Friday Miscellanea

 

No, I don't actually believe Stockhausen served imperialism. That was the title of an essay by Cornelius Cardew and I quote it just as a joke, though the story is that avant-garde music in Europe did receive some funding from the CIA.

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Perhaps there is a time to say "enough": ENO’s music director resigns over proposed cuts to musical staff positions

“I cannot in all conscience continue to support the board and management’s strategy for the future of the company,” he said in a statement released on Sunday by his management.

“While my feelings on this have been developing for some time, it reached its nadir this week, with the internal announcement of severe cuts to its orchestra and chorus from 2024-25 season.

Perhaps the English National Opera just needs a new name? "The Threepenny Opera"? "Lo-cal Opera Lite"? "The Fat Lady Has Sung"?

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This is a widespread phenomenon: PALTRY PAY FOR PROFESSORS AT SINKING CIM. When people ask why I quit playing concerts, I just tell them how poorly I was paid...

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The Washington Post has a piece on The Economy (Taylor's Version) where they claim that she could go home with as much as $4.1 billion from the current tour. That's with a 'b'! I can't actually read it because of the paywall, but that seems about four times the previous estimates I have seen which were around one billion. I'm just a tad flabbergasted...

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Hey, the ENO thinks it has problems: ‘We have to be very creative to survive’: the show goes on at Kharkiv opera house. At least they don't have to dodge Russian missiles.

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My favorite New York Times opinion writer, John McWhorter: Follow This Music to Joy

Music is universal among humans, typically used for immediate benefits: aesthetic pleasure, accompaniment to ritual, dance or work or even getting a baby to sleep. However, there is a 2.0 kind of music. You may like it fine on first hearing, but only with repeated listenings do you fully take it to heart and feel that magic click.

This music does not follow predictable patterns, the harmonies might be complex, the instrumental arrangement might be agitated with countermelodies and eccentric frills, the piece might not have been designed to summon you to move your body, or maybe the thing is just kind of long. It’s hard to embrace its full essence until you’ve experienced it a few times. 

Edward Bland (1926-2013) was a classically trained Black composer who spent decades creating a sui generis idiom he called “urban classical funk.” It combined classical technique with Black American and African elements.

I'm going to put some in the envois today.

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Exploring the options: From opera to breakdancing and back again: Jakub Józef Orliński fuses two worlds

He stumbled into singing in a high range during his time in an amateur choir in his native Poland when they began taking up music from the Renaissance. The collaboration and "musical intelligence" necessary to perform these works was "truly magical and extraordinary," Orliński says.

As a teen, he would listen to the punk rock bank The Offspring. But he also enjoyed pieces by 16th century composers Thomas Tallis or Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina.

"I could sense or I could feel something that I could not find in the pieces that I was listening by Britney Spears or Destiny's Child," he explains.

At the same time, Orliński was a skater kid who also did capoeira, freestyle skiing and snowboarding and played tennis. When he started breakdancing in his late teens, it was "an enlightenment," he says. "It combined acrobatics, it combined music and personal expression, so it's an art form."

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We had an item on this new recording last week, but here is another one: The Pianist Vikingur Olafsson on ‘History’s Greatest Keyboard Work’.

You have been playing the “Goldbergs” for 25 years. What were your first experiences with them?

It actually goes back to that famous recording from 1955. When I heard Glenn Gould, I realized that Bach is not one thing; he’s everything at the same time. The way Gould plays them, it turns this music from something that was seen as predominantly academic into something that was performance material — the sheer visceral side of the “Goldberg” Variations, the physicality of Bach, the physicality of the writing.

So I think when I was 14, I was just captivated that the piano can sound like this, that someone can actually play this three- or four- or five-part counterpoint and somehow be able to keep four or five different voices absolutely individual in their head. That’s something that took me so many years to try to capture myself.

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Here is Edward Bland's Chaconne in Blue No. 3:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCu2rXAqAOA

And some Renaissance dance music:

I partly want to put up this complete performance of Die Winterreise by Franz Schubert for voice and guitar because you so rarely see a guitarist in white tie! The artists are Tilman Lichdi and Klaus Jäckle.

We haven't had a Wigmore Hall concert for a while so here is a lovely one with Théotime Langlois de Swarte, violin and Justin Taylor, harpsichord.