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.