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: