Friday, February 23, 2024

Friday Miscellanea

Juan Gris, Violin and Guitar

"If it is true that Mahler's music is worthless, as I believe to be the case, then the question is, what I think he ought to have done with his talent. For quite obviously it took a set of very rare talents to produce this bad music."

--Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 67e

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I was delighted to stumble across this post at On An Overgrown Path: Not everyone climbs mountains. I'm somewhat nonplussed to discover that the title of the post is actually a quote from, well, me.

On his excellent The Music Salon Canadian blogger Bryan Townsend wrote:

On an Overgrown Path tells us There is no mass market for classical music. I'm pretty sure of two things regarding that: first, I have known this ever since I got into classical music, so it ain't news and two, that is a big part of the appeal. Not everyone climbs mountains and not everyone listens to classical music.

Bryan's thoughtful response supports my thesis that for two decades classical music has been chasing a non-existent mass market, as exemplified by the strategy of turning BBC Radio 3 into a clone of Classic FM complete with 'info-commercials'. But, and that is very important but, we cannot overlook that classical music is losing traction with audiences to an alarming extent. 

Bryan Townsend is right when he says 'Not everyone climbs mountains and not everyone listens to classical music'. But what happens when the lack of new mountain climbers means that the essential guides and Sherpas disappear to seek other work? What happens when the essential fixed ropes start failing due to lack of maintenance? What happens when the routes to base camps are closed down due to lack of traffic? What happens when essential funding for the climbing infrastructure is withdrawn due to the lack of mountaineers?  What happens when the mountains are dynamited by BBC Radio 3 to make them easier to climb?

This is exactly what is happening with classical music.

Yes, most sadly true: as the audience dries up, the schools of music begin to shut down, there are fewer role models for young musicians and composers and so on. My comment was just from an individual perspective.

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I'm not sure this is indicative of the above, but English National Opera sacks singers during interval

Singers and musicians at the English National Opera were handed redundancy notices midway through the final performance of its acclaimed production of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Formal redundancy letters, which came following a long-running funding crisis at the company, began to be sent out electronically shortly before the curtain for the final performance of the opera’s run had gone up.

But many of the performers only saw the details of their redundancy during the interval, when they opened the notifications backstage.

Despite this, they went back on stage to finish the performance, winning plaudits from the audience at the London Coliseum.

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Music theory from a mathematics perspective: How many melodies are there?

The equivalent of a writer staring at a blank page, wondering how to fill it, is a composer staring at the 88 black and white notes on a piano wondering how to compose a melody that's never been heard before. How can one possibly take the eight notes of a standard scale and write a brand new melody when so many great melodies have already been written? Perhaps they've all been taken!

So, to counter the fear of there being no new melodies, I thought it would be interesting to examine the number of melodies available to a composer looking at his blank stave to see how many there potentially are.

Follow the link for the answer. But the bottom line is:

So, a mere ten note melody will produce over 75 billion potential melodies of 13 notes within the octave! It's going to take our composer a while to work his way through those.

Of course, composers don't work like this!

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The enjoyment of classical music is dependent on listening skills. If you have only ever listened to three minute pop songs you are not going to find a Bruckner symphony very easy to appreciate. Running parallel with this is the issue of reading skills, which seem to be in similar decline: Why Joe College can't read.

Students also lack reading stamina: They have trouble staying focused on a challenging text. In middle and high school, they read short passages to prepare for tests, but rarely whole novels, Kotsko writes. He links to Peter Greene's lament that students' knowledge of literature "is Cliff's Notes deep, and they may never develop the mental muscles to work their way through a long, meaty piece of literature."

Learning "to follow extended narratives and arguments" is a valuable life skill, Kotsko argues. Young people who can't engage with complexity won't be prepared for the world.

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One wonders Is Philosophy Self-Help? Well, certainly lots of it isn't. But from the titles at least, some of it is, or purports to be.

In the past decade or so, there’s been a flowering of philosophical self-help—books authored by academics but intended to instruct us all. You can learn How to Be a Stoic, How to Be an Epicurean or How William James Can Save Your Life; you can walk Aristotle’s Way and go Hiking with Nietzsche. As of 2020, Oxford University Press has issued a series of “Guides to the Good Life”: short, accessible volumes that draw practical wisdom from historical traditions in philosophy, with entries on existentialism, Buddhism, Epicureanism, Confucianism and Kant.

After mulling over several conceptual models, the author concludes:

Philosophy seeds new concepts, novel understandings—as it might be, alienation, ideology, structural injustice; new ways of comprehending freedom, status, power. Philosophical argument serves more to nurture these concepts and give them life than to establish theorems critics can’t dispute. In Murdoch’s words, “the task of moral philosophers [is] to extend, as poets may extend, the limits of language, and enable it to illuminate regions which were formerly dark.”

Which is not terrible, but it avoids the whole question of truth which is, despite everything, still rather important.

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An economist recently called classical music the greatest (nearly) free gift in life, so let's have some examples. First up, a Mozart string quartet from Wigmore Hall:


 Sibelius, Symphony No. 2:

My new favorite harpsichordist, Jean Rondeau with some terrifying Scarlatti:

And a completely different kind of terrifying: the first movement, De profundis, from the Symphony No. 14 by Shostakovich, sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXuJWbVti2I

Poem by Federico Garcia Lorca.

14 comments:

  1. This is a rather meaty miscellanea.

    1. Poor Gustav as we beat up on him one more time. This was several years ago we discussed this so for new readers, the issue I have with Mahler is at higher or meta levels of the music. I think this is also where his contemporaries had the most angst. To clarify, at the level of individual phrases or paragraphs there is little wrong with Mahler's music IMO. Where it goes wrong is more what I would call reflexive self pointing, otherwise known as mugging for the camera. The way he repeats or emphasizes his phrases (points to self-consciously) makes it prolix, bombastic and overwrought for the nature of the material. To take an example, listen to the second movement of Symphony 9 where two simple Laendler tunes are flogged mercilessly for 17 minutes. There is no depth, just endless minor variations and re-orchestrations. Yes Mahler's works would be significantly better if they were cut by a third to a half. There is also a meta level of taste and balance where I also think his contemporaries were bothered. For example in the opening minutes of the Funeral March of Symphony 2 he has at least half a dozen cymbal crashes. Someone please have the boldness to remove all cymbals from Mahler's works.

    2. Re musical infrastructure. This was part of another extended conversation during the pandemic. Nothing has changed for the better. Given the useless or malign nature of the music organizations' leadership it is hard to be optimistic, at least in the Americas.

    3. All of us are alive without permission and always redundant to someone somewhere.

    4. Disciplined thinking. Yes pandemic attention deficit disorder is going to be a major issue to classical music going forward. I suppose the bon bons will survive. I would point out though that what unites Machaut, Josquin, Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Richard Strauss, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Webern, Holst, Messiaen etc etc is not a music style per se but the use of formal procedures to organize and notate the music. If that survives anywhere there is still classical (formal) music.

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  2. Thanks, Maury, for a rather meaty comment!

    Re Mahler, Kingsley Amis delivers a very similar critique to yours in his novel Girl, 20.

    Re your #3, which item is this responding to?

    Re your #4, yes, formal procedures and a system of notation. I think that Taruskin says somewhere that we seem to be moving into a "post-literate" phase in music history.

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  3. Even before cellular phones I saw creens as corrosive of attention span, as early as 1981 as MTV came out (back then I was a young rocker about to escape it's disintegration by reorienting myself around the Grateful Dead), I felt the continuous fast changing camera shots eclipsed listening and moved even visual attention into seconds or even just fractions thereof. Luckily I soon got sober and went to college where I majored in history, which taught me to sequester in the library and read books. But marriage followed, delaying my complete break with television until about 2000. Once the internet and especially social media arrived, I saw the same attention span disintegration but this time, especially as cell phones proliferated, much of situational awareness also disappeared.

    Is this the ultimate explanation for societal post-literacy and attention-deficit-shallowness in popular culture? In a dialectic of causation but also manifestation, I think mass literacy has never been a sustained or sustainable attribute of society because most people are not driven to continuous learning or questioning, but rather seek entertainments and other sensory pleasures to the detriment of philosophy. The educated --nevermind contemplative-- caste of society has always been relatively small and detached from the masses. Mountain climbers have to become comfortable in their loneliness, or if actually doing so, not loneliness but just solitude. I truly have no one to talk to at work and my social circle is quite small, a tiny fragment of the society I enjoyed as a boozing rocker, though ultimately much more to my liking, though I can't quite say "to my satisfaction."

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  4. 1. Never read Kingsley Amis as I was never a standard novel reader. But I suppose great minds think alike.

    3. the para related to the comically named redundancy notices (pink slips).

    4.Well there was that post years ago about music professors in the UK I believe who thought music notation (and maybe the alphabet) is a post neo colonial harbinger of doom and oppression. However even in the Dark Ages some people could still read. Wasn't HG Wells' The Time Machine positing the same fate?

    More seriously I suppose one could work with computer generated sounds and arrange and modify them into a formal music structure that the computer could notate for you. There are already programs that capture MIDI input and turn them into notation. They are filled with mistakes of course and I think are limited to standard notes rather than electronic music sounds that are not scale tones. The master used to be judged through the clerk copyist, but now they're judged by their computer output files. I'm sure many writers of the past 75 years or so have used dictation machines. If every poem or fiction is going to just be a song lyric or movie script it's probably good enough.

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  5. Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim is possibly the funniest novel ever written. And a quick read.

    Someday we will have to arrange a meet-up of all the Music Salon regulars so we can lift a glass and not listen to Mahler!

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  6. Will Wilkins: I think mass literacy has never been a sustained or sustainable attribute of society because most people are not driven to continuous learning or questioning, but rather seek entertainments and other sensory pleasures to the detriment of philosophy. The educated --nevermind contemplative-- caste of society has always been relatively small and detached from the masses.

    Despite the segmentation of high literacy you point to, there has been quite a bit of fruitful osmosis between the two groups over the centuries. The problem comes when the top couple of percent of literate and historically aware persons shrinks drastically as it did in the European Dark Ages. At present, even though you feel isolated in your proximate life you can still have contact with people more to your taste through TV radio and the web. If that were shuttered, we would be in real difficulty now since literateness and artistic professionalism gets almost no societal respect anymore.

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  7. Bryan you've convinced me to get Kingsley Amis Girl 20 and Lucky Jim. Comic novels are a bit different animal than standard narrative fiction.

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  8. It's striking how when I'm around people only a handful of years younger it feels like there is a big generational gap. I didn't have a smartphone until late in my teens, whereas they more or less grew up with these devices. The attention just isn't there, and they come across as constantly stressed and tired yet they seem to do very little. Most of their time gets eaten up by the phone and, without realising, it zaps their energy and curiosity and attention. Even when not staring at it they have their earpods in and are listening to it. A couple of friends recently told me how they spend several hours a day scrolling through 'reels' -- short video clips on instagram, tiktok etc. Until recently I hadn't even heard of reels. I tried it and had to stop, just ridiculously addictive, and got more so as the Machine adapted to my tastes. I don't if this means they won't be prepared for the world, though. It feels like the world is theirs. But maybe I am one of them too and am deceiving myself -- I'm typing this on my phone, after all, late at night...

    Lucky Jim is great -- it even begins with some Dowland! Never read Girl 20.

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  9. Steven, I think you are in absolutely no danger of being sucked into the zombie trap. But I have experienced for myself how addictive those short clips on YouTube can be. I found myself watching a whole string of shuffle dance once. The only thing that saved me was the horrible music--had to turn it off!

    Girl, 20 is about a conductor and his dallying with young women and it has that hilarious take down of Mahler 1.

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  10. wait ... so Adam Kotsko ... the one who said that Agamben couldn't say that a state of emergency to impose a top-down technocratic security state in response to C19 was conceivable within Agamben's own theorizing because governments were taking measures to save lives and not prevent terrorism? I ... wonder if Adam Kotsko himself (and Slate) have contributed to the problems they notice by dint of news aggregating commentary. I don't have to agree with Agamben but the guy can wield his theories however he likes and Kotsko can't just declare "no" after years of attempting to promulgate Agamben's ideas to English-language readers.

    But if you know what Agamben's "state of emergency" thesis even is then it's hard to claim that the only acceptable variant of the state of emergency would be terrorism and not, for instance, deciding to "defeat" a global pandemic.

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  11. Taruskin backtracked his post-literate thesis about two thirds of the way through the Ox, if memory serves. He concluded that classical music is changing, not dying.

    I just slogged through an English translation of everything JOhann Gottfried Herder wrote about music by way of Bohlman. Whew. Not the easiest reading. Ironically what helped me get through it is Herder was a Lutheran pastor and translator so I had enough background in theological and biblical-textual work to get some ideas where Herder's long game was.

    We live in an era in which, ahem, if I may dare to say this, contemporary scholars are so busy telling us what we're supposed to think about writers it can be tough to go to the primary sources and sometimes it takes a while to get things translated. Herder the pastor and translator was not the jingoistic proto-fascist John Borstlap thinks he was ... which is surreal given that Borstlap attempted to make a case that Richard Wagner had some flaws but wasn't proto-Nazi. If Wagner and Schleiermacher are okay in Borstlap's book how on earth is Herder the bad guy for encouraging people to draw upon the folk materials of their own musical cultures to create music rather than do garbage knock-offs of fantasy versions of Greek and Roman epics?

    I'm not saying Herder's easy to read but it's impossible to understand the good and bad points of nascent Romanticism without at least knowing who he was. Taruskin made some good points that we need to study Herder so as to distinguish between what the guy actually said and what his later rabidly nationalist self-appointed fans "said" he said.

    It'd be like ... I'm gonna read Edmund Burke for myself and not just assume that because Bill Buckley said Burke said X that Burke really said X. :)

    I think Kotsko might be overlooking the extent to which newer generations have been hamstrung from being able to think about people like Herder (or Adorno, or Agamben) because they've been told what to think about them so much already they might wonder why they should bother struggling through the primary source materials. A bit of an annoyed tear. I know.

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  12. I am in awe of the breadth of your reading, Wenatchee, but I think I currently have you beat for sheer refractory toughness: I am working my way through a book on propositional logic and set theory in order to better understand the knotty bits in Wittgenstein's Tractatus. And hoping that in the fullness of time this will bear fruit.

    Speaking of original sources, the rub in, for example, the study of the history of music theory, is that the original texts might be in Classical or Alexandrine Greek, Medieval Latin, with modern scholarship in French or German. If you are very, very lucky you might find the occasional English translation, but I was aghast to discover that it would cost $1,200 US to purchase a second-hand copy of the only available English translation of Boethius' De Institutione Musica.

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  13. I am sure you have me beat for sheer refractory toughness, Bryan. :)

    I couldn't resist filming some more stuff this weekend.

    This was originally material I used in a sonata for banjo and guitar.
    https://youtu.be/MU15iHhV_xA

    I also did a little piece in E flat major where a chunk of the little thing features slide playing. If I had my way every classical guitarist in the world would know how to play at least a few simple bottleneck riffs.

    https://youtu.be/KcVzQqSrwR0

    Because classical guitar pieces calling for glass slides can't all be Helmut Lachenmann's Salut für Caudwell. ;)

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  14. I've spent some time learning slide guitar and I've used a slide in a couple of pieces for classical guitar.

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