Friday Miscellanea

You can always count on Frank Zappa for a good quote:

Most people wouldn't know music if it came up and bit them on the ass.

--Frank Zappa

We have mentioned the California Festival a couple of times and now Alex Ross weighs in: What Does California Sound Like? and no, it's not surf music. Or Katy Perry.

In 1936, Isabel Morse Jones, a music critic for the Los Angeles Times, made a modest boast: “We in the west have been permitted freedom to develop our music in our own way to a certain extent, because of the distances between us and the musical politics of the east and Europe.” For sure: by the mid-nineteen-thirties, California composers were already striking new paths. Henry Cowell, a Bay Area native, was exploring cluster chords, drones, and open forms. Lou Harrison, an Oregonian gone south, was absorbing non-Western traditions. John Cage, a graduate of Los Angeles High School, was beginning to theorize a music of percussion and noise. Meanwhile, European composers were fleeing totalitarian Europe and making their way West. In 1934, the modernist titan Arnold Schoenberg took refuge in L.A.; Korngold, Stravinsky, Eisler, and Rachmaninoff followed. The colliding energies of California culture triggered multiple revolutions in the ensuing decades, with the hypnotically looping minimalism of Terry Riley’s “In C” exerting global influence.

That just demonstrates how well-researched everything Alex does is. You should read the whole thing. Here is another sample from the close:

Perhaps the most topographically evocative entry in the festival was M. A. Tiesenga’s “Sketches of Chaparral,” which appeared at Green Umbrella, alongside no less notable works by Dylan Mattingly, Reena Esmail, and Samuel Adams. Tiesenga, a graduate of the perennially productive avant-garde hothouse of CalArts, salutes the most universal of California beings—the low-lying, prickly shrubs that cling to the state’s hills, mountains, arroyos, and deserts. On hiking expeditions, Tiesenga made charcoal rubbings of the plants, fashioned sketches from them, and began to transform the resulting shapes and patterns into a score.

This process harks back to Cage’s methodology in works such as “Ryoanji,” which employs drawings that the composer made at the rock garden of the same name, in Kyoto. Tiesenga, however, makes room for un-Cagean melodic gestures and euphonious harmonies. The performers are encouraged to bring their own sensibilities into play; at times, they react spontaneously to the undulating lines of Tiesenga’s chaparral drawings, samples of which appear in their parts. At one point, Joanne Pearce Martin, the L.A. Phil’s peerless resident pianist, divined a glittering, cadenza-like solo from a skeletal array of notes. “Sketches of Chaparral” is a formidable imaginative act, but it is also an act of mediation between the natural landscape—wounded but still magnificent—and a community of musicians who hope to restore paradise in sound.

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Another failing of progressive culture: Art does not exist to improve society

But, for all this, the prominence of the word “wellbeing” in the ENO press release rings alarm bells. For opera’s contribution to health and welfare, its ability to improve lives, is a happy by-product. It is not the point. It is not opera’s job to do social work. Yet unfortunately this is where we find ourselves. It all started in the 1990s. A government in thrall to pop culture and “Cool Britannia” showed itself to be extremely ambivalent, nervous even, about the so-called “high arts”. New Labour set about redefining culture in two ways: as a commodified economic phenomenon (“the creative industries”) and, with the launch of the so-called “access agenda”, as a means for combating social exclusion. Art was henceforth to be put to service in solving all manner of social ills, health problems and educational challenges.

And we should also remind ourselves that being a lover of classical music confers no moral superiority.

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The prolific Ted Gioia has an update on dangerous music: Car Drivers Torment a City with Celine Dion Songs. He has a host of examples:

The city of Cancún prohibits concerts by artists who promote violence.

The new ban encompasses a wide range of genres, including metal, hip-hop, or the popular corridos tumbados, which are modern Mexican equivalent of British ballads about Robin Hood. “We will no longer allow people to promote violence,” said Jorge Aguilar Osorio, general secretary of the city council, when announcing the measure.

And on the other side:

An incarcerated gang leader in Ecuador attacked the government in a music video made inside a maximum security facility. 

Samantha Schmidt writes in The Washington Post:

The video, apparently filmed inside the Guayaquil prison and posted on YouTube over the weekend, pays homage to José Adolfo “Fito” Macías Villamar, a convicted murderer who has helped lead Los Choneros—a gang that reportedly partners with the Sinaloa Cartel to move cocaine to the United States.

Mariachi Bravo’s “El Corrido del León”—“The Lion’s Ballad”—taunts a government that has proved incapable of seizing control of its prisons back from the increasingly powerful gangs. With a high-production-value video recorded in part in a facility that holds Ecuador’s most dangerous convicts, the criminals are sending a clear message about who’s in charge.

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What is the perennial attraction of spacey music? Want to hear the wonder of deep space? This music is made from NASA's telescope data. This has been done so many times and, frankly, it always comes out sounding pretty much the same: random noodling.

Sheesh, is this "Repeat dumb ideas" week? The Milliseconds Before the Now

I think the future is versatility—a mixtape. I really believe that if a piece is put next to the right piece, even if it’s Schubert and Taylor Swift… they’ll shine light on each other. I see that working perfectly.

Mind you, the rest of the interview is full of interesting insights into conducting.

What’s it like, then, coming into something like a revival of this “Onegin” at the Komische Oper, where it’s been done before, the orchestra has a set way of doing it—how do you get people to change from what they’ve previously done?

We just read the overture the other day, and I could tell everything they had penciled in. It drives me crazy. No offense to my colleagues, but you always can tell when an orchestra’s reading something on the page that’s not what Tchaikovsky wrote. Someone tried to make the music more interesting than Tchaikovsky intended, which is kind of embarrassing. It’s like over-editing or spoon-feeding musical ideas through pencil markings, saying: Crescendo here. Put a comma here. Little things are important for the clarity of the piece, but I don’t like when people add things for the sake of adding. And I always hear it in the first reading. So I very gently say, “Oh sorry, do you have a crescendo there?” “Oh yeah, we have it penciled in.” “Okay, please take it out.”

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Norman Lebrecht advertises his Album of the Year article on Slipped Disc. Click for a provocative photo of Yuja Wang, a specialty over there.

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There is very little M. A. Tiesenga on YouTube, but here is a piece for perhaps the most terrifying musical ensemble: two drum kits and two saxophones:

Here is the waltz from Eugene Onegin by Tchaikovsky:

And here is Yuja Wang with "Rach 2"