Friday Miscellanea

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in.

--Leonard Cohen

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We live in very unsettled times and one indicator of this is that I struggle to find any items to share that are NOT contaminated by politics. The long-standing policy of this blog has been to avoid politics with the exception of political policies and events that directly impact the music world. But the context is constantly changing and over the last few years the whole social environment has been politicized to the extent that governments everywhere are intervening in private lives to an extent rarely seen. I won't go on a rant about how is it that government bureaucrats feel empowered to dictate what sort of home appliances you are allowed to purchase or how other government policies make agriculture more and more difficult--farmers in Germany are on strike for this reason--instead I will append comments to items that have an inordinate amount of political content.

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The New York Time has an article on jazz vocalist Linda Sharrock: An Innovative Vocalist Lost Her Speech, but She’s Still Performing

Sharrock’s vocal exclamations have become deeper and more guttural moans than the high-pitched shrieks of her early work with her then-husband, the musician Sonny Sharrock. In the late 1960s, Sonny revolutionized jazz guitar through volume, distortion and feedback while playing with Pharoah Sanders, Don Cherry, Wayne Shorter and Miles Davis. Linda’s approach was no less radical: On three albums of collaborations with Sonny, beginning with their remarkable 1969 debut “Black Woman,” her wordless exhortations included psychedelic sighs, orgasmic yodels and blood-chilling screams, all delivered with an intensity that made “Plastic Ono Band”-era Yoko Ono sound like Anne Murray in comparison.

While I would occasionally listen to this sort of thing when I was a young person, I never found much musical sustenance there. Even less these days. You might investigate for yourself on YouTube. The difference between this and primal scream therapy is what exactly?

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While we are over at the New York Times, here is something interesting: Channeling the Pain of Chinese Immigrants, in Music and Verse

In “Angel Island,” a staged oratorio about the anguish and isolation of Chinese detainees at Angel Island Immigration Station in California, a choir recites a poem about tyranny and misfortune.

“Like a stray dog forced into confinement, like a pig trapped in a bamboo cage, our spirits are lost in this wintry prison,” they sing in Chinese. “We are worse than horses and cattle. Our tears shed on an icy day.”

The poem is one of more than 200 inscribed on barrack walls at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, where hundreds of thousands of people, mostly from China and Japan, were questioned and held — sometimes for months or even years — as they sought entry to the United States in the first part of the 20th century. Their harrowing accounts form the emotional core of “Angel Island,” by the Chinese-born composer Huang Ruo, which has its New York premiere this month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in a staging that is part of the opera and theater festival Prototype.

 Which leads one to ask, does everything have to be about the emotional core of an oppressed person or group? And can we have a name for this new era in art? Despairism maybe?

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I am chagrined to discover that I, a retired sessional lecturer, private scholar and blogger, have higher ethical standards than the president of Harvard.

Ms. Gay’s resignation on Jan. 2 was a result of her maladministration as well as of convincing accusations of plagiarism in her academic writings. (In a New York Times op-ed after resigning, Ms. Gay acknowledged “errors” of attribution and wrote that she had never “claimed credit for the research of others.”) Mr. Ackman underscores that plagiarism wasn’t the main reason he gunned for her: “Had Claudine Gay had a perfect academic record, she’d still be a failed leader at Harvard.” He lists the reasons why he wanted her out: “how she led the institution, how she let antisemitism erupt on campus; how she responded to the 34 student groups; the lack of free speech on campus, the campus culture, the speech codes . . . the DEI department.”

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 Here is a discussion of the reigning ideological conformity found in many places in academia: Welcome to the Conformity Gauntlet!

As in the phrase “running the gauntlet,” the process involves a series of hurdles, challenges, and setbacks you must overcome to reach your goal. In the Conformity Gauntlet, however, these trials have nothing to do with your level of skill, intelligence, or competence, but rather your rigidness in adhering to the ideas and behaviors of the academic ruling class. The idea is to keep dissenters out or at least make them extremely hesitant to dissent, and it works very well.

Not having an academic job, I feel perfectly comfortable dissenting. 

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Here is a review of some recordings from the Guardian with focus on the guitar: Classical home listening: Sean Shibe; French music for two pianos – and Anthony Burgess’s guitar quartets

Capable of playing any type of guitar, on the evidence so far, in any style he chooses, Sean Shibe has returned to the classical tradition for his latest album, Profesión (Pentatone). The title is taken from Profesión de Fe (“profession of faith”), a poem by Agustín Barrios (1885-1944), the Paraguayan composer-guitarist whose singular story is alluded to in the CD notes. His La Catedral is one of the highlights here, along with works by two other South Americans: the Brazilian Heitor Villa-Lobos (12 Etudes) and the Argentinian Alberto Ginastera (Sonata). All were written originally for guitar. Sensuous, virtuosic, beguiling, Profesión draws the listener in, through the range of music as well as the irresistible quality of the playing. Shibe plays a Hauser copy that belonged to the late, great guitarist Julian Bream, a predecessor pioneer in expanding the instrument’s repertoire.

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Here you go: The Real Threat to Classical Music. Here's a sample paragraph:

If classical music were truly dead, as Pleasants already contended 70 years ago, people desperate today to signal their “anti-racist” bona fides or grovel over their wrongthink would probably choose some other cultural target, while those fearful of drowning in a rising sea of barbarism would find a different islet on which to haul themselves ashore. Classical-music critics at The New Yorker and The New York Times, not to mention various opera and orchestra managers and executives from Peter Gelb at the Met to Simon Woods of the League of American Orchestras, have recently indulged in an orgy of self-flagellation for their devotion to this “blindingly white” art form, to quote New Yorker music critic Alex Ross. Yet the very fact of these self-abasing pronouncements from the critical establishment attests to the enduring power of classical music—a power that neoliberal monoculture finds deeply intolerable.

Ah yes, "blindingly white" just like physics, engineering, philosophy, and a bunch of other disciplines. Read the whole thing as the discussion takes in a lot of interesting territory: 

This is a recurring story in cultural history, whether it is the theater of Elizabethan England, the ink painting of the Song dynasty, the sculpture of Renaissance Florence, the woodblock prints of Edo, or the jazz that came out of New Orleans and Kansas City. A school of great artists—and an enduring body of work—emerges out of a fortuitous combination of factors that we don’t fully understand; individual artistic genius is only one of those.

And finally:

Mozart’s and Gluck’s place in the culture won’t be replaced by Joseph Bologne and Florence Price. Nor, for that matter, do Charlie Parker, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, or Billy Strayhorn risk having their central position in the history of great music shoved aside by some minor contemporary of theirs decreed by the commissars of our cultural life to be, for patently non-musical reasons, someone we must listen to. The threat is elsewhere, menacing the music of Bologne and Price as well as that of Mozart, Gluck—and the jazz greats. It lies in the implicit warning of films such as Chevalier or articles such as Ewell’s: that to allow any great art to make, channeling Kierkegaard, a “fool” of one—or even to acknowledge that such a thing as great art exists—risks putting oneself beyond the pale of the politically and socially acceptable. The soundtrack our elites are preparing for us will be ear candy with room only for the thump-thump-thump of algorithm-driven pap—neither dangerous nor subversive.

Ah yes, thump-thump-thump! 

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 Alex Ross alerts us to someone we may need to get to know: The Sonic Revolutions of George Lewis.

George Lewis is one of the most formidable figures in modern music: a composer of international renown, a legendary improvising trombonist, a computer-music pioneer, a professor at Columbia, a stalwart of the Black avant-garde collective known as the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Yet a routine encomium to Lewis’s achievements and influence would ignore the import of his scholarly writings, which resist the usual narratives of individual genius. His 2008 book, “A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music,” is a riveting portrait of communal originality, with the author assuming a background role. Let’s simply say, then, that this genially authoritative figure deserves an extended round of applause. At the age of seventy-one, he is at the height of his productivity; he had seven premières in 2023, in New York, Vienna, and points in between. In a December concert at the Park Avenue Armory, the International Contemporary Ensemble, of which Lewis is the artistic director, played his music on a double bill with a performance by the composer-pianist Amina Claudine Myers, another A.A.C.M. veteran. The ensemble has also recorded “Afterword,” Lewis’s first opera. His second, “Comet/Poppea,” arrives in June, in Los Angeles.

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Let's kick off our envois for today with some Villa-Lobos. This is Sean Shibe playing the Etude #11 from his new album:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hob9vX1RhN0

And here is the Mēla Guitar Quartet with a movement from one of the guitar quartets by Anthony Burgess:

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

Here is a string quartet by George Lewis:

Finally something from that "blindingly white" composer (wearing a pink wig in the movie Amadeus) W. A. Mozart. The String Quartet K. 465 "Dissonance":