Friday Miscellanea

MEA CULPA! I FORGOT TO POST THIS THIS MORNING! 

The artist can mislead the public more easily than can a man of any other profession, for setting aside the affinity of the herd for all that is superficial, a sort of halo surrounds the painter; he profits by a number of institutions very favourable to mediocrity, which give a certain importance to the métier as such, and are readily turned to account by the adroit

--Julius Meier-Graefe (1867 - 1935) This quote is from 1904.

* * *

I've always been fascinated with Leonard Cohen, and not just because he was a fellow Montrealer: Leonard Cohen: Hippie Troubadour and Forgotten Reactionary

IN THE EARLY ’70s, Leonard Cohen was in crisis. His life felt meaningless, although, in theory, it shouldn’t have. He’d spent the past decade doing all the things people were supposed to do in the ’60s. He’d joined shadowy religious orders and dabbled in Eastern mysticism. He’d written a sexy experimental novel that thrilled the young and enraged the establishment. He’d reinvented himself as a singer-songwriter and played to crowds of ecstatic flower children. He’d taken all the drugs, smoked all the cigarettes, slept in all the iconic hotels—the King Edward, the Chelsea, the Chateau Marmont. If the ’60s counterculture were a mountain, he was the rare mountaineer who’d made it to the summit.

Read the whole thing for a thoughtful look at an artist that has a lot of relevance for us today.

* * *

A problem that refuses to go away: TENOR STOPS MID-CONCERT IN BIRMINGHAM TO STOP PHONE SNAPPERS

The tenor Ian Bostridge shocked Symphony Hall Birmingham last night by stopping after the third song in Britten’s Les Illuminations to denounce the CBSO’s new audience rules, which read:

“We are very happy for you to take photographs and short video clips at our concerts, but please refrain from recording the whole performance.”

Bostridge, a thoughtful, courteous man, stepped forward and – clearly fuming – requested that audience members turn off their phone cameras. He said taking photographs was ‘extremely distracting’ for a performer.

For the love of all that's holy...

* * *

This could well be true: An education in music makes you a better employee. Are recruiters in tune?

One of the most powerful traits instilled by a music education is a deep sense of professionalism. 85% of survey participants identified the trait as the skill that most influenced expectations of themselves and others, and the quality of their work. 

A common industry saying about rehearsal reflects this attitude of consistency and punctuality – “early is on time, on time is late, and late is left behind.”

Other notable skills included autonomy and self-direction, resilience and perseverance, and creativity.

Learning an instrument fosters disciplined, focused attention, a highly valuable skill in other contexts. ArtBitz/Shutterstock

Participants attributed the development of these strengths to the disciplined and focused attention required to learn music, and the intrinsic motivation needed to practise and perfect an instrument over a long period of time.

You are not likely to learn these sorts of skills in too many other places.

* * *

You get industrialized mass production: What Happens to Songwriters When AI Can Generate Music?

If you think 100,000 songs a day going into the market is a big number, “you have no idea what’s coming next,” says Alex Mitchell, founder/CEO of Boomy, a music creation platform that can compose an instrumental at the click of an icon.

Boomy is one of many so-called “generative artificial intelligence” music companies — others include Soundful, BandLab’s SongStarter and Authentic Artists — founded to democratize songwriting and production even more than the synthesizer did in the 1970s, the drum machine in the ’80s and ’90s, digital audio workstations in the 2000s and sample and beat libraries in the 2010s.

* * * 

Our first envoi really has to be Leonard Cohen:

 

Here is Ian Bostridge with Britten's Les Illuminations, op. 18

Here is a piece you rarely hear, the Septet in E flat major by Beethoven:

And now, if you will excuse me I have to go decolonize my bookshelf.

Today's Listening: Bruckner, Symphony No. 8

I've been listening to the Symphony No. 8 of Bruckner quite a few times lately. The main reason is that a performance of the piece by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Riccardo Muti on August 15 is the finale of my visit to Salzburg this summer and I want to become really familiar with the work. And, if you are wondering, nope, no tickets are available, it is sold out. Yes, already. So don't tell me that classical music is dying--only in some places. I have always rather liked Bruckner ever since singing in the university choir in a performance of his Te Deum. Sure, I fell under the spell of Mahler for a while--didn't we all--but I did come to my senses. Bruckner comes at the apotheosis of Western Civilization when it was frankly luxuriating it its accomplishments. With Mahler we are starting to feel the loss of confidence and premonition of the cataclysm that is soon to come.

Here is Günter Wand and the NDR Elbphilharmonie in a performance from 1987 in the Lübeck Cathedral.

Perfection Achieved

I taught myself how to write by writing letters to the editor of the Globe and Mail in Toronto. You had to address an issue of the day in pithy and original prose and not exceed 800 words. I got so that I could get quite a few letters published. And now, in the limited world of musical discussion on the Internet, I think I have achieved beatitude. Yesterday Rick Beato put up a particularly wacky video titled "What Is Wrong With Everyone?" Here it is:

Assuming that the comments are sorted according to Top Comments the first comment you will see is this one, attributed to Speusippus:

I was quantized once, but I got over it. Then I went all Pythagorean...

For some obscure reason way back in the early days I chose the nom de plume of Speusippus, the nephew of Plato, as my YouTube identity. You can tell it is me from the photo, the same one I use here. So that is my comment. Now here is the beatitude, it is the first ranked of 11,461 comments!! So that was a very cool comment but I bemoan how huge Rick Beato's appeal is compared to mine. Maybe I should be more wacky and hysterical?

Is AI Knowledge?

I'm reading Edmund Husserl's book The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness right now and he is a turgid writer--one suspects that all phenomenologists have to attend a special class in inspissated prose. In any case, noticing that the Brave browser now has an AI component I decided to put it to the test so I asked:

Summarize Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of time

The reply:

Edmund Husserl, a prominent philosopher, described phenomenology of time as a study of the structures of experience and consciousness. He believed that time is experienced as a continuous flow, which he called "internal time-consciousness." It consists of three aspects: retention (past), impression (present), and protection (future). This model emphasizes the subjective, lived experience of time, rather than objective, physical time.

Which I was initially very impressed by. But then I noticed:

Actually, isn't anticipation of future events called "protention"?

It answered:

Yes, you are correct. I apologize for the mistake. The term "protection" in Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of time refers to the anticipation or pre-awareness of future events. It's a form of intentionality that prepares us for what is about to happen. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.

So I said:

But you said "protection" again?

The reply:

 I apologize for the oversight. Yes, I mistakenly used the term "protection" again. The correct term is indeed "protention," which refers to the anticipation or pre-awareness of future events in Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of time. Thank you for your patience and for helping me improve my response.

So here is what I think: AI seems to temptingly facilitate the task of summarizing the thoughts of an obscure philosopher, but it is not actual knowledge because the fact that it is a mechanical sifting of acres of prose floating around on the internet means that both the source of the information and the methodology of how it is collected are unknown or at least obscure. So it isn't genuine knowledge because it is both unreliable and possibly unjustified.

I'm going to put up my review of the Husserl book alongside a fascinating new book on the rap producer J Dilla titled Dilla Time because, oddly, they often are talking about the same thing: how we perceive time.

 

 

 

Friday Miscellanea

This seems like a good thing: Brooklyn Museum Names Cellist Niles Luther First Composer In Residence

Luther is kicking off his residency by composing three musical arrangements to accompany the exhibition Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo (feat. Takashi Murakami), which opened today.

The museum said, “While not aiming to precisely replicate sounds of 19th-century Tokyo (then Edo), Luther’s compositions deftly incorporate traditional Japanese scales, modes and techniques to evoke the era’s ambiance as reflected in Utagawa Hiroshige’s prints. Drawing on his own experiences in Tokyo and collaborations with Japanese instrumentalists, Luther blends Eastern and Western musical elements to capture the essence of Hiroshige’s work, underscoring its lasting relevance. In this way, Luther’s music serves as a link between eras.”

I took a similar approach in setting the poems in my collection Songs of the Poets. The texts were drawn from a wide variety of poets and I tried to find a suitable musical style as an analogue to the poem. Mind you, in the case of a translation from an Aristophanes comedy, that meant using stylistic ideas from a Rossini opera buffa! 

* * *

Finally: In praise of the viola.

What’s special about this release is the eclectic menu assembled by a young Jamaican-American, Jordan Bak, who is clearly going places. Bak opens with a three-minute Chant by Jonathan Harvey, dinking back and forth between tonal and post-tonal contemplation. A Romance by Ralph Vaughan Williams, discovered among posthumous papers, is just what I need in these stressed-out times. 

Bright Sheng reimagines a South China folksong about a woman missing her lover in moonlight. It’s called The Stream Flows and it has vivid imagery. Augusta Read Thomas has made several alternate versions of her successful 2018 Song Without Words. The viola original still works best.

The album’s two most substantive, and sumptuous, pieces are by British composers. Arnold Bax’s viola sonata of 1922 is massively mellifluous, rippling with tunes that sound half-remembered and might even be original. Imagine Copland and Holst taking a country walk. The finale is so satisfying.

Gosh, I wish I could write something "massively mellifluous"!

* * *

I think they should have named it "Odio" instead: Udio. But here is the problem: for me, music is an intrinsic good, something that is good in itself. For most people, I guess, music is an instrumental good, something that adds a bit of flavour to life, puts a nice soundtrack in the background. Not for me. But this gives me problems that perhaps others don't have. For example, I tried to watch The Two Towers movie the other day but I turned it off after a few minutes, largely because of the music. I can't watch a Tolkien story with Wagnerian style music. But, on reflection, I realize that this is just an indicator of how the film itself, especially in the characterizations, is also shifted far away from the books. So I can't watch it for that reason as well. In that way, the music is a valuable warning sign. Your milage may vary.

* * *

A Secret Code May Have Been Hiding in Classical Music for 200 Years

But even discounting those final revisions, the Opus 132 that the world came to know was not exactly the Opus 132 that Beethoven handed to his copyist. The composer littered his original score with unusual markings that the copyist simply ignored. Below one staff, for example, Beethoven jotted “ffmo”—a tag that wasn’t a standard part of musical notation, and wasn't used by any other major composer. In another place, he drew an odd shape like an elongated diamond, also a nonstandard notation. None of these marks made it into even the first clean copy, let alone the published version. Almost no one would see those marks in the roughly 200 years after Beethoven first scribbled them down.

Then, one evening in 2013, the violinist Nicholas Kitchen was in New Mexico coaching a quartet through Opus 132. Kitchen is a man of obsessions; one of them is playing from a composer’s original handwritten manuscripts, rather than printed music, so he had a facsimile edition on hand. The errant “ffmo” caught the eye of the quartet’s cellist. “What’s this?” he asked.

As soon as Kitchen saw Beethoven’s mark, something in his brain shifted; later, he would tell people that it was as if someone had turned over a deck of cards to reveal the hidden faces behind the plain backs. Suddenly, he had a new obsession. Over the next several years, he would come to believe he had discovered Beethoven’s secret code.

As a performer I have always been fascinated by the idea that there are special hints and instructions from the composer that somehow fell through the cracks.

* * *

Here, thanks to a commentator, is the nightmare of Spotify:

Questions have arisen about Spotify’s possible inclusion of AI-generated music in its artist radio playlists. This comes after Adam Faze, studio chief of FazeWorld, on Twitter shared a playlist of 49 songs that appeared to be the same track, but with different artist names, song titles, and album artwork.

* * *

Over at The New Yorker, Alex Ross asks What Is Noise? and in the process reveals quite a lot about himself:

With a universal definition hovering out of reach, the discourse concerning noise often starts with the personal. My history with the thing is fraught: I hate it and I love it. As a child, I was extraordinarily sensitive to loud sounds. Family expeditions to Fourth of July fireworks displays or steam-railway museums routinely ended with me running in tears to the safety of the car. When, in early adulthood, I moved into the noise cauldron of New York City, I was tormented by neighbors’ stereos and by the rumble of the street. I stuffed windows with pillows and insulation; I invested in industrial-strength earplugs; I positioned an oversized window fan next to my bed. This neurosis has subsided, but I remain that maddening hotel guest who switches rooms until he finds one that overlooks an airshaft or an empty lot.

All the while, I was drawn to music that others would pay money to avoid. Having grown up with classical music, I found my way to the refined bedlam of the twentieth-century avant-garde: Edgard Varèse, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Ligeti. In college, I hosted a widely unheard radio show on which I broadcast things like Ligeti’s “Poème Symphonique”—a piece for a hundred metronomes. When someone called in to report that the station’s signal had gone down, I protested that we were, in fact, listening to music. Similar misunderstandings arose when I aired Cage’s “Imaginary Landscape No. 4,” for twelve radios. When I moved on to so-called popular music, I had ears only for the churning dissonances of Cecil Taylor, AMM, and Sonic Youth. I became the keyboardist in a noise band, which made one proudly chaotic public appearance, in 1991. At one point, my bandmates and I improvised over a tape loop of the minatory opening chords of Richard Strauss’s “Die Frau Ohne Schatten.”

* * *

‘Misguided wokeism’ puts people off opera, says top London conductor. I think we were just talking about this.

“I think opera in many quarters is seen as something elitist,” Pappano told BBC Radio 4’s This Cultural Life. “The [British] politicians, for instance, don’t come to the opera house, they used to, whereas in Italy, the president of the republic would come and there’d be big applause, it would be celebrated by the audience ... in Germany too.

“Here it’s looked on with great suspicion. That drives me nuts, I have to tell you. England is a haven for culture whether it is pop culture or classical culture, literary culture, theatrical culture, this is one of the great addresses and yet we’re embarrassed by it.”

Pappano said the opera industry had had a “rough time because the money becomes less and less every year”.

“Why be embarrassed about something that is a treasure?” he said. “The Royal Opera House, the English National Opera, the Welsh National Opera are beacons, they’re internationally recognised and centres of excellence, you know, honing talent.”

* * * 

We have a couple of obvious choices for envois today. First up Jordan Bak, viola, with through the filtering dawn of spreading daybright by Jeffrey Mumford. There wasn't anything on YouTube from his new album and the title of this piece almost sounds like one I might have chosen!

Next, Nicholas Kitchen and the Borromeo Quartet with the third movement from the String Quartet 132 by Beethoven:

Lastly the Lachrimae Pavan by John Dowland played by Elizabeth Pallett:

Going Down with the Ship?

There is a kind of drumbeat of despair that accompanies the discussion of classical music in the public fora--at least in North America. There are so many voices: Ted Gioia, Greg Sandow, me in posts like this Classical Music's "Business Model" and a host of others. Let me offer some thought-provoking propositions:

• A certain model of society, in the US often called the "blue model" seems to be undergoing a severe disruption witnessed by people simply leaving: Chicago, New York, California.
• Unfortunately for classical music, these are also main cultural centers for classical music, but they are less and less able to fund the costs, never mind the reasons why
• Classical music is often described as the music of white elite taste
• So the question is, does classical music and high art generally have to go down with the ship of progressive ideals?
• Doesn't it make sense to perhaps separate the fine arts from the DEI model? They are strange bedfellows at best
• I am making a number of assumptions here: that classical music is basically music of long-standing value that doesn't need to be and in fact should not be fused with the progressive project to transform society.
• That classical music has over long stretches of time thrived in socially conservative environments and could do so again.
• That the association of classical music and the fine arts in general with the progressive project is actually of fairly recent vintage, dating from between the world wars.

So, I had this passing thought and I'm just throwing it out there so you can kick it around. Here is some suitable listening music. Stravinsky, Symphony in C, Leonard Bernstein conducting the Israel Philharmonic.

Reviewing YouTube

The other day I recommended three philosophy channels on YouTube and I want to start this post by re-recommending one of them. I just started watching Prof. Victor Gijsbers series of videos on epistemology and they are really great. Here is the third one:

 You should get a couple of things from this clear, balanced and well-argued clip: epistemology, along with logic and ethics (and probably aesthetics as well) is a normative discipline, i.e. it is not about digging up knowledge so much as it is about discovering why you should be seeking knowledge. The other main point is that the search for knowledge is an intrinsic good, not an instrumental good (of course it could be both). Like friendship and love and kindness and things like that, the search for knowledge, not the simple possession of it, is intrinsically good.

So, let's do some searching for aesthetic knowledge cleverly disguised as a review of some classical guitar videos. I used to do what I called micro-reviews of music videos, almost exclusively of pop music, but it got tiresome and I had the feeling that it was a bit, well, cruel. This is what often restrains criticism: some poor musician is striving to deliver a fine performance and some nasty ankle-biter (avoiding the use of the obvious term) has the nerve to criticize their sincere efforts, even if obviously flawed. But, assuming the logic of the bell curve, most performances will be mediocre, a few will be excellent and a few will be horrifically bad. This is true despite the best efforts of all the marketing and promotional people.

I have the most appropriate expertise to review classical guitar recordings rather than pop music or orchestras or pianists or violinists, but there is a caveat. A producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that I had done a lot of work with called me up one day to ask my opinion of some pianists. I asked him why me, I'm a guitarist? His answer was that he certainly would not ask me my opinion about guitarists even though that is my instrument. The reasons for that are well-founded. The music world is very competitive and one's view of rivals is distorted by this. One does not ask one soprano their opinion of another soprano! The other main reason is that well-established performers have arrived at certain decisions regarding style and interpretation and therefore they have little interest in how other artists work nor do they have much empathy for differing approaches.

But these issues aside, I think I might have some useful views on classical guitar performers these days as I retired as a performer a long time ago so I don't see anyone as a 'rival' any more and second, I take a more objective interest in performance and interpretation as I am no longer giving performances. So, let's have a look at some classical guitar clips on YouTube. I will try to focus on recent ones, but an older one might creep in.

David Russell has recently done music videos of all the Bach lute suites on location in some beautiful places in Spain and Portugal (he has lived in Spain for many years). He is the most well-known member of the second generation of British guitarists the first of which consisted of Julian Bream and John Williams. Bream has passed away and Williams has retired so Russell is really the most prominent British guitarist of his generation even though he has lived most of his life in Spain. He attended the Royal Academy and won the Julian Bream prize twice. He has had a very successful career and performs at guitar festivals all over the world. Here is his performance of the Lute Suite no. 3 (which you will have to click over to YouTube to view):

Nothing wrong with that, right? Technically perfect, musically assured, all together a fine performance. Now go back and just listen to the gavottes, starting at the 18:16 mark. I want to focus on those because I learned and performed them a year and half ago so they are fresh in my mind. Ok, so what do you think? First of all, to my ear, they are just a bit too quick. This is a frequent problem with performances of Bach. His music is often technically difficult so performers sometimes mistake this for being music that calls for a virtuoso approach. This is a misunderstanding, of course. Bach's music is not difficult because he intended a virtuoso display, unlike a lot of Vivaldi or Paganini. No, it is difficult because the musical ideas are original and texturally complex. So, this brisk tempo rather misses aspects of the music. Sometimes I think of it as like being frog-marched through the piece in handcuffs! As we reach the end of the first section we find another problem: there is absolutely no acknowledgement that we have come to the end of a section with a cadence and a repeat from the beginning. I'm sure David is aware of the structure, but he just does not let that cause any deviation in his rigid tempo. These observations apply to the whole performance. The main aesthetic ideal here seems to be perfectly clean technical perfection at the expense of musical expression. You might speculate as to the psychological reasons for this, but I won't. So while we can certainly admire the result of many years of disciplined practice, I find it very hard to listen to Bach played as if musical expression were of no importance.

Here is really recent video, just posted a couple of weeks ago. Jan Depreter at the Antwerp Guitar Festival. Again, I want to focus on just part of the performance so I can make detailed observations instead of vague generalizations. Let's listen to the Weiss Passacaglia and the first part of the Bach Chaconne.

We cannot accuse Jan Depreter of a rigid performance. There is lots of expression in the dynamics, the articulation, the tone-color and in the tempo. However, we might consider if all this is appropriate? Quite a lot of it, yes. Performances of Baroque music certainly do not need to avoid expression! However, the kind of ubiquitous vibrato we hear in this performance does not strike me as a very Baroque type of expression. There were also some missed opportunities to shape rhythms and phrases in ways reflecting what little we know about performance practice. For example, a piece like this with its obvious French antecedents could well benefit from some inégale. Now let's have a listen to the Chaconne, which begins at the 4:31 mark. In the first minute I notice six places where he failed to insert a very obvious ornament such as filling in a third, a couple of trills, a couple of mordents, and so on. Instead, we had the ubiquitous vibrato and chords rolled in a romantically guitaristic manner. Again, ok, but not terribly Baroque and frankly, after a while, tiresome.

Another new clip: this was posted just eight days ago. This is Cristina Galietto playing the Romanza by Paganini.

Here we have a performance entirely appropriate to the music--honestly how could a guitarist from Napoli get it wrong? Her tone is warm and her dynamics are finely shaded. She thoroughly understands the music and is delicate when needed and aggressive when needed. It is a treat to hear a performance so expressive of the musical content, not feeling as if it is applied a posteriori with a butter knife.

Let's hear Scott Tennant play the Sonata K. 322 by Domenico Scarlatti.

I met Scott at one of the Toronto guitar festivals. He is a superb guitarist and placed very well in the competition. This is an excellent performance with loads of clarity, but also the right observation of musical expression. Absolutely nothing wrong with it. But just for fun, let's compare this to an older recording of Scarlatti by an absolute genius. Less precise, but wow. This is Leo Brouwer with K. 544.

I didn't review any of the vast mass of mediocre performances and didn't happen to stumble across any of the really awful ones--if I had, that would have felt cruel!

Any thoughts from my commentators?

UPDATE: I just ran across this clip from a few years ago by Xuefei Yang playing some music from Latin America. Just to show that you don't have to be from Napoli to play Paganini or 18th century Leipzig to play Bach--you can be Chinese and be a master of Latin American style. This is really excellent:

Friday Miscellanea

Because the Friday Miscellanea used to be a lot more light-hearted and then things got very dire.

* * *

Now back to our usual message of woe: Spotify officially demonetises all tracks with under 1,000 streams. See, this is why I don't stream (apart from YouTube). It is my conviction that much of the best art and music is found on the less-travelled paths, the less well-known artists. So the way the big corporations have stepped into our lives--oh and big governments too--has not been a blessing.

According to a Spotify blog post, 99.5% of all streams on the platform are of tracks that have above that many plays, with the platform claiming that these tracks will now earn more as a result. 

This week, United Musicians and Allied Workers shared a post on X which suggested those numbers could be wildly overstated, arguing that 86% of all content on Spotify will now fail to meet the criteria for royalties based on play count.

* * *

The New Neo runs a really interesting blog and one of her specialties is dance: You may never have heard of Vladimir Vasiliev, one of the greatest male ballet dancers who ever lived.

But even on videos you can see the tremendous height of Vasiliev’s jumps. In this video the camera angles are sometimes odd, and I have no idea what sort of surface he’s on. It looks as though it could even be concrete, which would be awful. But no matter; Vasiliev soars to a height surprising. Keep in mind that the year was 1969 and ballet technique back then was nothing like as advanced as today. And yet most of today’s dancers can’t hold a candle to him

* * *

This is a follow-up to an item posted a few weeks ago about the dire situation of the Victoria Conservatory of Music. This story is about the music program at another institution in the region, Vancouver Island University: VIU's music program should not be closed

We are shocked and dismayed upon learning that action is being taken to dismantle the music program at Vancouver Island University.

We believe this is short-sighted, as music is one of the most lucrative degrees to attain for so many reasons. We can attest to the success of this program, as we are both graduates from VIU’s former Malaspina College two-year jazz diploma.

We have made international careers in the music industry as multi Juno-award winning conductors, performers and producers, in part due to our formative years at this institution.

Read on for the details of the very successful careers of the writers. They close by saying:

We believe that there is a strong market in the institution to have a robust body of students who want to be trained to enter the ever-growing and changing Canadian music industry, whether in education or professional arts careers in music.

VIU is the perfect place for this to happen. Nanaimo has always had the potential to be a culture magnet and has had growth in this area because of VIU’s music program.

Closing this program will definitely shutter culture in the Nanaimo region, period.

I'm posting this because, as with the Victoria Conservatory of Music, I have a personal connection. For a couple of years, when the school was just a two-year college, myself and a flute professor drove from Victoria to Nanaimo once a week to spend the day teaching private students at the school.

I'm not sure that these kinds of appeal can be successful, though. The argument the writers make does not quite jibe with reality. The truth is that these two individuals are the exception, not the rule. The truth is that most graduates of this music program and ones at the Victoria Conservatory of Music and the University of Victoria will not have successful international careers--and that is what you have to achieve to make a decent living. Typically, graduates move into related fields like the public school system, arts administration or even out of the arts entirely. A tiny percentage, like myself, continue as performing musicians and make a living. Mind you, it likely won't be a "decent" living!

Why is this? Vancouver Island, British Columbia and Canada generally provide thin and poor cultural soil for any music apart from folk, popular and country. This is not surprising as they were only recently colonized. The very first Canadian composer who was not an immigrant from Great Britain, Murray Adaskin, only came into his career after the Second World War. Incidentally, Adaskin's parents were Jewish immigrants from Latvia. Classical music in Canada (with, as always, the exception of Quebec) has been supported by a tiny percentage of native-born Canadians and a significant number of immigrants from Europe, especially from Germany and Austria. As the proportion of these in the population diminishes and that of immigrants from Asia, Latin America and Africa increases, the support for classical music will continue to diminish.

The only real and reliable support for the rather expensive art form of classical music exists in societies where a very large proportion of the population love the music and attend performances. That in turn will open the possibility of lucrative careers for students of music in those societies. That's how the causality works. You can't create the markets by setting up schools to train musicians who graduate with nowhere to go. It is instructive to note that both the authors of the above article live and work in the US.

* * *

Loony item of the week: How Our Music Affects the Earth.

While it's well known that factors like transportation, agriculture, and fashion use up resources and contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, less time is devoted to considering how the music industry as a whole plays a role in impacting the environment. It can be easy to forget that something we cherish so much can also be a part of the problem.

The rise of streaming services has led to lower consumption of records and CDs, and therefore less plastic packaging. Such tangible methods of music consumption may be more obvious in their effects on the environment, but streaming is harmful in its own way. A collaborative study between the University of Glasgow and the University of Oslo found that in 2000, when CD sales were at their highest, music consumption in the U.S. generated 157 million kilograms of greenhouse gases. It requires huge banks of servers which store the files that must be accessed every time a person plays a song. Each retrieval uses energy, which in turn generates carbon emissions.

Obviously civilization itself is a danger to the environment...

* * *

A Russian expatriate based in Germany: A Conductor Who Believes That No Artist Can Be Apolitical

Now in his third season as the opera house’s music director, Jurowski, 52, is attracting the kind of adoration from the Munich public that was routine under Kirill Petrenko, who left in 2021 to lead the Berlin Philharmonic. But Jurowski is not merely winning over audiences; he has maintained the Bavarian State Opera’s reputation as one of the finest — if not the finest — companies in Europe while pushing its repertoire in new directions and rooting his artistry in political awareness.

“We classical musicians tend to keep ourselves way from politics,” Jurowski said over lunch in March. “We always say that the music should be apolitical. Music can be, and art can be, but people who are making art should not be apolitical. At a certain point it becomes not about politics, but about ethics.”

Read the whole thing to see how he negotiates the conflicting needs of aesthetics and politics.

* * *

And here is composer David Bruce talking about Dilla Beats:

 There is actually a mainstream classical example of a micro rhythm. The traditional performance of a Viennese waltz is to play the first beat short, the second beat long and the third beat medium. Or you could think of it as playing the second beat early. And of course there is the whole panoply of effects of the French inégale.

* * *

Now for some envois. Here is Vladimir Jurowski conducting Mahler:

And for an authentic performance of a Viennese waltz you likely can't do better than the Vienna Philharmonic:

Don't see any other good envoi possibilities in this week's items so I guess I get a free throw. We haven't mentioned the Swedish symphonic composer Allan Pettersson for quite a while. Here is his Symphony No. 6:

(That's for people who find Bruckner just too jaunty and superficial!)

Three Philosophy Channels on YouTube

One of the great things about YouTube is that you can educate yourself--for free--in just about any area of life. Though I would stay away from the "guitar in ten easy lessons" clips. I have learned a great deal in the area of philosophy on YouTube, so here are some people I follow in philosophy. No particular order. First up is Jeffrey Kaplan a super bright and crisp thinker that has an elegant and clear presentation and teaches philosophy in the US. Can you figure out how he manages to write backwards so fluently? He has lectures on a myriad of subjects including why physicalism is not possible. Here is his intro to philosophy:

 Next up is Victor Gijsbers who teaches philosophy in the Netherlands. I found his introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus to be very helpful when I was first trying to get into it.

And finally, Woan Ni, a philosophy student at the Sorbonne who has some of the most delightful philosophy videos. Here is one on Wittgenstein.

Today's Listening: François Couperin

 

Today's Listening: A terrifying transcription for guitar

This is Kazuhito Yamashita playing his transcription of Pictures at an Exhibition by Mussorgsky for solo guitar. Yes, I know, it is impossible. But I saw him play it in Toronto in the 80s so, obviously not. I even used to own a copy of his transcription, published in Japan.

 

Today's Listening: Bruckner

The first movement is 28 minutes long and the second movement even longer. But he manages to squeeze all four movements into less than an hour and a half. Remarkable performance by the Berlin Philharmonic. But what I find most remarkable is that the great Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache conducts it from memory. How can you possibly memorize an hour and a half of orchestral music this monumental? Plus he might have a few other works in his memory.

How to practice

You know how if you ever let anyone see how you do sit-ups or push-ups or planks or whatever, the first thing they say, invariably, is "you're doing that all wrong!"? And then you change your technique but still the next person says "no, that's not how you do it." So you should never let anyone other than your coach, if you have one, see you exercise.

Similarly, it is probably a bad idea to let anyone other than your teacher see how you practice guitar. And now I'm going to demonstrate why. Here is a clip of Alexandra Whittingham practicing:

 And I'm going to say "Alexandra, you're doing it all wrong!" Now Ms Whittingham is undoubtedly a more accomplished guitarist than I am--after all I retired from the concert stage a long time ago, and she is a fine musician and technician who has won major international competitions. But still, this is a very bad way to approach a new piece. As Itzhak Perlman said in a video once, if you practice the wrong way, it takes twice as many hours to undo it. This is true. Exactly how you approach a new piece is really important. Hacking away at it like this is obviously not a good approach. There is no point in doing this arpeggio before you even learn the notes of the chords.

I am reminded of that axiom from Biology 11: "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." In this context, it is the idea that in some ways for some pieces, they are built up a bit like how music developed historically. Without wandering off into the weeds, what I mean is that for a lot of pieces, like this one, instead of just hacking away at it, trying to sight-read it as it lies on the paper, a better approach is to reduce the texture to just the harmonies--play it as simple chords. Then you can more easily play just the right notes and connect them to what comes before and after. I learned this from Oscar Ghiglia.

Once you have all the harmonies clear, you can add in rhythm and then melody. She feels like she doesn't have time to do this, but honestly, you don't have the time to screw it up! What she is learning here is all the wrong stuff: how to misread the notes, go back and forth, and constantly interrupt the flow.

I don't mean to pick on Ms Whittingham, as I said she is an excellent guitarist and we have all been in situations where we are pressed for time and hack away at a new piece. But still... If I were a pianist I would probably have picked one of the clips of Tiffany Poon:

(But she is better at it. Guitarists are notoriously bad sight-readers.)

For different pieces there are different approaches. For a fugue or anything contrapuntal, obviously you want to read the voices individually. For many pieces you want to learn the melody first. Learn what to leave out: ornaments, fioratura, tricky rhythms. Learn the bones first, then put on the flesh and last of all the clothes and makeup.

Tiffany Poon, by the way, is no great shakes as a sight-reader. Experienced pianists (and violinists, etc.) can play pretty much anything at sight. First time. That is how all movie soundtracks are recorded. They are done in one two and half hour session. What you hear was most likely played once! That's what those guys get paid for. And yes that includes guitarists who do studio work. I once worked with a very gifted singer who could sight-read early music from the original notation. I kid you not.

Accents

We in the music world use accents all the time, in both our performances and in our notation. Here are some:

 But the English-speaking world has decided that not only will we eliminate all accents from written English (yes, we used to have some like this "noël" to indicate that there were two syllables. Similarly in "coördinate.") But that has all been declared obsolete. And we eliminate all accents from non-English words even when they are crucial. Take this example from a recent blog post:

• Apple is laying off 700 workers, including the entire team working on the Apple Car, which Apple still denies ever working on. (9to5Mac)
  
  What exactly do you put on you resume when you worked for a decade on a project that was never officially acknowledged and never produced any real-world results?
  

In the second paragraph there is a missing letter which makes it even harder to understand. This is how that paragraph should appear: "What exactly do you put on your resumé when you worked for a decade on a project that was never officially acknowledged and never produced any real-world results?"

The word is "resumé" with three syllables, meaning your curriculum vitae as opposed to the quite different word "resume" meaning to go back to doing something you were doing before. Totally different words distinguished only by the acute accent. How is this difficult? The accent changes the pronunciation and the meaning. If you know any French you constantly run into places where French words are used in English, shorn of their accents and therefore essential aspects of their pronunciation and meaning.

Yeah, I know that train has left the station, the ship the pier and the horse the barn, but really, it seems that all the battles worth fighting are ones that need to be revived. Call it a renaissance of lost causes. Or maybe an "early grammar movement" like the Early Music Movement. That turned out pretty well.

3800 Posts!

As of this morning, there are 3,800 posts on The Music Salon and 13,005 comments. Thanks to all who have commented and keep it up! I don't think I have ever put up Berlioz' colorful and charming Harold in Italy. Here is a performance by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony with viola soloist Antoine Tamestit and conductor Eliahu Inbal.

Friday Miscellanea

This is a view from the UK: The love that dare not speak its name and is it ever dire.

We have reached a point where the pendulum has swung so far the other way that classical music is struggling to maintain a foothold at all on some university music courses. If any academic were to propose a degree course based entirely around classical music — and I imagine few would dare — they would be regarded as eccentric at best, politically dubious at worst.

This is the nub of the embarrassment. Classical music is no longer simply something that people enjoy listening to, playing, studying and writing about; rather, it has been intensely politicised. The relentless elitism barbs have already done a great deal to turn people off classical music, but in recent years these historically illiterate insults have morphed into something even worse, as the elitism stereotype has merged with wider debates about equality in ways that are making the classical music world very edgy indeed.

But you need to read the whole thing. The writer traces the path of the downfall of classical music from the 70s and 80s when it was very well-attended. But I find it hard to believe that pure classical music courses have nearly disappeared from universities in the UK. They are certainly widely present in Canada.

* * *

What changed Rick Beato's life--and mine:

I think the very first Bach recordings I owned were Switched-On Bach and Christopher Parkening's recording of the Chaconne on guitar.

* * *

I don't know whether to laugh or cry: Top musicians among hundreds warning against replacing human artists with AI. Aren't these the same folks that have been using drum machines and Autotune for years?

More than 200 musical artists — including heavy hitters such as Billie Eilish, Katy Perry and Smokey Robinson — have penned an open letter to AI developers, tech firms and digital platforms to "cease the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists."

* * *

Here is something on a rarely-discussed topic: The Team Effort Behind One of Classical Music’s Greatest Hits. Due to time pressures and physical disability, Gustav Holst relied on a close circle of pianists and copyists in his compositional process:

“The Planets” was composed and orchestrated between 1914 and 1917, and was first performed for the public in 1920. During that six-year period, he relied heavily on a group of supportive women whom he later referred to in the dedication to his opera “At the Boar’s Head” as “my scribes.”

HOLST WAS A BUSY MUSICIAN when he began to think about “The Planets.” In addition to composing, he juggled work at three different institutions: Morley College, James Allen’s Girls’ School and St. Paul’s Girls’ School. He formed a strong attachment to those places, and his catalog reflects that, in pieces like “Brook Green Suite,” written for St. Paul’s junior orchestra while he was hospitalized toward the end of his life and titled after the school’s location in Brook Green, Hammersmith.

His activities were complicated by lifelong bad health. In particular, Holst had suffered since childhood from neuritis in his hands, first affecting his ability to play the piano — he later opted for the trombone — and later making him struggle with the more laborious aspects of composing. Those included copying, part-writing and orchestration, tasks that, in a time before digital engraving or photocopying, required “a huge amount of physical effort, and that took an awful lot of time,” the music historian Leah Broad said in an interview.

* * *

Picking up on a topic a few posts back: Puccini’s ‘Butterfly’ and ‘Turandot’: More Than Appropriation

This plain brown music box is therefore central to the ambivalence that lately surrounds Puccini, “Madama Butterfly” and “Turandot,” and the amorphous label of appropriation that has been applied to both. It reminds us that Puccini, who was always searching to endow his scores with “local color,” didn’t just compose exotic-seeming, faux-Asian tunes for his operas, but also sought out actual Asian examples. These works are tributes to the curiosity about other cultures — the desire to blend your traditions with others’ and tell stories about more than just yourself — that has animated art for as long as humans have been making it.

It’s helpful to remember that we are dealing here with Italian operas about Asia, not with Asian operas. I think audiences understand this distance even without specific directorial strategies that emphasize it. But such techniques can be effective; the Met’s sleek and lacquer-shiny current production, originally directed by Anthony Minghella, affectingly represents Cio-Cio-San’s son with a Bunraku puppet, constantly surrounded by operators draped in black.

* * * 

It’s All in the (Video) Game: Composers Embrace a Growing Industry

Horowitz and Looney want to tell you about the vast game frontiers attracting a disparate array of composers, from aspiring students looking to break into the industry to established artists versed in jazz, contemporary classical music, songcraft, and electronica. It’s a dominion where composition intersects with cutting-edge technology powered by an economy that dwarfs Hollywood.

The music created to accompany and enhance the quests, missions, adventures, and world-building that unfolds in games doesn’t stay in the digital realm. “It’s weird to say, but the new American Songbook that kids want to play comes from this game music,”

Not being a gamer, I think I missed this whole trend. There is also a new book: The Theory and Practice of Writing Music for Games.

* * *

 Alex Ross explains the age of the multi-tasking maestro: Conductors Had One Job. Now They Have Three or Four

"I love my three orchestras,” the twenty-eight-year-old Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä said the other day on WQXR, during a broadcast from Carnegie Hall. Mäkelä was leading an all-Stravinsky concert with the Orchestre de Paris, of which he has been the music director since 2021. The other orchestras in question are the Oslo Philharmonic, which he has led since 2020, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, where he holds the title of Artistic Partner. In 2027, Mäkelä will become the chief conductor of the Concertgebouw, which would appear on any shortlist of the world’s finest ensembles. No conductor in modern history, not even the lavishly hyped Gustavo Dudamel, has ever risen so quickly to the peak of the profession.

* * * 

Our first choice of envoi is obvious: The Planets by Gustav Holst.

And, of course, the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 by Bach:

And we should give a listen to Klaus Mäkelä. Here he is with a tight, disciplined and dynamic Shostakovich Symphony No. 7:

Today's Listening: Thomas Adès

 

How to have a good comment section

Even though I often don't agree with the assumptions of both the news and editorial sections of the paper, I read parts of the New York Times most mornings. This morning I ran across something that relates to why the comment section on this blog tends to work quite well: The Nobel Prize-Winning Professor Who Liked to Collaborate With His Adversaries. Here is the relevant quote:

Professor Kahneman saw such a dynamic as “angry science,” which he described as a “nasty world of critiques, replies and rejoinders,” and “as a contest, where the aim is to embarrass.” As Professor Kahneman put it, those who live in that nasty world offer “a summary caricature of the target position, refute the weakest argument in that caricature, and declare the total destruction of the adversary’s position.” In his account, angry science is “a demeaning experience.” That dynamic might sound familiar, particularly in our politics.

Instead, Professor Kahneman favored an alternative that he termed “adversarial collaboration.” When people who disagree work together to test a hypothesis, they are involved in a common endeavor. They are trying not to win, but to figure out what’s true. They might even become friends.

For the context, read the whole thing. The basic idea is to have respect for people who disagree with you and you will usually find that they will return the respect. The payoff is that you will both get closer to some truth. In the whole nearly thirteen year history of this blog I have only had to ban two commentators. Years ago they got into a ferocious argument about Narciso Yepes that was very much tangential to the original post. They refused to desist so I banned them both. On one other occasion I banned another commentator and deleted his comment simply because it was obscene and insulting. And that's it! In thirteen years and nearly 13,000 comments. For the internet that must be some kind of record?

In the world of music and aesthetics we recognize that there is always a lot of subjectivity and objective truth can be elusive so it benefits all of us to respect contrary opinions.

So, thanks to my commentators for recognizing this and for making the blog a better place. And do not water down your opinion as it may be most valuable in its strongest iteration.

Not sure what a suitable envoi would be, but how can you go wrong with a Mozart piano concerto? Maurizio Pollini just passed away, so let's hear his playing the Piano Concerto no. 23:

 

Hearing, hearing as, and interpretation

Wittgenstein's rabbit/duck example

I'm introducing this post with a famous example from Wittgenstein of the difference between seeing and seeing-as that has some interesting applications in music. When you look at the above picture you see a simple line-drawing. But you can see it as two different animals, a rabbit or a duck. There is a difference between seeing and seeing-as.

There are musical applications because we can both hear and hear as. Take theory class for example: the professor might play two chords and ask "which one do you hear as the tonic?" And what about this progression? Composers can, with context, make it obvious what chord is the tonic and what the dominant. But they can also make it ambiguous and in the case of a modulation from one key to another, we may only hear something as a tonic in retrospect.

Music adds the interesting element of temporal context to the hearing-as aspect. Wittgenstein uses that term "aspect" to describe, say, the two different interpretations of the drawing. In one aspect it is a duck and the other a rabbit. In popular music sometimes there is an ambiguity between tonic and dominant--or is it sub-dominant? If your usual context is Classical style, then a pop song might sound like it is ending on the wrong chord.

But the hearing-as issue extends far beyond simple harmonic function. For example, a passage may be played and heard as introductory when near the beginning of a piece, like this from the Bach Chaconne.

But might have a quite different expressive effect when heard several minutes later in the piece where its function now is to recall the opening and prepare for a modulation to the parallel major:

This example is close to the duck/rabbit one as the two passages are, at first, identical. But we can expand the concept quite a bit. The Chaconne is a splendid example of organic unity in music. The whole piece, roughly fifteen minutes in length, is based almost entirely on this eight measure theme:

Click to enlarge

A chaconne, at this point in music history, usually consists of a set of variations over a short harmonic progression, often in the form of a repeating bass line. Due to the length of this piece, while there are many instances of the same bass line, Bach often departs from it. The basic harmonic progression persists, however. But each variation brings out difference nuances or aspects of the theme. For example, the example above is the whole of the eight measure theme. Notice that it starts on the second beat and ends on the first. The progression is i, iv, V6/5, I, VI, iv, i6/4, V6, i with a slightly different and more conclusive cadence in the second half.

When we hear it at the beginning it has an introductory feel but with two what we might call sub-texts: there is just a hint of the French overture (especially if you add some ornaments as I do) and a hint of the sarabande, which emphasizes the second beat, as this theme does. That French overture feel continues with a couple of variations emphasizing a dotted-note figure:

But there are lots of sub-texts or aspects in play. For example, a bit later Bach alludes to a typical element in fugue texture by inserting a multi-voice stretto, most unusual in a piece for solo violin:

I am using examples from my transcription for guitar, but apart from some added bass notes it is identical with the violin original. Later on there are allusions to dance:

And in this passage I hear an extreme expression that has the feeling of a lament, communicated through chromaticism and texture:

Then, modulating to D major, this passage sounds to me like a deeply meditative chorale:

Bach uses variation form and technique to reveal different possible aspects of the basic harmonic progression, ones referencing different musical styles and genres as well as different kinds of emotional expression. I'll stop here, because I am still learning the piece and haven't thought about later sections.

What I do when I play the piece is look beyond the notes to see the different aspects that they reveal. In that sense I am interpreting the piece according to different aspects. Of course, someone else could see entirely different aspects.

Here is a performance of the piece by Jean Rondeau on harpsichord:

Statistics!

We are coming up on three big milestones in The Music Salon: any day now we are going to hit 13,000 comments, a little later, 3 million page views and a bit after that, 3,000 posts. The blog has been much more successful and fulfilling than I imagined it would be. But it has certainly been a group effort. On a few occasions I have called on frequent commentators to help out with posts on people like Takemitsu and Messiaen and the comments have always been an engine of knowledge and judgement. In the early days the blog was more basic and educational, nowadays it leans more towards culture, aesthetics and philosophy, but even Russian web spiders aside, it has a solid, regular readership.

Here is a little reward for your frequenting the blog: Prokofiev, Violin Concerto no. 1 with Hilary Hahn.

 

Musical Roots

Categorizing music is usually a futile and annoying pursuit so I am going to talk about some music without naming a style or genre. Last night I got the urge to listen to some music I haven't heard for quite a while--this is one of the good things about YouTube, you can indulge almost any urge. Here is what I listened to:

What these clips all have in common is that they are live performances with no lip-syncing, no backup dancers, no fancy pyrotechnics and, most importantly, they blend music traditions with creativity. One of the roots of Cream was the blues of Robert Johnson and the second and third clips also reflect that. PJ Harvey is a different kettle of fish, but her unique creativity also uses some traditional elements such as the driving energy of rock and roll. Jimi Hendrix also has some obvious roots, though he developed the electric guitar in new directions. I like this music because it is what I think of as the "real thing." These days one gets the distinct impression that the whole point of music is to attract listeners, sell tickets, influence fashion and most of all, make money. All that is ok, but it is not what I think of as the "real thing." And oh boy, do I ever want to avoid using the word "authentic!" But to me, the difference between this kind of music, which is just straight from the shoulder and damn the torpedoes, and the other kind of music, which is contrived, self-conscious, aimed at manipulating certain effects, insincere, phony and substanceless is perfectly obvious. And I don't think it is just a matter of taste, or is it?

What do you think?

"Always look on the bright side of life!"

On this special Friday, why not have two miscellanea? I have noticed a lot of gloom lately so in order to counteract it, let's recall that lovely quote from Horace Walpole: "Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel." So here are some things that I found particularly joyful this week:

• Sam Bankman-Fried, financial fraudster, was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison (marked down from a possible 110). He is likely to find himself in a low-security prison where he will be able to pursue things like ceramics and playing the harmonica (really!). One should be aware that he was very influenced by utilitarian moral philosophy growing up--an excellent example of how badly that usually works out.
• From the unintended consequences file: when Twitter banned Donald Trump from its site he founded a new social media site called Truth Social. This week it went public resulting in a windfall for Mr. Trump of approximately $5 billion.
• Some especially good news for those worried about climate change: it happens that, not only are we not in a particularly warm period in Earth's climatic history, we are actually still coming out of a recent ice age, the Late Cenozoic.
• Beyoncé does country: I find this image particularly enjoyable for its sheer artificiality. That's not a possible configuration of a horse's legs while running, you can't possibly sit on a horse that way, especially while it is running and good grief: 
  
  
  
• And finally I discovered something interesting about humour. Sometimes my sense of humour gets a bit out of hand and I apologize for it by saying it is just "Canadian humour." I was teasing a couple of businessmen about selling their company this week and they said, "That's not Canadian humour, that's Irish humour!" I never knew!

And here's that song:

Friday Miscellanea

Interesting article: The Six Cello Suites (BWV 1007-1012); Mstislav Rostropovich, cello. As a guitarist, I don't play the originals, but I am very familiar with these pieces, both on cello and because they are often played on guitar--especially the prelude to the Cello Suite No. 1. I have not heard the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich play them, so should be interesting. This blogger, Evan Goldfine, intends to listen to every piece by Bach and blog about them. Let's see if he makes it through all three hundred cantatas!

* * *

And here is a nightmare: THIS ‘SECRET’ COMPOSER IS BEHIND 650 FAKE ARTISTS ON SPOTIFY. HIS MUSIC HAS BEEN STREAMED 15BN TIMES ON THE PLATFORM

The existence of fake artists on the platform is now a well-known fact: Music released by musicians under pseudonyms, who have no real online presence other than their Spotify accounts and plays, and whose music can be found on many of Spotify’s key playlists dedicated to ‘mood music’.

This is the musical equivalent of Cheez Whiz. Useful, I suppose, but not something you would want to actually listen to.

On Tuesday (March 19), DN published yet another expose on Spotify’s fake artist problem, and reports to have identified the musician “behind the world’s most listened to network of fake artists on Spotify”.

DN reports that this individual is a composer from Sweden named Johan Röhr, whose music, it says, has been released on Spotify under “50 composer aliases and at least 656 invented artist names”.

I know you want to hear something. This is Adelmar Borrego's Go the Distance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ-QjrvmDW0

Reading on we discover that he makes over $3 million a year from royalties. I honestly don't know what to say about this. But it confirms me in my blanket rejection of anything that resembles background music--lint for the brain.

* * *

DEI continues its ravages through the fabric of our society: Lost in music: why piano competitions must address the gender gap, The subhead gives a nice summary:

All five finalists at the last Leeds piano competition were male – a far from unique competition scenario. Now, the event’s CEO explains how they are dismantling barriers for female musicians

Now of course I am very much against the harassment of women (or anyone) and especially the use of non-disclosure agreements to protect powerful people, but to be brutally honest, the truth here is overpoweringly likely to be that the only "barrier" to female entrants to the competition were that they did not play as well as those who did become finalists. And yes, I did read the article, but it had the odor of special pleading all the way through. Just how much pushback am I going to get for stating this uncomfortable truth? The writer describes many ways in which they are going to try and adjust the "imbalance" but I suspect that nothing less than a 50% quota will be satisfactory.

If there were even the slightest attempt to be fair, there should have been a debate between the last judges in 2021 and the new CEO. This new policy is after all claiming that the male finalists did not earn their places but only achieved them because of mysterious "barriers" to female entrants. That sounds like slander to me.

* * *

Some excellent music criticism from Alex Ross as he reviews two concerts: The Escher Quartet and Igor Levit Test Musical Limits

No equine units were needed outside Alice Tully Hall the other day when the Escher Quartet—Adam Barnett-Hart, Brendan Speltz, Pierre Lapointe, and Brook Speltz—played the Bartók quartets in a single, three-and-a-half-hour concert, under the aegis of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Still, it felt like a significant occasion. The Eschers, who have been playing together since 2005, when they met at the Manhattan School of Music, were nodding to another august group, the Emerson Quartet, which disbanded last fall after a remarkable forty-seven-year run. No one seems to have attempted a Bartók-quartet marathon until the Emersons undertook one, at Tully, in 1981; they repeated the feat seven times in the course of the following two decades. The Eschers were mentored by the Emersons and often emulate their elders. The emphasis is on technical perfection, formal cogency, and unity of interpretive approach. Underscoring the continuity is the fact that David Finckel, the Emersons’ longtime cellist, is a co-artistic director of the Chamber Music Society. 

Three days before the Eschers occupied Tully, a no less striking marathon took place at Carnegie Hall. The thirty-seven-year-old German pianist Igor Levit has pulled off many memorable exploits in his career—performances of Beethoven’s final sonatas and of Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues in single sittings; a rendition of the Goldberg Variations in the midst of a Marina Abramović installation; a twenty-hour-long immersion in Satie’s endlessly repeating “Vexations.” But the program he brought to Carnegie may have been his most audacious to date. It consisted of Hindemith’s Suite “1922”; the first movement of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, transcribed for piano by Ronald Stevenson; and Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, transcribed for piano by Liszt.

I have a ticket to hear Igor Levit in concert in Salzburg in August.

* * *

Here's some news from the world of science: Why some types of music make people want to dance more than others

A trio of neuroscientists at Aix Marseille Université in France, working with a psychologist colleague from the University of Connecticut in the U.S., has discovered what they believe to be the mechanism in the brain that controls the desire to dance prompted by music. In their study, published in Science Advances, the group conducted three separate types of studies to explore the brain's reaction to music and a subsequent desire to dance. 

The researchers suggest their work cumulatively shows that the sudden desire to dance prompted by music with a medium amount of syncopation is the brain's attempt to anticipate beats among the syncopation—it causes the body to literally lean forward repeatedly.

* * * 

 Now for some listening. First up a brisk interpretation of the Cello Suite no. 1 of Bach by Mstislav Rostropovich:

Here is the winner of the 2021 Leeds Competition, Alim Beisembayev from Kazakhstan in the competition finale:

Here are the Escher Quartet with the first movement of Bartók's String Quartet no. 2:

And finally Igor Levit with the Piano Sonata no. 30 by Beethoven: