: 30 years ago, Prince changed the way artists negotiate with the music industry

“While he was still being paid very generously by Warner Brothers, the conditions of that contract, especially as it pertained to how and when and why he could release his music, that those conditions had become kind of onerous,” Piepenbring said. “He felt that he no longer had control over his songs.” 

“He kind of very famously said that ‘if you don’t own your masters, then your masters own you,’ ” said writer and tech entrepreneur Anil Dash, who’s written about Prince. “At the time when he changed his name, he took to shortly thereafter writing the word slave on his face, which is a pretty profound statement for a Black artist to make.”

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Our first envoi should be something by longtime Orkney resident Peter Maxwell Davies.

Here is a cantata by Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre:

Finally, a little music from the Kronos Quartet:

Bits and Pieces

I was FaceTiming with a German friend and she asked "So what's the deal with American politics?" My answer: "it's so crazy I avoid it by listening to 15th century music."

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The three stages of being an expat:

1. Wow, this is a really different culture. I have to try and adapt.
2. This is a cool place to live, you should come down for a visit.
3. Nah, don't bother, it's not as nice as you think, you should stay where you are, we are getting crowded...

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Reading about post-modernism I can certainly see the point of the criticism of abstract reason and the interest in collective identity and the subjectivity of truth. But what gives me pause is the realization of just how this is going to be--and has been--put to practical use by unscrupulous politicians. Perhaps we need a post-post-modernism.

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Some pretty good drumming...

Franco-Flemish Record Review, part 2

The second disc in this box of thirty-four is also by the Ensemble Gilles Binchois and it contains the music that accompanied a very famous European banquet "Le Banquet du Voeu" of 1454, known in English as the "Feast of the Pheasant." Here is a contemporary painting of some of the participants.

Click to enlarge

Just a few months before, in 1453, the Ottoman Empire had finally conquered the Byzantine Empire, whose last remaining territory was the capital of Constantinople. This was the end of the Eastern Roman Empire and a major turning point in the history of Western Europe as scholars from Constantinople, Greek-speaking, brought a wealth of ancient manuscripts to the West, one of the sparks that initiated the Renaissance in Northern Italy. At the time, the great cathedral in Constantinople, the Hagia Sophia, was the largest church in Christendom and would be until the completion of the Seville Cathedral in 1520.

The Banquet of the Pheasant, given by Philip the Good of Burgundy, was to promote a crusade against the Turks. As the time of crusades was rather over, it never took place. But the banquet remains one of the famous ones in European history and there are a number of accounts of it, including lists of the music which included anonymous pieces as well as music by Guillaume Duffy, Gilles Binchois, and several others. Dufay and Binchois were the most-represented.

Honestly, the historical context is slightly more interesting than the music on this disc, but it is entertainingly diverse and well-played. We even get a cornemuse solo. The recording dates from 1991.

Disc 3 is titled "Dufay and Binchois: The Art of Courtly Love, the Court of Burgundy." The performers are The Early Music Consort of London, the first generation of specialist performers and include David Munro, James Bowman, Alan Lumsden, James Tyler, and Christopher Hogwood along with many others! It kicks off with some jolly springtime music by Dufay. Later on we get the motet Lamentation Sanctae Matris Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, also by Dufay, lamenting the loss of the Hagia Sophia. I suspect you could write quite a clever historical novel called The Two Churches about the Hagia Sophia and the Duomo of Florence, turning points in the 15th century. Also on the disc are some lovely chansons and ballades by Binchois. For contrast there are also two anonymous basse danses.

The recording dates from 1973 and was recorded at Abbey Road.

Here is the Dufay Lamentatio from the disc:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpKSnqtfd0A

Premiere of String Quartet No. 2 "Landscapes"

This is always the most difficult moment for me with a new piece. I have spent the time, often quite a long time, composing and re-composing; we have had the premiere and there is a recording, but now, I just don't know what to think of the piece. I need a lot of distance! So I offer the recording to you for your thoughts...

I may try and do a better one later on, but this is my first stab at putting together a little video of the premiere of the String Quartet No. 2 that took place in Vancouver on May 27 of this year. My deepest thanks to the Pro Nova Ensemble who put in a lot of work and did a fine job of bringing the piece to life. And, of course, to the audiences who attended the three concerts (the two others were May 21 and 25). It was a real privilege to get to hear this piece. I started composing it three years ago, but the original plans were thrown awry by the Covid epidemic. Many thanks also to Richard Volet who made the journey over from Victoria just to record this concert.

The members of the Pro Nova Ensemble are:

• Hyunsil Lucia Roh (violin)
• Ju Dee Ang (violin)
• Barbara Irschick (viola)
• Shin-Jung Nam (cello)

The piece is in three movements:

1. Mountain with Birdsong
2. Moments in the Forest
3. The Surrounding Ocean

The first movement I re-wrote a few times before it came together. It fuses together birdsong and elements from Asian and Russian music. At the end the movement simply dissolves. The second movement is in moment form and consists of a lot of tiny moments that are not co-ordinated in any way but just occur. They are framed by a chord progression. The last movement captures the dynamic and energy of the ocean and serves as a traditional kind of finale.

I think the recording captures the performance quite well. At the beginning of the second movement a loud motorcycle went by, but it seemed almost to fit in. I have only rudimentary skills with iMovie. I have just put some photos and a couple of short video clips over the recording to give you a bit of a taste of the experience from my point of view. The opening panorama is of the water reservoir in North Vancouver. There is a photo from the last rehearsal which I attended. Most of the other photos are from the second concert, in a cultural centre on the water in West Vancouver.

Please let me know your thoughts and comments on the music.

 

Retro Record Review

Dual portrait of Dufay and Binchois

Some things that I used to do fairly regularly that I do much less often is micro-reviews of pop music, little essays on music theory and "retro record reviews." The latter included things like a review of several recordings of the Bach Goldberg Variations on harpsichord, released over a few decades. I think the winner there was Trevor Pinnock, though Scott Ross came in very high. The reason for this was that I just got tired of all the fawning over the Glenn Gould recordings and thought these other folks should get some credit.

I like the idea of talking about recordings that may be decades old, but still have much to offer--probably more than current recordings which are the only ones that get reviewed these days. Though this may be changing as I suspect that we are entering a period in which no recordings get reviewed except for the occasional puff piece on the latest pop diva--which is rarely about the music.

So I'm going to review a nice box of recordings I just started listening to. I can't promise to offer anything like the depth of musicological expertise that the late Richard Taruskin brought to the table in his remarkable reviews of a variety of "early music" recordings (that actually extended up to Norrington's Beethoven). But I will do my best. Here is the recording:

First let's clear away some false assumptions: no, this is not some new and laudable record company (Warner Classics in this case) project to offer us a bargain box of "Josquin and the Franco-Flemish School"--34 CDs for $50, though that is what we get. The liner notes attribute the 2021 release to the 500th anniversary of the death of Joaquin. But the truth is that this is a heterogenous collection of recordings by various ensembles recorded over much of the history of early music in the 20th century from the early recording of Adrian Willaert by the Ensemble Vocal de Bruxelles in 1970 and the 1965 recording of Pierre de la Rue by the Capella Antiqua München to the Hilliard Ensemble's recording of the same composer in 1990 and the Ensemble Gilles Binchois recording of the named composer in 2000. Most of the recordings date from the 1980s by groups including the Hilliard Ensemble, the Early Music Consort of London and many others.

It goes without saying that the technical standards are good and many of the older recordings have been remastered so yes, you can go ahead and purchase the box in confidence. The problematic aspect, as Taruskin has observed in many places, is that the conceptual ideology of the performance practice has seen enormous development over those fifty years. But I will simply sidestep that and refer you to the relevant volume Text & Act by Taruskin.

What I will do is just offer my subjective reception on listening to the discs. Why did I purchase the box? I was just so sick of the never-ending articles on AI and music and the Taylor Swift tour that I felt the need for a real musical grounding and where better than the glorious music of the 15th and 16th centuries. The liner notes comment:

Architecture, sculpture, painting and music all benefited from Burgundian ambition and together disseminated a new vision of art throughout Europe as the continent moved into the era of humanism and the Renaissance. Henceforth, mankind would be seen as the peak of Divine Creation, and it was the duty of art to glorify both human intelligence and its application to the creative act, while also seeking to communicate with the greatest number of people--this led to the development of a new kind of polyphonic song designed for private practice and adapted to that purpose.

Particularly outstanding examples of the astonishing musical development of human intelligence are pieces like Nuper rosarum flores by Guillaume Duffy that mirrors structural aspects of the Florentine Duomo into the music and the Missa prolationum by Johannes Ockeghem that exhibits feats of meter and subdivision that I doubt have ever been surpassed.

But a lot of the discs contain secular song, a genre that has been around for millennia and is still around today--Thanks, Taylor! The first disc is devoted to chansons mostly in rondeau form by Gilles Binchois and is a fairly recent 1997 recording by the Ensemble Gilles Binchois. To a modern listener the music is preternaturally calm, arriving at a cadence every ten to twenty seconds. These often sound rather angular to our ears due to the frequent use of the Landini cadence where the interval of a sixth falls to a fifth before opening out to an octave. The ensemble uses voices with instruments----the leader, Dominique Vellard is a lutenist as well as a singer and we hear a lot of lute accompaniments. The highlight is the setting of the fine poem of Christine de Pisan (1364-1430) Dueil angoisseus as a ballade. Courtly love is the main theme of the texts though they also include celebrations of nature and the return of spring.

Ending today with the recording of Dueil angoisseus which we can find on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_snuhaYa-J4

I will take up more of the discs in future posts.

Music that Transcends Its Genre

Putting up "Hey Jude" in my miscellanea reminds me that there are a few, very unusual, pieces that actually transcend their genre (form, structure, whatever). "Hey Jude" is a perfect example. It starts off as a normal pop song in Paul's ballad style, but then arrives at a coda that just goes on and on. I believe it is still the longest song ever to have been a number one hit. It is a three minute song with a four minute coda repeating the "na-na-na" refrain over and over.

Beethoven provides us with two examples, both similar in that the last movement is so extended that it tends to overpower the structure--just like "Hey Jude." The first example is the original last movement to the String Quartet op. 130 which was so poorly received by his publisher that he was compelled to write a shorter, more conventional finale and the original last movement was published separately as the Grosse Fuge op. 133. Nowadays quartets might choose either movement to end the quartet. The Grosse Fuge is a. great, shaggy dog, of a fugue unlike any written by anyone else and it dwarfs the quartet it was the original finale to.

And here is the Quatuor Ebène with the op. 130 Quartet with the fugue as the finale.

The other example from Beethoven is, of course, the last movement to the Symphony No. 9 that has been a huge success since its premiere. Mind you, not everyone agrees, but audiences certainly do. Beethoven broke the mold of the classical symphony by, again, turning the last movement, typically a dance-like finale, into a huge cantata with chorus and soloists in multiple sections. Attempting to top this achievement gave most Romantic period symphony composers severe anxiety!

Are there any other examples where a composer writes a last movement that simply outgrows its form entirely? Oh yes, another very famous one, the last movement of the Partita for Violin No. 2 in D minor is the famous Chaconne. It is as long as the other four movements put together and, with some sets of variations aside, is the longest single instrumental movement of the Baroque era.

I have particular fondness for this piece as it is the only one of the genre-transgenders that I can play on my instrument.

These are all that I can think of right now, though there are some near-misses. All these examples share being the end section or movement of a larger work the rest of which is fairly conventional which they entirely transcend and dwarf. In the 20th and 21st centuries we might find other examples, but they tend not to be part of more conventional works so don't quite fit the pattern. One other I might be tempted to add is the finale to the Symphony No.. 41 by Mozart with, while not very much longer, certainly exceeds the bounds of a symphonic finale in other ways.

Let me know if you think of other examples.

Friday Miscellanea

I hate to harsh your mellow, but this has to be the musical atrocity of the week: MusicGen: Simple and Controllable Music Generation. I suspect we need a new definition of "music" specifically so we can warn one another about things like this.

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Here is some more technology: What Happens When A.I. Enters the Concert Hall

Isaac Io Schankler, a composer and music professor at Cal Poly Pomona, conceived the performance and joined Wang onstage to monitor and manipulate Realtime Audio Variational autoEncoder, or R.A.V.E., the neural audio synthesis algorithm that modeled Wang’s voice.

R.A.V.E. is an example of machine learning, a specific category of artificial intelligence technology that musicians have experimented with since the 1990s — but that now is defined by rapid development, the arrival of publicly available, A.I.-powered music tools and the dominating influence of high-profile initiatives by large tech companies.

This reminded me of some of the experiments decades ago at the Pompidou Center in Paris that Pierre Boulez was involved with and indeed, that seems to be in the DNA:

Antoine Caillon developed R.A.V.E. in 2021, during his graduate studies at IRCAM, the institute founded by the composer Pierre Boulez in Paris. “R.A.V.E.’s goal is to reconstruct its input,” he said. “The model compresses the audio signal it receives and tries to extract the sound’s salient features in order to resynthesize it properly.”

I just don't see what it has to do with musical expression.

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These stories are everywhere: Twelve Brutal Truths about AI Music

(2) Dead musicians will come back to life.

I don’t think the music business has fully grasped the zombie angle. The potential profitability is huge. Just imagine a dead musician or dead band working for you—they never complain or go on drunken sprees. They just churn out songs on demand for every occasion.

A few goofy YouTube videos have played around with the concept—making an AI John Lennon sing a David Bowie song, for example. These smell like gimmicks right now. But sometimes gimmicks get turned into major trends.

Sadly, probably not the ones we would like to come back to life.

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About now we desperately need a FUN clip:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kAfB0YCemxo

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Even the Beatles are jumping on the AI bandwagon: The Beatles Come Together for ‘Last Record’ Using AI, Paul McCartney Says

McCartney said Hollywood director Peter Jackson, who directed the 2021 documentary epic “The Beatles: Get Back,” used AI technology to isolate the voice of John Lennon from an old demo tape.

“He was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropy little bit of cassette where it had John’s voice and a piano,” McCartney said. “We were able to take John’s voice and make it pure through AI and you were able to mix the record as you would normally do.”

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Finally, a non-AI story: Revisiting a Kaija Saariaho Opera Days After Her Death

The composer Kaija Saariaho, who died earlier this month at 70, spent much of her career expecting not to write an opera. She saw it as a dusty art form, she once said, and couldn’t picture translating her sound world of slow, subtle harmonic changes into melodies and arias.

A pair of directors changed her mind. In the early 1990s she saw Patrice Chéreau’s staging of “Wozzeck” in Paris and Peter Sellars’s production of “Saint François d’Assise” at the Salzburg Festival — experiences that, she later said, “opened my mind to what can be done by telling a story with music.”

Saariaho’s first opera, “L’Amour de Loin,” an ethereal allegory of medieval love, premiered at Salzburg in 2000 and quickly became her most famous work. Even so, she didn’t plan to compose another.

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 And it seems like Saariaho's week as Alex Ross delivers another big piece at The New Yorker: The Sonic Signatures of Salvatore Sciarrino and Kaija Saariaho. First, Sciarrino:

The Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino, whose austerely sensuous opera “Venere e Adone” had its première on May 28th, at Staatsoper Hamburg, has long possessed his own inviolable sonic world. Born in Palermo, Sicily, in 1947, he is largely self-taught as a composer and at the age of fifteen was already winning notice at Italian new-music festivals. One of his earliest published scores, the Sonata for Two Pianos, from 1966, begins with softly sweeping gestures across the white keys, like the rapid strokes of a superfine brush. In keeping with the hectic spirit of the nineteen-sixties, Sciarrino dissolved conventional classical forms into atomized activity, but his exquisite touch, his lepidopterist’s regard for the slightest fluttering sound, set him apart from his thunderous avant-garde colleagues. Five decades on, he remains a musical loner, tending his own strange garden.

And Saariaho:

Saariaho shared with Sciarrino a feeling for music as a landscape seething with natural activity. But, in contrast to Sciarrino’s sparseness and dryness, Saariaho unleashed radically beautiful floods of tone. I remember my first encounter, in 1993, with her early orchestral masterpiece “Du Cristal,” which begins with a mountainous eight-note chord spread across many octaves, the notes C, D, and G-flat shining in the brass like a snowcap lit by the sun. At the close of the twentieth century, Saariaho revealed how much elemental drama remains in the realm of harmony: dissonance becomes a molten mass from which new tonalities are forged. That same organic majesty elevates her first opera, “L’Amour de Loin,” which arrived at the Met in 2016 and helped usher in a new age for contemporary fare at the house.

Nothing wrong with Alex Ross' prose!

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I am getting really tired of these folks. BREAKING: CLIMATE PROTESTERS DISRUPT GLYNDEBOURNE

‘Just Stop Oil just let off a glitter cannon in the front row of Glyndebourne Dialogues des Carmelites. Halted performance. (They were) rapidly removed by security. Torrent of boos and shouts of “get out” from audience.

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I offer this for two reasons: to avoid yet another story about AI and because Portland really needs some positive news. Mendelssohn’s bar is demystifying classical music with cocktails and Operaoke

Operatic voices reverberate throughout a quaint bar on North Mississippi Avenue — a typical Tuesday night for the musical regulars that frequent Mendelssohn’s, Portland’s one-of-a-kind classical music-themed bar.

Tucked in the bustling Boise neighborhood, Mendelssohn’s has become a gathering place for Portland’s musicians to sip on themed drinks, sing ballads from the high stage and meet other people interested in classical music.

Now for some groovy envois. First an instrumental piece by Kaija Saariaho:

Next that early piece by Salvatore Sciarrino, the Sonata for Two Pianos (1966)

And, inevitably, Hey Jude, performed by the world's greatest tearoom orchestra. Stick with it, the real song starts 51 seconds in:

Trip Retrospective

The Granville Street Bridge viewed from
the Granville Island Market in Vancouver

I'm about to prepare a video to go with the live recording of my String Quartet No. 2, premiered in three concerts in Vancouver at the end of May, so this seemed a good time to put up a post about the trip in general. As in my last trip, to Germany last summer, the travel itself was not at all pleasant. No general lessons there, it just seems that travel is more and more onerous.

But being in Vancouver, and briefly in Victoria, was very pleasant indeed. I lived a large portion of my life there, mostly on Vancouver Island, and did a great deal of performing both live and on the CBC in Vancouver. It was a treat to reconnect with some family members and with some old friends. I am still in touch with high-school friends and with a couple of friends from my music career in the area.

It was particularly great to reconnect with Richard Volet, a very fine flute player with whom I did very many performances and, until he retired a couple of years ago, was the principle flute with the Victoria Symphony. Now he is a gifted recording engineer as you will hear in the quartet recording which he did.

It was more sobering to have lunch with Alexander Dunn, the guitarist who took over my teaching jobs in Victoria when I left in 1990. He stepped into the sessional lecturer job at the University of Victoria and the head of the guitar department at the Victoria Conservatory of Music. When I left there were eight undergraduate guitar majors at the university and a host of students at the conservatory. I don't recall exactly, but I think we had four or five teachers other than myself. From what I have seen, Alex did a superb job of raising the technical standards at the university, founding a guitar society, and bringing in many great players for concerts and master classes. Alas, Victoria has not treated him as kindly.

I don't want to reveal any confidences, but the situation today is that the university has squeezed the guitar contingent down to three students and, as the position remains a sessional lecturer, the pay is correspondingly less. The situation in the conservatory is far worse. Back when I was there, it was ruled by the husband and wife team of Robin and Winnifred Wood, virtuoso pianists who trained in London. The standards in piano and string performance were high and the focus was entirely on classical music. Now, as I mentioned in a post last year, the conservatory seems to have swung around into being a community music school focussed on popular music. I guess that's ok, but it sure is not attracting any serious young classical students. Again, the pay situation for a classical guitarist there is dire.

I have the greatest sympathy for the situation that Alex finds himself in. I asked him if he envisioned still being in Victoria when he took over the jobs over thirty years ago and he looked at me with a frozen expression and said "I've been trying the leave the whole time!" Well, yes, that was my feeling as well, but I left after twelve years.

So what was wrong with living in beautiful, idyllic Victoria? And indeed it is, both beautiful and idyllic. I think the problem comes back to what we might call the aesthetic values of the society and to get into that, I will have to go back a few years.

Way back in 1973 when I was planning my trip to Spain to study with José Tomás I was applying for my first Canadian passport and needed a guarantor. I didn't have any connections with anyone in the Church so I headed up to the university. It was the summer so lots of people were not there, but the secretary was embarrassed to discover that, of the few professors available, none were actually Canadian. A guarantor has to be a Canadian citizen and of some position in society: pastor, professor, etc. Yes, the music department at the University of Victoria was, in those early days, largely peopled by Americans (and a few Czechs) from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY. This is probably why the UVic music department is also called the "School of Music."

Without getting bogged down in details, the musical DNA of the school was graven in stone early on: the focus will be on the orchestra and the training of orchestral musicians. Things like early music, composition, and ethnomusicology would have to take a back seat, as would guitar of course. My getting hired to found the guitar program was a bit of an accident as the then chair of the department, Paul Kling, was a violin virtuoso who rather liked the guitar. We played quite a few concerts together. Alas, his successor was a careerist who hired other careerists and the long term plan of the school was never to include a tenure-track position for guitar even though there was one for an oboist. She had three students, rarely performed, but was an assistant professor with tenure. I remained a sessional lecturer and would always be one even though I had eight students, held a weekly master class, and did innumerable concerts (the only time the CBC came to the school of music was to record my concerts). Unfortunately I did not have the political skills back then to leverage this into a better position.

Looking into this unpromising future was what finally compelled me to leave and move to Montreal where I found it also extremely difficult to develop my career, though for different reasons.

That was probably too much detail! The general truth is that Canada, especially on the West Coast, does not care very much for music though there are certainly pockets of activity that contradict this. The winery and artisanal brewing industries are booming but classical music is moribund. This is probably the case in many places in the world outside of Europe. Early in my career I should have had the good sense to relocate to Europe.

My String Quartet No. 2 which I will be posting very soon, is a kind of farewell to the beautiful surroundings of Vancouver Island. Here is a photo from my flight to Victoria:

Friday Miscellanea

Great article in The Guardian about photos that Paul took during Beatlemania: ‘Suddenly, we were in Wonderland’: Paul McCartney on his lost photos of Beatlemania.

How it looked from their perspective

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Yo-Yo Ma offers cello support!

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The weird times we live in! This is the big music story this morning: How Three Taylor Swift Fans Are Sticking It to Ticket Resellers

Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour has created a torrid resale market, with nosebleed seats listed on StubHub for more than $1,000. While scalpers try to turn a profit on the musical event of the summer, three Swifties are working to get tickets to fans at face value.

Through their Twitter account @ErasTourResell, Courtney Johnston, 25, Channette Garay, 24, and Angel Richards, 27, say they have connected more than 3,000 people with tickets to Swift’s shows. Their Robin Hood-like efforts come amid attempts to curb what some lawmakers describe as a monopoly over ticket sales in the U.S. After the Ticketmaster presale for Swift’s stadium tour saw unprecedented demand, many fans are still looking for last-minute seats. But on the secondary market, they have faced staggering prices, canceled orders and fake tickets.

There was no such thing as a billionaire musician until the last few decades. In the past even millionaire musicians were passing rare--one example is Gioachino Rossini who wrote some forty hugely successful operas and retired at age thirty-seven. He was probably a millionaire in today's currency. Popular music brought us a few millionaires (and a lot more who died poor!), but the first billionaire musician was probably Paul McCartney. He was followed by a host of others: Kanye West, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Rihanna, not to mention a bunch of "hundred-millionaires" like Drake. It seems we are on the verge of a musician becoming a billionaire after one tour! Yes, Taylor Swift, who was worth some $570 million in December and the way the tour is going, will likely be a billionaire any month now.

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And while we are on pop music, here is a look at its earthier (seamier) side: An Anthropologist of Filth. Chuck Berry was a harbinger of a certain kind of contemporary pop artist:

It was his cousin Harry who introduced him, as a teenager, to the joys of photography (and much more besides: chemistry, rockets, astronomy, hypnotism). Harry “provided a conduit of science and rational thought to Chuck, plus also plenty of dirty pictures.” At this point we hear an ominous organ note on the soundtrack: “Over the years, Berry would amass a vast collection of cameras, video monitors, darkroom technology, and assorted recording devices.” Even after the success of “Maybellene,” his personal business cards read charles berry, photographer. In tandem, Berry developed what might be termed an interest in, shall we say, the wilder shores of love. You get the impression that music was never really the place where he lost, found, or explored himself and his deepest desires. That place existed in the center of a Venn diagram whose twin cheeks were sex and tech.

Read the whole thing for a fascinating look at all sides of Chuck Berry.

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Further on the "weird times" meme: BANK GETS ALL TANGLED UP IN BACH. This is the note that violinist Viktoria Mullova got from her bank regarding a payment for use of a Bach recording:

Hello Viktoria,

We've suspended transfer 709043505 for a sanctions review.

Please send us the following information:

1. A detailed reason for this transfer. 2. What does reference "Nr. 2023/40013 / 17.5.2023, Bach, 6 Solo

Sonatas Partitas/2308100857" refer to? If the "Bach" is related to a person - send us their full legal name, date of birth, and the country they live in. If the "Bach" is related to a business - send us their full registered name and address. a valid website and any invoice if they have one. If we don't get this information, we may have to reject or block this transfer.

Bear in mind it can take up to 7 days to check your reply.

And here was her reply:

Hello, Thanks for taking care of this serious problem. The detailed reason for this transfer is that I am a musician and am being paid for the use of a recording of mine. The reference refers to exactly which recording they used (please see my website viktoriamullova.com)

And in answer to your other question:

Full legal name: Kapellmeister Herr Johann Sebastian Bach

Date of Birth: March 31st, 1685 (probably best not to try and track him down)

Country of residence: Ancient Thuringia (now known as Germany)

With best wishes

Viktoria Mullova 

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I'm not sure what to make of articles like these: AI Could Usher in a New Era of Music. Will It Suck? I mean, I'm pretty sure the answer is yes because I think most music "sucks" to use the vernacular. I have been trying to get a sense of the music of Taylor Swift recently, but I find it so insipid I can't even listen to it.

Ever since it launched in April, it’s been aggregating a controversial new musical … thing: songs created with artificial intelligence tools that mimic, with chilling accuracy, mainstream stars like Drake and Kanye West. The conversation around AI music has largely been frenzied and shot through with hand-wringing over What It All Means and What It All Portends.

My reaction to reading something like this is go to Amazon and buy this: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B092PG7WYT/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

34 discs of Josquin and other members of the Franco-Flemish school that will enable me to avoid thinking about Taylor Swift and AI for a while

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Here is another weird story: An S.F. Safeway is annoying its neighbors by blaring classical music. Here’s why

“Since February, live classical music has been played from the unit to deter loitering,” said Safeway spokesperson Wendy Gutshall. “This is a common industry practice. As an ongoing effort we monitor the volume level of the unit and adjust where necessary.”  

As to why the volume was cranked up over the past weekend, Gutshall did not respond. Nor did she explain the choice of classical music, as opposed to, say, heavy metal or hard rock. In Australia, some stores blast Barry Manilow to deter loitering.

Sam Dodge, director of street response coordination in the S.F. Department of Emergency Management, said he had heard classical music being played to deter loitering at the now-closed Burger King at Market and Grove streets and at other Safeway parking lots throughout the Bay Area.

“It is a rather common practice. I don’t know why,” he said. “I find classical music soothing.”

Lots of questions come to mind: what "classical" music was being played, exactly? And are corporations simply exempt from noise abatement laws? Also, how could anyone live in a place like that?

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Finally, with a sigh of relief, we get to the envoi section for today. I guess Yo-Yo Ma playing the Cello Suite No. 1 by Bach is a logical choice. I like that this is the "official video." 

Rossini, Overture to The Barber of Seville:

And here is one of the pieces recorded in the box of Franco-Flemish music:

Have a nice weekend!

The Harmony of Ted

Of all the popular and scholarly writers on music, the one that tends to irritate me the most is...

....wait for it...

...no, not Norman Lebrecht...

it's Ted Gioia.

It's partly because he is so darned prolific, tossing off a thousand or more word essay every couple of days. And yeah, I could do that too if I didn't have a lot of other things to do, plus, laziness.

But it's mostly because while he is so deeply mistaken on anything having to do with music history, he is also utterly self-assured about it with no hint of the awareness that his knowledge might be a bit off-kilter. I guess that is a valuable quality to have when you are preparing acres of click-bait, but want to appear as a wise oracle. Sigh.

Ok, let's take a run at his latest effort: Is There Such a Thing as Western Harmony? That really captures the Ted Method which seems very similar to the approach of many YouTubers. Make a flat, challenging, controversial statement that is only controversial to people who are unacquainted with the topic. Here are some similar titles from YouTube: "How The Beatles wrote their most ambitious song," "The greatest 30 seconds of Classical Music," "Top 10 metal moments in classical music," "HOW TO READ MUSIC IN 15 MINUTES," "The string Quartet explained in less than 5 minutes," and so on and on.

Mr. Gioia operates on a higher level, of course, he does not purport to explain harmony in three minutes or less. Instead of promising something impossible in a jiffy, he takes a well-established historical fact and shows how roguishly cool he is by calling it into question. And he does it by an age-old technique named after those clever Greeks: sophistry: "A plausible but misleading or fallacious argument."

He starts by muddying the water by throwing out the absurd statement "After all, how can anybody own harmony?" This is fiendishly clever and misleading at the same time. No-one is claiming to "own" harmony, but it opens the door to the possibility of attacking the adjacent claim that harmony, in the sense we understand it today, did indeed originate with that clan of horrid reprobates Dead White Males of Western Europe, hereinafter abbreviated to DWMWE.

Here's how he puts it:

I’m aware that much of our theorizing about harmony came out of Europe. But what does that really mean? European music itself originated from intense cultural intermixing—including elements from outside the Western world.

He is referencing, without mentioning, the work of Martin Bernal in Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Well, sure there were a lot of threads of influence from Egypt and other Middle Eastern civilizations that found their way into Greek culture. A while back I mentioned how the form of the classical pillar and capital came originally from Egypt. But failing to notice that the Greeks transcended their influences in every possible way is a peculiar kind of intellectual failing.

He follows this up with "The birth of so-called Western culture is the ultimate case study in diversity." Which is a brilliant misreading of cultural history. Western culture, including Western harmony, is anything but a case study in diversity, instead it is an example of focus and elimination of extraneous elements. For example, the use of complex microtones tends to interfere with the development of harmonic clarity so Western music went to great lengths to develop an efficient tuning system that would enable modulation. Exactly the opposite happened in classical Indian music where harmony was reduced to an octave-fifth drone in order to enable more melodic complexity and a variety of microtones. Oh, and that "so-called" is the perfect weasel expression. Beware the sneering shibboleth!

Reading this "It’s no coincidence that the Greeks named their musical modes after a range of ethnic and national groups—Lydians, Phrygians, Dorians, etc.—some of them disempowered and enslaved." I don't want to read any further. How did he managed to drag "disempowered and enslaved" into this discussion?

And in fact, I am going to stop there. Life is too short to be reading Ted Gioia's travesties of music history.

Friday Miscellanea

How Winning (or Losing) a Grammy Changes the Music Artists Make:

We found that after winning a Grammy, artists tend to release music that deviates stylistically from their own previous work, as well as from other artists in their genre. Nominees who lose do the opposite—their subsequent albums trend toward the mainstream. We think this happens because winning a Grammy grants an artist more leverage to pursue their personal artistic inclinations. Nonwinners, however, might interpret their loss as a negative signal about how their artistic choices deviated from the norm, and thus feel more bound to conventions of their genre.

I think it is safe to say that not winning--not even being nominated for--a Grammy has had no significant effect on my style or productivity.

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The latest from Norman Lebrecht: Stravinsky’s reputation is in freefal:

Ernst Roth was absolutely right that the musical landscape would change after Stravinsky’s death, but not in the way he lamented. Stravinsky had so overplayed the Great Composer role that the title fell into disuse. There has never been another Great. Instead, we have enjoyed half a century of fine composers from A to Z, John Adams to Hans Zimmer, without distractions of historical magnitude.

I once had an all-night argument through the streets of Rotterdam with the conductor Valery Gergiev as to which was the better composer, Stravinsky or Prokofiev. As dawn broke, I conceded that Prokofiev had left us more works of lasting importance. Stravinsky, formerly the Great Composer, was a distant second best.

The difference between criticism and yellow journalism is pretty well illustrated by this piece. Lebrecht misses no opportunity to smear the reputation of Stravinsky through well-chosen put-downs:

His neo-classicism is derivative, his late-onset serialism all but unlistenable. Middle-to-late Stravinsky works are often a contrivance to cover up loss of invention.

There are a host of other examples. Read the whole thing. Is any evidence of any kind offered to support this scurrilous attack? Not at all--it is really all just click-bait.

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The one thing that Europe has over North American that makes high culture so much more of a dynamic force in society is its immense depth of cultural capital. Sadly, this may now be threatened: The Florence opera house to sell its vast archive to avoid closure.

The Maggio Musicale in Florence may sell off its large archive in a desperate attempt to find €8.5m by July, part of a huge debt left behind after Alexander Pereira resigned last February. Without this sum the company – that has seen singers from Beniamino Gigli to Maria Callas to Cecilia Bartoli on its stages – risks closure, putting its 300-strong workforce out of work.

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After A $3.7 Million Renovation, George Frideric Handel’s London House Is Open Again

The former home of composer George Frideric Handel has reopened to the public following a two-year renovation project costing £3 million. The property is now known as the ‘Handel Hendrix House’ (HHH), as the adjoining flat was occupied by US rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix in 1968. Both music icons are commemorated in exhibitions at the house, which has been a museum since 2001.

Handel moved into the house in the summer of 1723, and lived there until his death in 1759. The renovation has opened all of Handel’s house to the public for the first time by restoring the basement and ground floor, as well as refurbishing the upper floors. Researchers for the ‘Hallelujah Project’, as it was called, were also helped by a detailed inventory of the house’s contents that was written when Handel died. The house now includes recently acquired artworks that were once by displayed by Handel inside his home.

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James Wood in The New Yorker: The Graceful Rebellions of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

But, when Mozart sat at the keyboard in a Paris salon, was anyone actually listening, and what did people comprehend, anyway? And might Mozart, in the midst of a busy room, not have felt more solitary than Barenboim in the midst of an empty one?

Mozart was highly attuned to this dilemma. In an often-cited letter to his father, he wrote that his piano concertos offered a happy medium between the easy and the difficult. There are passages, he said, that only the connoisseur can fully appreciate, “yet the common listener will find them satisfying as well, although without knowing why.”

The whole piece is well worth reading.

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As a riposte to the ridiculous essay by Norman Lebrecht, let's have lots of that loser, Stravinsky, and all chosen from his loser periods. Orpheus, ballet, 1948:

 

Symphonies of Wind Instruments 1920:

Symphony in C, 1940

And, finally, the Violin Concerto, 1931: