Friday Miscellanea

"Meaning is not a process which accompanies a word.

For no process could have the consequences of meaning."

--Ludwig Wittgenstein (quoted in Saul A. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, p. 53, footnote 35)

One of my hobbies is reading philosophy and I have a particular attraction to the more difficult ones: Kant, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. The two most difficult books I have ever read are G. E. M. Anscombe's An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus and the one quoted from above. Ironically, I find these books interpreting and explaining Wittgenstein to be even more difficult than the originals. Probably because they get right into the thickets. Take the quote above, for example. You can just breeze past it. But if you want to explain it, well, that is the kind of thing that leads to footnotes a page and a half long, sesquipedalian footnotes!

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And now, as a kind of sorbet: THE NAKED CONDUCTOR BARES ALL – AGAIN

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This new book on Mozart looks interesting: Mozart the Performer: Variations on the Showman's Art 

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Over at The Guardian there is a review of a new book on journaling: The Notebook by Roland Allen review – notes on living. That's another hobby of mine.

Notebooks in different guises have been around since at least the late 13th century. In Florence they were used as ledgers, spurred the development of double-entry book-keeping, and, not least because they were made of paper rather than more expensive and less stable parchment, were integral to the rise of mercantilism. In the form of sketch books they allowed artists to depict their surroundings repeatedly and develop more realistic techniques.

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On a positive note: How USC made classical music cool again

In 2011, USC acquired KDFC in San Francisco and expanded the classical network to 10 cities, including Palm Springs, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Ventura, Oxnard, Monterey and Ukiah. The radio network known as Classical California now reaches around 1.5 million listeners per month. KUSC alone has the largest classical radio audience in the country, reaching more than 900,000 listeners each month over the air. KDFC and the other stations add another 500,000 radio listeners, with an additional 185,000 from the Classical California online streams online.

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Here is an article on historical performance: Hickup over the Littany. It's a review of a new book by Andrew Parrott.

One​ of the abiding mysteries in presenting music from the past is what the singers sounded like. There is no evidence for it, apart from written descriptions, all of which fall far short of telling us anything precise. What is one to make of this description of the singing in the Chapel Royal in 1515, written by the Venetian ambassador to Henry VIII’s court and included in Andrew Parrott’s The Pursuit of Musick? ‘More divine than human; they were not singing but jubilating [giubilavano].’ The exact meaning of ‘giubilavano’ has been long debated, to no avail. Or what does this résumé of national styles, written in 1517, tell us? ‘The French sing; the Spaniards weepe; the Italians, which dwell about the Coasts of Genoa, caper with their Voyces; the others bark; but the Germanes ... doe howle like wolves.’

Boy, would I ever enjoy doing a similar critical catalogue of today's pop singers. Maybe another day...

Four ensembles founded in 1973 continue to work in the light of these discoveries: the Academy of Ancient Music, the English Concert, the Taverner Consort and Players, and the Tallis Scholars (which I started as a choir in Oxford while I was an undergraduate there). The first two concentrated on instruments only; the Tallis Scholars worked with voices only; and the Taverner Consort, led by Parrott, set out to combine the two. Parrott’s problem was always going to be dealing with voices in parallel with the instruments. No one could argue that the newly interesting old instruments weren’t what the composer would have heard. But with voices everyone could argue that what they heard wasn’t right, which of course meant not to their liking. In his first recordings, Parrott was pragmatic, using the instruments that were available at that time, and guessing how the singers should sound alongside them. The purists of the time accepted his stance.

The really odd thing about this lengthy review and, presumably, the book itself, is that there is no mention whatsoever of the primary critic of the early music movement: Richard Taruskin. One wonders why? 

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From that important source of cultural news, the Wall Street Journal: The Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde on the State of Music.

Honestly, the majority is always wrong. Music is just the backdrop to their life. I’m not saying that mainstream music isn’t important to them, but they’re not connoisseurs. They’re not making it their whole life. But the people who really love it, they will be at the shows. They will find those shows. And the musicians who are making that music, who are the real musicians, will find an audience.

That’s why it’s all about the clubs. That’s why I wanted to play clubs again. Because once you’re playing in stadiums, and you have all that stuff—auto-cue and huge light shows and pyro—I don’t know if you can play a club anymore. You lose the feel for it. And to me, if you can’t do that, then who are you?

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Here is a blog I have not run into before: Osborne on Opera: A Critical Blog. The latest: “Florencia” and the “New Opera Problem” Redux. He does tend to let a metaphor run away with itself:

The canonical repertory is foundering, for reasons that are discussed here in post after post. So the company’s current management has undertaken a program of artificial insemination in place of what was once natural conception—hence the ethnocultural distribution noted above, to which we can add a sexual identity element, as well. This is not a program of audience integration (the management cannot be so unobservant as to suppose that will happen, except at the outermost fringe), but of audience fragmentation, in perfect synchronization with the oft-remarked silo-ing of group identities in our society as a whole. It happens that I have worked in a silo. It is not so bad in the fall, when you’re up at the top near the fresh-air source, and the silage is fresh and relatively dry. But through the winter you work your way down toward the floor, and by spring you are pitching forkfuls of sopping, matted, deeply marinated muck into baskets for trolleying back up to the top, dripping as they go, and the stench is asphyxiating. Moral: the good stuff is right near the top. Also: some silos are near-empty to begin with.

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At The New Yorker, Alex Ross reviews: “Maestro” Honors the Chaotic Charisma of Leonard Bernstein

Bradley Cooper’s new movie “Maestro,” a portrait of Bernstein’s marriage to the Costa Rican American actress Felicia Montealegre, has a scene that features the Mahler Second and takes place in a cathedral—Ely Cathedral, in England. Cooper, who stars as Bernstein, is presiding over the vocal-orchestral conflagration with which the symphony ends. The sequence mimics a television film of Bernstein and the London Symphony performing the Mahler Second at Ely, in 1973. Cooper’s impersonation falls short of the real thing, as it must; his gestures are more angular and herky-jerky than Bernstein’s, less flowingly assured. But he is conducting: he is ahead of the beat, attuned to fluctuations of tempo, alert to instrumental and vocal entrances. The London Symphony, appearing as itself, responds with palpable force. You forget that you are watching a star actor play a star conductor; you become immersed in Mahler’s molten flow. For that reason, it’s one of the most striking music scenes recently put on film.

As always, worth reading the whole thing.

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The Mozart Matinee on July 27th at the Salzburg Festival, which I plan to attend, features the Piano Concerto in D minor, K. 466, so let's hear it:

Also on the program is the Masonic Funeral Music in C minor, also by Mozart:

Every Saturday and Sunday morning during the Salzburg Festival the Mozarteum Orchestra plays concerts of music by Mozart with various soloists. The Mozarteum is rather a unique institution. It is a fully accredited university, one of six in Salzburg, but it is a university with just one department: music.

The last concert I attend before flying back home is the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Riccardo Muti with the Symphony No. 8 of Bruckner. Here is the Vienna Philharmonic with Karajan conducting: