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: