Friday Miscellanea

The New York Times has an excellent article on the new music string quartet: For New Music, There’s No Quartet Like JACK

The group formed in the heady atmosphere for new music at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., in the early 2000s. The players in the original lineup — Richards, Otto, the violinist Ari Streisfeld and the cellist Kevin McFarland — were united by decisive encounters with the work of the German composer Helmut Lachenmann, a master of sonic extremes. Lachenmann traveled to Toronto to coach three of the JACK members in his first quartet, “Gran Torso,” and the group flew to a festival in Mexico with other Eastman musicians to continue working with him.

“I am their father, or something — their grandfather,” Lachenmann, who turns 88 this month, said with a laugh recently. “They were totally precise, and very musical. And there is for me one word that is very important: They are serene. When I met them, immediately it was clear, the honesty and the concentration. I don’t find better groups for my music than them.”

* * * 

Finally someone, other than myself, with something nice to say about Schoenberg: The Case for Challenging Music.

On December 1, 1900, at an intimate concert hall in Vienna, a respected local baritone gave the premiere of some early songs for voice and piano by Arnold Schoenberg. Today this music, though written in an elusive harmonic language, comes across as exuding hyper-Wagnerian richness and Brahmsian expressive depth. But the audience in Vienna broke into shouts, laughter, and jeers. From that day on, as Schoenberg ruefully recalled two decades later, “the scandal has never ceased.”

The author Harvey Sachs relates this story, and describes the songs sensitively, in his new book, Schoenberg: Why He Matters.

I mentioned this book previously, but it was, I think, a different review.

* * *

According to The Guardian: Culture is not trivial, it’s about who we are. That’s why Labour needs a plan to save the arts.

The scale of the challenge is vast. The Tory destruction began in 2010, as soon as the coalition came to power, with George Osborne’s austerity cuts. The then culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, removed an instant £19m from Arts Council England’s budget, while the overall budget of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport was reduced by 24% between 2010 and 2014-15, pulling it down from £1.4bn to £1.1bn. These seem tiny figures because they are: utterly inconsequential when set against Osborne’s total cuts, irrelevant when compared with overall government finances. Still, they were enormous enough when applied to individual arts organisations.

* * *

Somewhat quizzically, the Wall Street Journal reviews the California Festival: Was the California Festival Really a Festival?

For many music lovers, the essential concerts were likely the three programs in which Mr. Dudamel led a full-force Philharmonic. All three featured Latin American orchestral music, a specialty of the conductor. But the first two, under the banner “Canto en Resistencia” (loosely “Singing in Resistance”), also cast the spotlight on a bevy of female pop stars from south of the border who clearly attracted their own fans: Ana Tijoux, Catalina García, Ely Guerra, Goyo and Lila Downs on Nov. 9, and Silvana Estrada from Nov. 10 through 12.

Both programs opened with Roberto Sierra’s short but bright “Alegría” (1996) and Tania León’s kaleidoscopic “Stride,” which won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize and proved a fine showcase for the orchestra’s trumpets. But the second bill added Mr. Márquez’s alternatingly sultry and toe-tapping “Danzón No. 2” (1994), a piece Mr. Dudamel has conducted here since 2017 and which is by now, after many joyful performances, virtually his signature work.

More significant in this context was the premiere of a new arrangement of the Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz’s “Seis Piezas a Violeta” (“Six Pieces to Violeta”), originally a piano quintet from 2002 now enhanced for piano and string orchestra. An often spare and sometimes astringent piece, it held one’s attention with its blocky piano chords and arpeggiated string writing, often recalling music by Philip Glass, Alban Berg and Bela Bartók. Joanne Pearce Martin, the orchestra’s resident keyboardist, handled the solo piano passages with especially spirited aplomb.

* * *

To me this reads like a report from Alpha Centauri: Spotify Wrapped 2023: 'Music genres are now irrelevant to fans'

From Goths to punk rockers, genre can imply a lifestyle as well as a way of simply categorising music. However, in the digital age, around 100,000 new tracks are uploaded to Spotify every day, and they're sorted into one of more than 6,000 genre classifications.

Hundreds have been added in the last year alone, from Dream Plugg (a spaced-out brand of hip-hop) to Zomi Pop (a fusion of Mayanmar's traditional Zomi music and Western pop).

* * *

How about 21st Century Baroque?

Nuova Pratica, a group of up-and-coming performer-composers who aim to re-open the book on Baroque composition, wants you to know that the language of the past is very much alive. Formed in 2020, during the early days of the pandemic, the ensemble’s musicians write, record, and perform their own Baroque-inspired music. Rejecting the idea that what they do is mere pastiche, they don’t seek to imitate or emulate. They just want to write music they enjoy, informed by the styles and sounds they love the most.

Here is a sample:

For these performers their "contemporary" music is actually Baroque music.

Now for some envoi: here are some early Schoenberg lieder. The performers are Ellen Hartla Faull and Glenn Gould. We often forget how Gould was a keen advocate of the music of Schoenberg.

 And the JACK quartet with Grido by Helmut Lachenmann:

Here is "Seiz piezas a Violeta" by Gabriela Ortiz in the original chamber music version:

And here are the first and last movements of the Bach Partita No. 6 in E minor from Igor Levit's complete recording:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t9HztaHW8s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4njb4vf9IU