"Each language is a tradition, each word a shared symbol; the changes that an innovator may make are trifling--we should remember the dazzling but often unreadable work of a Mallarmé or a Joyce."
--Jorge Luis Borges, p. 346 in this book:
The last CD I purchased by Kronos was a box set celebrating their 25th anniversary, now look where we are: At 50, the Kronos Quartet Is Still Playing for the Future
When Kronos formed, contemporary music was widely viewed as mathematically rigid and atonal: unlistenable audience poison. Buoyed by dramatic stage lighting, trendy clothes and passionate, eclectic performances and recordings, the quartet showed that a new approach to the new could fill halls and draw young crowds.
Kronos proved that composers working in different idioms than standard-issue modernism — like Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Adams and Osvaldo Golijov — could become core string quartet material, as could world traditions and collaborators on nonwestern instruments. A quartet could adapt the music of far-afield artists like Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans, Astor Piazzolla and Sigur Rós, and could define the hard-edge soundtracks of films like “Requiem for a Dream.”
Who else could possibly have chosen "Purple Haze" by Jimi Hendrix as their go-to encore?
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If you young folks are not yet totally bored with The Beatles: ‘Now and Then, I Miss You’: The Love Story at the Heart of the Last Beatles Song
Beatles songs still speak to us so directly because they are vehicles for the transmission of feelings too powerful for normal speech. Mr. Lennon and Mr. McCartney were intense young men who grew up in an era before men were encouraged to speak about their feelings, either in therapy or to one another. They gained their emotional education from music, especially the music of Black artists like Smokey Robinson, Arthur Alexander and the Shirelles. Almost everything they felt — and they felt a lot — was poured into music, including their feelings about each other.
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From the philosophical files: Whither philosophy?
Expertise counts for much in today’s intellectual climate, and it makes sense that those educated and trained in specific fields would be given greater consideration than a dabbler. But it is those philosophers who wrote on a wide range of areas that left a profound mark on philosophy. Aristotle dedicated himself to a plethora of fields, including science, economics, political theory, art, dance, biology, zoology, botany, metaphysics, rhetoric and psychology. Today, any researcher who draws on different, ‘antagonistic’ fields would be accused of deviating from their specialisation. Consequently, monumental books that defied tradition – from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (1886) – are few and far between. This is not to say, however, that there are no influential philosophers. Saul Kripke and Derek Parfit, both not long deceased, are perhaps the most significant philosophers in recent years, but their influence is primarily confined to academia. Martha Nussbaum on the other hand, is one of the most important and prolific philosophers working today. Her contributions to ethics, law and emotion have been both highly regarded and far-reaching, and she is often lauded for her style and rigour, illustrating that not all philosophers are focused on narrow fields of specialisation.
But ‘the blight of specialisation’, as David Bloor calls it, remains stubbornly engrained in the practice of philosophy, and ‘represents an artificial barrier to the free traffic of ideas.’
Incidentally, if you want an excellent survey of 20th century philosophy, have a look at Roger Scruton's Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey. It's inexpensive, thorough and not written for overspecialized scholars. Not to say it is entirely easy to read!
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As always, Slipped Disc provides some interesting information: WHAT THE TOP FINNISH CONDUCTORS EARN
Here are the top 10 conductors:
1) Santtu-Matias Rouvali: 490,000 €
2) Sakari Oramo: 325,000 €
3) Leif Segerstam: 324,000 €
4) Hannu Lintu: 268,000 €
5) Dalia Stasevska: 252,000 €
6) John Storgårds: 240,000 €
7) Klaus Mäkelä: 236,000 €
8) Jorma Panula: 206,000 €
9) Olli Mustonen: 204,000 €
10) Ville Matvejeff: 163,000 €
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When Aaron Copland and the U.S. State Department Made Musical Diplomacy
Despite a plethora of research on Copland, no scholar had ever explored his cultural diplomacy in Latin America. In Aaron Copland in Latin America, Hess documents Copland’s four State Department Latin American trips, which took place between 1943 and 1963. He conducted concerts (often programming his own music), gave talks and interviews, and sometimes traveled to rural areas with messages of cultural connectivity. Copland’s Latin American travels drew widespread attention in the media. He was a tireless promoter of the State Department programs, giving talks and writing about them for mainstream publications. Copland’s tours were so significant that they are mentioned prominently in the State Department’s recent announcement of the new music diplomacy initiative, along with tours by Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and others starting in the 1950s.
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Sheku Kanneh-Mason, barred from boarding flight with cello, calls for better airline protocol
In September, the British cellist was blocked from boarding a BA flight, despite arriving early and booking two seats – one for himself, one for his instrument, a prized 1700 Matteo Gofriller cello.
Kanneh-Mason had to book a new flight home from Bucharest, where he had been performing alongside the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra, to London Heathrow, that he said cost “three times as much”.
“It’s frustrating to arrive to the airport, having done everything right in the lead-up with the booking and everything and yet, still things can go wrong at any sort of stage,” he added.
I don't travel with my guitar very often these days, so when I had to fly to Toronto a few years ago to do a recording I almost drove my travel agent mad fussing about taking my guitar on board. She downloaded the requirements from the AeroMexico website and yes, a guitar case just complies. As it turned out, there were no problems placing my guitar in the overhead compartment. But cellists have a real challenge!
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Breaking news from Spotify: starting in 2024 (less than two months from now), they will no longer pay any royalty on tracks that fall below a minimum 1,000 streams a year. These tracks will still earn royalties, in theory – but those royalties will not be paid to their rights holders. Instead, they will go into a pot to be divided among accounts that garner more plays.
This is akin to a regressive tax – reducing payments to those who already receive less, in order to boost payments for those who already receive more, increasing the divide between haves and have-nots. It is, on the face of it, the ugliest of ugly capitalist cash grabs.
Actually, this is not a symptom of free market capitalism, but rather of technological monopoly power.
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Lots of material for our envois today. Let's start with the venerable Kronos Quartet. Here is "Testimony" by Charlton Singleton:
This is possibly the most successful collaboration between John Lennon and Paul McCartney:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSGHER4BWME
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Here is that top-earning Finnish conductor Santtu Mattias Rouvali conducting the Symphony No. 6 of Tchaikovsky (he was also one of the performers in the Steve Reich piece in the previous post):
Here is Aaron Copland playing one of his most radical pieces, the Piano Variations of 1930:
Finally, Sheku Kanneh-Mason with a Tiny Desk concert:
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