Friday Miscellanea

After yesterday's post you may be thinking of me as an insipid softy, so let's start with a contrasting quotation:

Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous.

That's H. P. Lovecraft, not actually one of my favourite authors, but that's certainly a striking opening sentence. Now on with our regularly scheduled programming.

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The downside of the shunning of John Eliot Gardiner is certainly the impact it has had on his musicians, the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists. Some concerts will go forward with a substitute conductor, but not all: GARDINER MUSICIANS LOSE CANADA TOUR

The Canada leg of a late-October performance by the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists has been cancelled due to the conductor’s withdrawal.

It remains to be seen if their subsequent Carnegie Hall date will go ahead under a different conductor.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner is unavailable for any further dates in 2023.

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I don't think I have mentioned AI here much. This story seems to summarize some reasons why: Proust, ChatGPT and the case of the forgotten quote

The other day, I was looking for a quote in Proust, so I thought I would ask ChatGPT. Here’s how it went.

EB: Is there a passage in In Search of Lost Time when Proust talks about how love affairs repeat themselves, and says that when you’re writing about a love affair in the past, you’re often drawing inspiration from a different love affair in the present?

CHATGPT: Yes, there is a passage in Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” (also known as “Remembrance of Things Past”) where he discusses the repetition of love affairs and the influence of present experiences on writing about past love affairs. The passage can be found in the first volume of the novel, “Swann’s Way” (Du côté de chez Swann)... 

Please note that the specific wording and context of the passage may vary depending on the translation and edition of the novel. If you’re interested in exploring this theme further, I recommend reading “Swann’s Way” to experience Proust’s beautiful prose and intricate exploration of love, memory, and the passage of time. 

Instead of, you know, actually giving you the quote, the AI recommends reading Swann's Way which is 464 pages long. Well, that saved a lot of time! I should also mention that the place where I found this link seriously oversold it by implying that the AI recommended reading all of Proust's novel, some 1,800 pages. How clickbaity of them.

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I would link to Alex Ross' latest at The New Yorker, a piece on Liszt, but they keep telling me "You've Run Out!" I used to read The New Yorker every week, but I'm not tempted to, these days. I suspect in a few weeks they will allow me to link and read stories again...

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And then I was going to link to a piece in the Boston Globe about why Brandeis cut its Music PhD program, but I can't get past that paywall either. I guess that times are tough in digital news so they really can't allow us to read anything for free any more. That is more and more the case in Canada as well. I guess we will all survive even without knowing what excuse Brandeis offered for axing its Music PhD programs.

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Oh yes, and Spotify is struggling to find a way to squeeze out more revenue: Spotify is testing making lyrics a Premium-only feature

While it’s possible that Spotify will bring lyrics back in front of the Premium paywall, it’s certainly true that the company is on the hunt for anything it can do to get users to pay up. After pouring billions into podcasts and audiobooks to little effect, it seems to have largely given up on the idea that exclusive content is the path to riches. Instead, the company appears to be looking to build other kinds of features users might pay for. That’s especially important as the price of Premium, like so many other streaming services, continues to rise.

Well, yes, it's all about the Benjamins.

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And Apple bought the independent Swedish label BIS: Apple’s BIS acquisition is a bet on a classical music catalogue, and on building cred in the industry.

More than 80% of the music we listen to today is delivered over streaming, according to figures from last year. But when you look at classical music, it’s been a stubborn hold-out, accounting for just a tiny fraction of that, with just 0.8% of streams (and that’s in the stream-friendly market of the U.S.). Apple’s bet is that this percentage will grow, though, and it wants a piece of that action. After launching its new classical music app earlier this year, Apple has taken its latest step into the space: BIS, a revered classical music label out of Sweden, announced today that it is joining the company.

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‘People used to joke, What next from memory? The Rite of Spring?’: Nicholas Collon on his orchestra’s ultimate challenge

Ever since Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring burst into life on a balmy Parisian evening in May 1913, it has delighted, shocked and thrilled audiences like few other works of art, rightly earning its title as the watershed moment in 20th-century orchestral music. Over the decades it has inspired brilliant choreographers, received many thousands of performances in concert halls around the world and been recorded nearly 200 times. The Rite made its household name in Disney’s Fantasia, and opened a door for the rest of 20th-century orchestral music, from Olivier Messiaen to John Williams. So it gives us a small thrill to think that this week Aurora Orchestra will achieve a new first: performing the work entirely from memory.

Well sure, why not? After all, the dancers have to do it all from memory. The difference really is that no symphony orchestra with a regular concert schedule has enough rehearsal time to play from memory.

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Another review: Misunderstood Musical Genius: On Harvey Sachs’s “Schoenberg”

ARNOLD SCHOENBERG (1874–1951) was a pivotal figure in the development of 20th-century music. Of the thousands of composers who came before and after him, he stood alone both as the embodiment of the high Romanticism of the 19th and early 20th centuries led by Gustav Mahler, Richard Wagner, and Richard Strauss, and as a rebel who broke down the gates of traditions that had ruled music composition for three centuries. After he spent his childhood in pre–World War I Vienna in a Jewish ghetto, Nazi antisemitism drove him from Europe, eventually to land in Los Angeles, where he stayed to the end of his life, teaching first at USC and then UCLA.

A generational original, Schoenberg forged an entirely new path and language for musical expression. He called it the 12-tone or dodecaphonic system, built on all 12 pitches in the Western scale, rather than the traditional hierarchical seven. Ironically, his impact even on his most ardent disciples, Anton Webern and Alban Berg, was so provocative that they built on his techniques in divergent directions.

A paradox is operating here: why would such an influential visionary and radical creator as Schoenberg receive minimal attention and performances of his masterworks today?

It's not all that complicated, really. Schoenberg wrote a great deal about music and wrote some important textbooks as well as being an influential teacher. For this reason, even though his music tends to appeal to only a very limited but sophisticated audience, he still has a significant historical profile. Oh, and places that never program any Schoenberg are hard to take seriously. 8>)

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We haven't had any Liszt in a while, so let's start with him. This is Horowitz playing the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2:

And here is what I presume is one of the BIS recordings, the Lahti Symphony Orchestra with the Symphony No. 6 of Sibelius.

And, of course, some Schoenberg. This is Glenn Gould with the Three Piano Pieces, op. 11. We often forget that Gould played a lot of music other than Bach.