Friday Miscellanea

"quid est ergo tempus? Si nemo ex me quaerat scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio."
("What, then, is time? If nobody asks me, I know well enough what it is; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled.")
--Augustine, Confessions XI.14

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 Dr. Johnson refuting Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy of subjective
immaterialism by violently kicking a stone: “I refute it thus!”

You don't get many statues celebrating philosophical arguments, in fact this might the only one. Bishop Berkeley was an Anglo-Irish philosopher who put forth a theory that denied the existence of material substances, postulating instead that we don't have perceptions of anything, we just have perceptions. This is a surprisingly tricky position to refute and Dr. Johnson did so by simply kicking a stone.

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I think of McGill University in Montreal as being a sober and respectable academic institution and not just because it is my alma mater. Pieces like this are one reason why: Mozart’s Music Doesn’t Make Baby Geniuses

There is an alchemy to science. Sometimes, when the conditions are just right, the results of tiny, preliminary studies are transformed into truisms that spread the world over. For example, everyone knows that you’re either left-brained or right-brained… except that that is false. What is true is that some brain functions tend to involve one half of the brain more than the other, but the idea that scientists are left-brained while artists are right-brained is nonsense. Yet, the belief endures. When science goes public, it can become magic.

The Mozart effect is a scientific legend. It’s the idea that playing Mozart’s music to a baby will make them smart. We know it isn’t true. But it started with a nugget of science back in 1993. What happened next is a cautionary tale for how these legends spread. The media half-remembers the study and twists its findings, and the story starts morphing in the telling until it finds a shape the public views as desirable.

This is a story of scientists hounded by the media, trying to evade death threats. It is also about how scientific studies are portrayed as sacred rituals when they fail to replicate.

And then the article gets really interesting! Yes, you have to read the whole thing if only to find out how minimalist composer Philip Glass’ music was unfairly demonized in an attempt to prove a theory. (The term "minimalist" is from the article and no, I don't really agree.) This is a brilliant piece of intellectual history.

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 Here is how one UK student amuses himself: transcribing performances that do not already have a notation, like this cadenza to a Mozart piano concerto:

Hat tip to the New York Times.

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While over at The Critic, Norman Lebrecht does a drive-by of the Chopin Competition: How to win at Chopin

Over three weeks, 40 contenders from around the world play Chopin all day and into the night for the benefit of a half-filled hall and large local television ratings. In the final, half a dozen survivors slug it out for the top slot, egged on by teachers, parents, bus drivers and their own damaged egos, trapped in a remorseless kind of Stockholm syndrome that makes them love their tormentors — the judges, and the contest itself.

One finalist, locked in a toilet with her teacher, is heard weeping hysterically and being ordered to stop if she wants to win. Another is watched over in sleep by his professor, herself a past contestant. A splendid Polish young man thinks he stands the best chance of winning if he has his hair done like Chopin’s; he winds up walking off stage in the middle of the second round, saying something like “I don’t want to do this any more.”

Three Italians maintain a modicum of sanity. One of them recommends, “I would say, whoever wins this competition should spend the €40,000 on a course of psychotherapy.”

My personal take on competitions: they are psychologically brutal and tend to produce generations of robotic virtuosos. Oh, and the best musician never wins.

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A CANADIAN UNIVERSITY SCRAPS MUSIC DEGREE

McMaster University, a public research university in Hamilton, Ontario, has abolished its music degrees.

The degree course began in 1965. The university administration underfunded Music programmes for 40 years, closing its MA program in 2006, according to Paul Rapoport, who taught there from 1977 to 2005 and was Chairman of the Music Department in 1994–95. Now the bachelor degree has also been abolished.

Just between us, I barely knew that McMaster even had a music department...

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NYC’s Metropolitan Opera puts trigger warning on Puccini masterpiece ‘Turandot’ in bow to woke culture

New York City’s famed Metropolitan Opera added a website trigger warning for prospective ticket buyers to Giacomo Puccini’s “Turandot,” informing audiences that the 1926 masterpiece set in ancient China could be offensive.

“It is rife with contradictions, distortions, and racial stereotypes,” reads a program note promising “a discussion of the opera’s cultural insensitivities.”  

“It shouldn’t be surprising . . . that many audience members of Chinese descent find it difficult to watch as their own heritage is co-opted, fetishized, or painted as savage, bloodthirsty, or backward,” the note continues.

Trigger warnings are themselves rife with contradictions, historical distortions and intellectual fetishes. 

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AT LAST, LA WAKES UP TO SCHOENBERG

Arnold Schoenberg’s inventive approach to harmony left a lasting influence on the 20th century. Marking the 150th anniversary of his birth, the LA Phil explores the work of the Austrian-turned-Angeleno composer throughout the season highlighted by two performances of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder conducted by LA Phil Conductor Emeritus Zubin Mehta featuring soprano Christin Goerke (Tove), mezzo Violeta Urmana (Waldtaube), tenors Brandon Jovanovich (Waldemar) and Gerhard Siegel (Klaus-Narr), and speaker Dietrich Henschel (December 13 and 15).

I think it is safe to say that, despite the 150th anniversary of Schoenberg's birth, Los Angeles has not woken up very far. Gurrelieder is a lovely early work that resembles Wagner as much as anyone. Actually waking up to Schoenberg would probably involve programming some later works like the Piano and Violin Concertos, some string quartets, piano music and maybe his opera...

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Alex Ross swoops in with a big piece on Schoenberg: How Arnold Schoenberg Changed Hollywood

Of the thousands of German-speaking Jews who fled from Nazi-occupied Europe to the comparative paradise of Los Angeles, Arnold Schoenberg seemed especially unlikely to make himself at home. He was, after all, the most implacable modernist composer of the day—the progenitor of atonality, the codifier of twelve-tone music, a Viennese firebrand who relished polemics as a sport. He once wrote, “If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.” The prevailing attitude in the Hollywood film industry, the dominant cultural concern in Schoenberg’s adopted city, was the opposite: if it’s not for all, it’s worthless.

Yet there he was, the composer of “Transfigured Night” and “Pierrot Lunaire,” living in Brentwood, across the street from Shirley Temple. He took a liking to Jackie Robinson, the Marx Brothers, and the radio quiz show “Information Please.” He played tennis with George Gershwin, who idolized him. He delighted in the American habits of his children, who, to the alarm of other émigrés, ran all over the house. (Thomas Mann, after a visit, wrote in his diary, “Impertinent kids. Excellent Viennese coffee.”) He taught at U.S.C., at U.C.L.A., and at home, counting John Cage, Lou Harrison, and Oscar Levant among his students. Although he faced a degree of indifference and hostility from audiences, he had experienced worse in Austria and Germany. He made modest concessions to popular taste, writing a harmonically lush adaptation of the Kol Nidre for Rabbi Jacob Sonderling, of the Fairfax Temple. He died in Los Angeles in 1951, an eccentric but proud American.

Read the rest for more of Ross' charming and informative guide to Schoenberg and how his music is being celebrated this year.

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In honor of the refractory Austrian, let's have a whole set of envois dedicated to Schoenberg. First, the Piano Pieces op. 11 from that fertile transitional stage when he was experimenting with atonality but had not yet organized it in 12-tone serialism:

The String Quartet No. 2 is also from this time:

Two later works are the Piano Concerto op 42:

And the Violin Concerto op. 36: