The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

 Here is a pretty good piece by Castelnuovo-Tedesco, very well played:

What Do Elliott Carter and Morton Feldman Chat About?

 

Today's Listening: Frescobaldi

This is a fun clip: a very young Oscar Ghiglia playing the "La Frescobalda" variations by Frescobaldi for Segovia in 1965. And everyone is wearing a jacket and tie!

 

Some Famous Guitarists

In most professions it is unethical to comment directly on the competence of one's colleagues. In some it is prohibited by law. Since it has been decades since I retired as a performer, I think it might be safe to offer some thoughts. Plus, I have the qualifications. So here are some personal reflections on a number of famous guitarists.

Andrés Segovia is the grandfather and godfather of the classical guitar in the 20th century. His career spanned nearly the whole century, from his first concert in 1909 to his last in 1987. I don't think anyone, even long-lived performers like Arthur Rubinstein, has had a longer career. When I was a young student he was often poo-pooed for his "romantic" approach to composers like Bach. Well, why not, when Segovia was born Johannes Brahms was still alive. But Segovia's strength was the powerful musical character of his interpretations which won over audiences world-wide. He could fill any hall. I only saw him once, in Montreal in 1977 when he sold out the biggest concert hall in town, over 2,000 seats. They even put another two hundred chairs onstage, just leaving him a slim avenue to enter and exit. And he played eight encores! We don't need to discuss the details as they are easily listenable on CD and streaming. The next generation, fine technicians though they were, simply did not have the gift of distinctive interpretive character. Segovia had a small circle of disciples that passed on his influence to following generations.

Julian Bream was not one of those disciples, but hewed his own path. Like myself, he started on a more popular instrument before switching to classical guitar. He was a spectacular performer with a gift for brilliance and inspired many composers to write for guitar. Bream did almost as much for the lute as for the guitar and was also a world-wide artist, though he tended to fill the middle-sized halls, not the biggest ones. I saw Bream several times in concert and met him once. His strength was his ability to inspire and interpret newer works, especially by British composers, and older works for lute. He was not an outstanding concerto performer as I never sensed that he was comfortable interacting with the orchestra.

John Williams is a bit younger than Julian Bream, but certainly the other pillar of that generation. He had the great advantage of having a guitarist father who got him into Segovia's master classes when he was barely into his teens. Williams owes this to his solid technical skills which were superior to any other guitarists of the time. He had a particular gift for the rhythms and timbres of Spanish music and was the greatest concerto player--possibly ever as few guitarists get much chance to perform with orchestras these days. Williams was also the first to do a really capable integral recording of the Bach lute suites. Yes, you can put scare quotes around "lute" if you want, but while we know that they were mostly not written for lute, they are a solid item in the guitar repertoire, so let's just accept that. I only saw him in concert once, the premiere of Leo Brouwer's Toronto Concerto, but was able to chat with him at the after-party.

Narciso Yepes was a great artist of the guitar and a kind of nemesis to Segovia. He broke away from that stream of tradition by playing a ten-string guitar and by being a truly original artist. He excelled in classical repertoire by Sor, in Scarlatti, in concertos and in Spanish music. He had a clarity of execution that few other artists matched. I had the good fortune to hear him a couple of times in concert and to meet him backstage.

Leo Brouwer might not make it onto most people's lists of the great guitarists of the 20th century, but in my view he most certainly was. These days he is more well-known as a composer, but in the 60s and 70s he was a formidable concert artist. I had the opportunity to hear him once as well as to study with him on a couple of occasions. Most unfortunately, his career was cut short by an injury to his right hand index finger. Before then, he was the finest interpreter of Baroque music on guitar. He recorded an album of Scarlatti that is simply unequalled, certainly on guitar. He studied composition with Karlheinz Stockhausen in the 60s but what is less well-known is that he also studied performance practice with Gustav Leonhardt.

Manuel Barrueco came on the scene as a virtuoso hurricane in the late 1970s with an album of etudes by Villa-Lobos that was simply at an extraordinary technical level. The story is that John Williams picked up a copy of the vinyl disc and was so impressed that he took it out to Bream's place in the country to play it for him. I heard Barrueco in concert a couple of times and hung out with him a bit when we had him come to town to give a master class. Like most virtuosos at that level, he wasn't the greatest teacher because I honestly believe he had difficulty understanding why someone might have difficulty with some passages. Fantastic guitarist, he later did an extraordinary album of Albéniz transcriptions. He recorded a lot of Bach and Scarlatti, but I never warmed to it, because what I heard was steely, cold technique and not much else.

Pepe Romero is another great technician, but he also has deep roots in the folk music of Spain. His family emigrated to the US in the 1950s, but they originated in Malaga. Pepe is an outstanding interpreter of any music from Spain and Latin America and recorded an absolutely lovely album of Bach. He has an unrivaled warmth of tone and an extraordinary virtuosity, exhibited in his recordings of the concertos of Joaquin Rodrigo. His only serious rival for best Rodrigo interpreter is John Williams. I had the good fortune to take Pepe's month-long master class in Salzburg and I have heard him play on many occasions.

Oscar Ghiglia, who just passed away this past March, had only a modest career as a performer, but was probably the most influential teacher other than Segovia himself. He was one of that inner circle of guitarists that also included José Tomás and Alirio Diaz. I spent two summers studying with him in Banff and he was the only guitar maestro I met of whom it could be said he really had a deep understanding of the music. On the other hand, he rarely mentioned technique. Oscar said to me once that being a famous guitarist is like being one of the steers in the front of a stampede--at any moment you can be run over and disappear into anonymity. 

There are many other guitarists worth mentioning like Vladimir Mikulka, Ida Presti and so on, but while fine players they did not achieve the same level of recognition. I might do another post on them and on the younger generation.

Just one piece to listen to: Segovia's 1959 recording of the Chaconne by Bach.

Friday Miscellanea

Music is good for one who is melancholy, bad for one who is mourning,

and neither good nor bad to one who is deaf.

--Spinoza, Ethics II/208

* * *

The top story: Chechnya bans all music deemed too fast or too slow

Minister of Culture Musa Dadayev announced the decision to limit all musical, vocal and choreographic compositions to a tempo ranging from 80 to 116 beats per minute (BPM) at a meeting Friday, the Russian state new agency TASS reported.

Wow, I think that eliminates everything other than Andantino through Allegretto. So, no more Bruckner. Or tarantellas.

* * *

Ok, now here is an important question: Music vs. Lyrics. I have to admit, most of the time, unless it's Schubert or Schumann, I don't pay a lot of attention to the lyrics. Especially if it's hip-hop.

...the way I see it, you’re either a music person or a lyrics person. I am a music person. I have artists that I think of as my favorites, but probably couldn’t sing a song of theirs all the way through confidently at karaoke. However, I will know each note of that sax solo. My sister, born only a couple of years after me, is a lyrics person; she can listen to a song literally once and know all the words.

There are a bunch of quotes from various people you have never heard of.

* * *

BBC unveils 2024 Proms lineup: Daniel Barenboim, Daleks and disco. Uh, I think that's a hard pass. I would rather have Schoenberg, Weinstein and Lea Desandre.

* * *

This is, uh, cool: BARBARA HANNIGAN BECOMES CHIEF CONDUCTOR. Of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, that is.

The Canadian soprano and conductor has just been appointed Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra from August 2026.

She says: ‘Always curious, courageous and creative, the players of the ISO are dedicated to working at the highest level. Their technical excellence co-exists alongside their wonderful imagination. In working with the ISO, I have felt the desire and possibility, for the first time, to consider a position as Chief Conductor. It is a matter of creative chemistry and collective timing that drives us to embark on this new path, together.’

I'm a fan.

* * *

‘People are forfeiting meals’: musicians on the struggle to financially survive

“Brexit had a massive impact. We used to do festivals in places like Italy and Spain. They pay musicians better there. In England, venues won’t provide food. But over there, it’s just expected: you give them a place to stay and you pay them properly because they’re doing a job. But it’s not the culture here.”

Manchester-based producer Dean Glover has been recording music for 10 years. “When I started,” he says, “musicians could live comfortably and have the spare money to put into their music. One thing that’s changed is that there are some artists I work with who work a 9-to-5 minimum wage job, and they will literally forfeit meals or necessities for that week if it means they can continue putting money behind their music.”

Glover, 35, is concerned that these musicians are being priced out of career success. “I’ve seen it myself many times – a band with all the flash equipment, with the van, with the crew, with all these opportunities, and that’s just because their financial background has enabled them to pursue it.”

Hey, not just career success, but priced out of the grocery store. It's not just musicians--a lot of folks are suffering, but musicians are always closer to the edge.

* * *

AI can now generate entire songs on demand. What does this mean for music as we know it?

I’ve been working with various creative computational tools for the past 15 years, both as a researcher and a producer, and the recent pace of change has floored me. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the view that AI systems will never make “real” music like humans do should be understood more as a claim about social context than technical capability.

The argument “sure, it can make expressive, complex-structured, natural-sounding, virtuosic, original music which can stir human emotions, but AI can’t make proper music” can easily begin to sound like something from a Monty Python sketch.

Forgive me for being massively uninterested in any music not produced by and for human beings. So what if it "sounds just like" music a human being would make? That's like receiving a phone call that sounds "just like" one from your family or lover but was synthesized by a computer.

* * *

How did we turn this into a scientific question: Why Do People Make Music?

Music baffled Charles Darwin. Mankind’s ability to produce and enjoy melodies, he wrote in 1874, “must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed.”

All human societies made music, and yet, for Darwin, it seemed to offer no advantage to our survival. He speculated that music evolved as a way to win over potential mates. Our “half-human ancestors,” as he called them, “aroused each other’s ardent passions during their courtship and rivalry.”

Other Victorian scientists were skeptical. William James brushed off Darwin’s idea, arguing that music is simply a byproduct of how our minds work — a “mere incidental peculiarity of the nervous system.”

That debate continues to this day. Some researchers are developing new evolutionary explanations for music. Others maintain that music is a cultural invention, like writing, that did not need natural selection to come into existence.

Ah, right, by ignoring that it is an art form created to give expression to aesthetic ideas and pleasures. Instead it is an anthropological quirk of evolution. Read on to see how music is all about multicultural diversity, but somehow at the same time, illustrating universal truths of evolution. Isn't it funny how "science" always seems to turn up conclusions that match up with the narrative demanded by the mainstream culture?

* * *

On doing all of something: THE VIRTUOUS CYCLE

Playing all six Bartók string quartets in an extended performance in one thing, but what about Mozart's piano sonatas or Haydn's symphonies? Canadian pianist Stewart Goodyear sometimes performs all 32 Beethoven sonatas in one day, breaking only for meals. Paul Lewis does a similar thing with the composer's piano concertos, generally playing the five works over multiple concerts running over several days, as he did at the Proms in 2010. (He's about to perform this series with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra in Christchurch Town Hall from 19 May.) The Proms is partial to a composer cycle – in 2015 Yo-Yo Ma played all of Bach's Suites for solo cello, while, in the same year, Osmo Vänskä conducted a series of all seven Sibelius symphonies. (Perhaps, in this Bruckner bicentenary, we might see a symphony cycle this year?)

When a performer tells us something about what they are playing we tend to just believe them. However:

Shostakovich's string quartets are autobiographical; they reflect a part of his musical self that perhaps could not be shared in other work. We're playing a diverse, contrasting programme, but everything comes back to Shostakovich's twelve quartets.'

I question the "autobiographical" claim, plus, Shostakovich wrote fifteen string quartets.  

I did a post on the composer version of this: doing a whole bunch of iterations in a single form or genre, like Scarlatti's 555 keyboard sonatas, or Haydn's over one hundred symphonies, or Bach's three hundred or so cantatas. The Salzburg Festival was doing things like this when I first attended as a student way back when. Alfred Brendel did all the Schubert piano sonatas in a series of concerts and the Alban Berg Quartet did all the Beethoven string quartets in another series. They don't seem to do that any more, though they did do the massive project of producing all twenty-two Mozart operas in 2006.

 * * *

Let's kick off our envois with a Schumann lied: "Ich grolle nicht."

Here is Barbara Hannigan singing and conducting Stravinsky:

The Jerusalem Quartet just got cancelled out of a couple of concerts in Amsterdam, so let's have them playing the Quartet No. 13 by Shostakovich:

Today's Listening: Rodrigo

 Joaquin Rodrigo's Three Spanish Pieces is one of the most challenging sets of works for guitar. Until Julian Bream recorded them, everyone avoided them like the plague, except for the Fandango, which Segovia had recorded. The middle movement, the Passacaglia just looked weird and technically impossible so no-one played it. Then Bream found the right tempo, fairly slow, and did a terrific recording so everyone knew what to do. The last movement, the Zapateado, is just technically fearsome. But the biggest musical challenge has always been the Passacaglia.

Here is a fine new recording by Italian guitarist Cristina Galietto:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OUUrxCWtf0

Quid est ergo tempus?

That's the beginning of the famous Augustine quote about time:

Quid est ergo tempus? Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio.

Which translates as: 

What, then, is time? I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled.

This is to introduce short reviews of two books on time: the phenomenology of Husserl and  Chanas on Dilla Time.

These two discussions of time are about as utterly different as imaginable. So I will give a brief account of each followed by what we might learn setting them side by side. First of all, what is phenomenology? It is a school of philosophy, started by Edmund Husserl and others that Wikipedia introduces as follows:

Phenomenology is the philosophical study of objectivity and reality (more generally) as subjectively lived and experienced. It seeks to investigate the universal features of consciousness while avoiding assumptions about the external world, aiming to describe phenomena as they appear to the subject, and to explore the meaning and significance of the lived experiences.

The two main divisions in philosophy are Anglo-American analytic philosophy and Continental (i.e. European) philosophy and phenomenology falls into the latter camp. Husserl is focussed on how we experience time and, in a certain sense, this is also interesting to J Dilla.

Husserl's discussion of time-consciousness is in the book shown above, dating from 1928. Here is how the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes it:

Finally, we should note that on Husserl’s view there is a further important dimension to perceptual experience, in that it displays a phenomenological deep- or micro-structure constituted by time-consciousness (Husserliana, vol. X, XXXIII; also see Miller 1984). This merely seemingly unconscious structure is essentially indexical in character and consists, at a given time, of both retentions, i.e., acts of immediate memory of what has been perceived “just a moment ago”, original impressions, i.e., acts of awareness of what is perceived “right now”, and protentions, i.e., immediate anticipations of what will be perceived “in a moment”. It is by such momentary structures of retentions, original impressions and protentions that moments of time are continuously constituted (and reconstituted) as past, present and future, respectively, so that it looks to the experiencing subject as if time were permanently flowing off.

I'm offering that because, frankly, I found it so difficult to make sense of Husserl's book I doubt I could summarize it. Here are some sample quotes from early in the text:

The evidence that consciousness of a tonal process, a melody, exhibits a succession even as I hear it is such as to make every doubt or denial appear senseless. [p. 23]

One cannot discover the least trace of Objective time through phenomenological analysis. The "primordial temporal field" is by no means a part of Objective time; the lived and experienced now, taken in itself, is not a point of Objective time, and so on. Objective space, Objective time, and with them the Objective world of real things and events--these are all transcendencies. In truth, space and reality are not transcendent in a mystical sense. They are not "things in themselves" but just phenomenal space, phenomenal spatio-temporal reality, the appearing spatial form, the appearing temporal form. [p. 24]

I read all 126 pages of the main text and it doesn't get any clearer. Husserl was very influential, one of the most important founders of phenomenology and a big influence on Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. I may have a look at them at some point. But the main problem I have with this approach is that I find it almost impossible to connect the ideas proposed with either music as I perceive it or as it is practiced in the "Objective world of real things and events" and therefore, really, of little interest. Your mileage may vary.

Dilla Time is a far more fun read and it is an excellent introduction to the whole culture of black music, rap and hip-hop. It delves into the technical tools used by contemporary musicians in these fields and gives insights into the culture of sampling, beats and the collective nature of these kinds of creativity. So in that sense it is a terrific book and I was very pleased to have read it. I don't have any quibbles except that the concepts of rhythm dealt with aren't inspiring to me in any way. What I am most interested in, rhythmically, are things like the suspension of beat, unmeasured flow, also meter and the interesting effects of hemiola on several levels. Also, long term rhythmic direction and so on. But these are just personal preferences.

What would be the most contrarian envoi I could post? That's easy, an unmeasured prelude by Louis Couperin:

What's an unmeasured prelude? That's when you just play what you see, but without beats or measuring durations. No beat in other words.

Tribute to Alexander Dunn 1956 - 2024

Alexander Dunn

I don't do obituaries here as a rule, leaving that to Slipped Disc, but I want to honor a fine guitarist and friend. Alex Dunn was an outstanding student of Pepe Romero and we met in Pepe's master class in Salzburg in 1988. He, along with Randy Pile (editor of the guitar music of Joaquin Rodrigo), were private students with Pepe in San Diego. Alex was an excellent guitarist with superior technical and musical skills. He was also an authority on the French guitarist and lutenist Robert de Visée on whom he did his doctoral dissertation.

In 1990, when I decided to take leave of Victoria, British Columbia, I recommended Alex for both my teaching jobs, at the University of Victoria and the Victoria Conservatory of Music where I was head of the guitar department. I was back there last May to attend premieres of my String Quartet No. 2 and had lunch with Alex whom I hadn't seen for years. He showed his generous nature when afterwards he published this on his FaceBook page:

What a pleasure to see Bryan Townsend, the founder of the University of Victoria guitar program. With typical determination and hard work, Bryan built up an exceptional program from scratch that has been an honor to carry forward.

Over lunch I asked Alex if he had any idea that he would still be here, over thirty years later. He said, "god, no!" Sadly, over the years the environment has steadily worsened for the classical guitar. I had eight students at the university and the conservatory had several guitar teachers and dozens of students. Now, the conservatory features less and less classical music as it moves to a pop music focus. And the university just has a couple of students.

Alex kept up an active performing career. Just in December he asked me to look into possible venues for some concerts in Mexico with his guitar quartet. In fact, he asked me to sit in as the fourth guitarist for their concerts in Mexico. Sadly, I was unable to help him out and the Mexican leg of the tour, projected for this coming Fall, is not happening.

I'm happy to have known Alex, a fine, dedicated musician who brought a lot of good into the world, but sadly received little reward or recognition.

 I think this is a better representation: Dark Angels by Peter Maxwell Davies with soprano Susan Young.

Crushing Culture and Creativity

I've had an iPad for years and I find it enormously useful. But I don't know what horrifies me more: the new Apple ad for the iPad, or that there are people who are not horrified by it.

https://twitter.com/tim_cook/status/1787864325258162239?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1787864325258162239%7Ctwgr%5Eca49a6766bc3f625e21a2ca05e57221e5e71b436%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Finstapundit.com%2F646716%2F

It is so smug, disdainful and contemptuous of not only the materials that creative people typically work with, but creative people themselves. Trying sketching on an iPad was one of the things that drove me away from digital technology. iPads may be useful for the usual internet diversions and for promoting, recording and videoing creative activities. But that's it. If you want to actually create something, you need to get your hands dirty with some of those things crushed in the commercial.

That poor guitar...

Friday Miscellanea

Consciousness is the source of all things and of all conceptions. It is a sea ringed about with visions.

--Oskar Kokoschka in 1912

The instruments out on the extremes, really high or really low, are always fun:

* * *

Some statisticians weigh in: Who wrote the music for In My Life? Three Bayesian analyses

Over the years, Lennon and McCartney have revealed who really wrote what, but some songs are still up for debate. The two even debate between themselves — their memories seem to differ when it comes to who wrote the music for 1965’s “In My Life.” . . .

Mathematics professor Jason Brown spent 10 years working with statistics to solve the magical mystery. Brown’s the findings were presented on Aug. 1 at the Joint Statistical Meeting in a presentation called “Assessing Authorship of Beatles Songs from Musical Content: Bayesian Classification Modeling from Bags-Of-Words Representations.” . . .

The three co-authors of this paper — there was someone called Mark Glickman who was a statistician at Harvard. He’s also a classical pianist. Another person, another Harvard professor of engineering, called Ryan Song. And the third person was a Dalhousie University mathematician called Jason Brown. . . .

[Regarding In My Life,] it turns out Lennon wrote the whole thing. When you do the math by counting the little bits that are unique to the people, the probability that McCartney wrote it was .018 — that’s essentially zero. In other words, this is pretty well definitive. Lennon wrote the music. And in situations like this, you’d better believe the math because it’s much more reliable than people’s recollections.

But read the whole thing because it's complicated...

* * *

Yet another reconstruction of Ancient Greek Music. Imagine what a reconstruction of Michael Jackson might sound like if a scholar tried to recreate it two thousand years from now if all the recordings and scores were lost. Yep.

* * *

Ted Gioia has another of his really catchy essays: All Bad Music Will Eventually Disappear. What he means is just that, over time, the winnowing process of musicians and listeners choosing over and over what to hear, filters out the poor quality music in favor of the good quality music. Which we already, knew, of course. Unfortunately, what he doesn't mention is that the corollary is that, at any given moment in time, most music is crap. But we knew that too.

* * *

I've been aware of this musician for some time and saw her perform in Salzburg a couple of years ago: ‘I’m not humble. I expect miracles’: why violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja wants to blow you out of your seat

Something should happen in a concert,” says Patricia Kopatchinskaja. “I don’t know what. But every time, I’m expecting a miracle. I’m not very humble about this!” If audiences have learned to expect inspiring and surprising things from this restless and unpredictable violinist, that’s nothing compared to the standards she sets for herself. On stage, Kopatchinskaja is an impish presence, a coiled spring that could unwind in any direction. In conversation, she talks seriously and softly, yet every so often an idea forms that especially pleases her and her eyes get a mischievous glint – a look that, in performance, means she and her fellow musicians are indeed about to make something happen.

Oh yes, she is a violinist, but when I saw her she was conducting and performing the voice part in Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire!

* * *

Well, there's one great title I can't use because John Zorn grabbed it:

* * *

This seems a very sensible approach: STEPHEN HOUGH: NO PHONES, PLEASE, BETWEEN BARS 123-176; 185-199…

I'm really excited to be playing Brahms 1 next season with one of my favourite orchestras: 

@TheCBSO

 I'm happy to be filmed on phones by the audience except for the following bars when I really need to concentrate and could be distracted:

1st movement: 91-118; 123-176; 185-199; 226-341; 352 to end;

2nd movement: 14-19; 21-27; 29-30; 33-58; 71 to end;

3rd movement: 1-36; 46-98; 122-167; 188-238; 275-333; 337-368; 376-410; 418-426; 434-442; 448 to end.

Or, all the measures in which he is actually playing.

* * *

Notice of an important anniversary: Barenboim: What Beethoven’s Ninth Teaches Us

Music, if you study it properly, is a lesson for life. There is much we can learn from Beethoven, who was, of course, one of the strongest personalities in the history of music. He is the master of bringing emotion and intellect together. With Beethoven, you must be able to structure your feelings and feel the structure emotionally — a fantastic lesson for life! When we are in love, we lose all sense of discipline. Music doesn’t allow for that.

But music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments. It might be poetic, philosophical, sensual or mathematical, but it must have something to do with the soul.

* * * 

For those of you who have been waiting, here is a different performance of John Cage's 4'33 for orchestra.

* * *

I tried to read this from the New York Times as it seemed an interesting ontological or aesthetic question, but it got all down into legal issues so I got bored: What Is a Song?

In many music copyright disputes, one of the main issues is originality, or how the law sets a boundary between creative expression that is the property of a single artist versus material in the public domain. Last year, a federal jury in New York heard hours of expert testimony about whether a syncopated four-chord sequence in Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” was distinctive enough that Sheeran’s song “Thinking Out Loud” infringed on it — or whether, as Sheeran’s lawyers contended, those parts are generic “building blocks” that no musician can own. The jury ruled in Sheeran’s favor, finding that he and a co-writer had created their song independently and not copied from Gaye’s 1973 classic.

But a key question running through that trial was about something even more fundamental: whether the core of “Let’s Get It On” — and what is protected by its copyright — is determined by the sounds we hear on its original recording, or the notes written on yellowing sheet music stored at the Library of Congress.

What we need is a forensic musicologist!

* * *

After all that we need some good music. First a Vivaldi concerto for an unusual pairing of soloists:

 Claudio Monteverdi: Magnificat

And Kazuhito Yamashita with the Caprichos de Goya by Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Yes, all Italian music today.

Here's an interesting question

This is, apparently, the kind of question you might have to answer if you are a philosophy student at the Sorbonne:

Is Beauty limited to perception?

This is exactly the kind of question that philosophers in the Austro-Anglo-American analytical tradition really hate. Oh, by the way, the name of that philosophical stream would be simply "Anglo-American" if it were not for one single figure: Wittgenstein. He started out influenced by Frege, but then went to Cambridge and studied with Bertrand Russell so now he is a huge part of the analytical stream. But back to the question: This is looking at the old saw "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" from a different angle. Yes, of course, Beauty is in perception, but is it limited to perception? I think not because when I am composing or playing I am certainly seeking to express Beauty in some way. And we have to define Beauty pretty widely as it has to include all the contrasts that occur in order to create moments of Beauty. Beauty is not simply sappy prettiness. So when I am attempting to create Beauty is it simply perception? Well, no, it is imagination and recollection and experimentation and serendipity and all sorts of things that we would not normally categorize as perception.

Your thoughts? And to listen to while you are mulling it over, here is a sarabande by Jacques de Saint-Luc:

Friday Miscellanea

I cannot hear the music of existence

I have not been given the power to imagine it

--André Frénaud (1907 - 1993)

Is this the End of Days or the Beginning of Days: Jerry Seinfeld is reading Marcus Aurelius.

"... he talks a lot about the fallacy of even thinking of leaving a legacy—thinking your life is important, thinking anything’s important. The ego and fallacy of it, the vanity of it. And his book, of course, disproves all of it, because he wrote this thing for himself, and it lived on centuries beyond his life, affecting other people. So he defeats his own argument in the quality of this book.... I really have adopted the Marcus Aurelius philosophy, which is that everything I’ve done means nothing. I don’t think for a second that it will ever mean anything to anyone ten days after I’m dead...."

I'll think that we really are turning around as a culture if I hear that Taylor Swift is reading Aristotle...

* * *

Another one of those articles telling us what science tells us about music: What We Know — and Want to Know — About the Physicality of Music

The headline: “Music scientists find the connection between music and emotion: ‘Our neurons dance to the same rhythm.’” The subheading: “Three independent scientific studies analyze how the human brain transforms notes into feelings, a mystery that has intrigued psychologists and musicologists for decades.”

More and more, science is allowing us to understand our attraction to music and what it does for us — and consequently, what makes us human.

Aw, hell, I just remembered I have never learned anything interesting from any of these scientific studies of music. So, you know, I pretty much don't care what they have to say. But that term "music scientists" is actually really funny. Next up, "poetry scientists" who aim to discover what makes us, well, poetic.

* * *

This is way more interesting: Like living beings: how instruments damaged by war and disaster found new life thanks to a luthier’s noblesse oblige

In 1996, after the war, the Sarajevo orchestra was in residence at the Farfa Giubileo Festival near Rome. Injeian went to Italy to restore its war-torn instruments. The work was done over a couple of weeks at a monastery nearby where he performed the ’surgeries.’ In Injeian’s words, ’Instruments should be treated as living beings. For the Sarajevo Philharmonic some instruments needed to be treated rather like field dressings for soldiers. Some needed more and received further restoration. Repairs were often grafts, just like skin grafts and prostheses made as are such optimal solutions for humans, according to their need.’ Injeian sees his work centered around the humanness of the instruments.

War-damaged cello

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A Fierce Soprano Arrives at the Met in ‘Madama Butterfly’

In the famous aria “Un bel dì,” or “One fine day,” every line seemed considered without being mannered, as if Grigorian’s Cio-Cio-San (the actual name of Butterfly) were thinking through her feelings in real time: joy, hope, defiance. She grabbed Suzuki by the shoulders, trying to shake sense into her, before shaking herself out of blissful reverie. You believed her screams, and feared the hand she raised in anger.

This revival of “Butterfly,” which will be simulcast in cinemas on May 11, has another notable debut in the conductor, Xian Zhang, the music director of New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. She led with brisk tempos, sensitive to Puccini’s shifts between Orientalist whole tones and love-drunk chromaticism, and reserving eruptive forces — including a pounding, death-driven drumbeat — for maximal effect.

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I'm going to offer this next item with absolutely no comment: John Cage Would Want You to Listen to Columbia’s Pro-Palestinian Protesters

John Cage, the influential composer and artist, is dead. So it’s technically impossible to know with absolute certainty how he would feel about the pro-Palestinian encampment at Columbia University.

But the question emerges after New York Times columnist John McWhorter, a music humanities and linguistics professor at Columbia, wrote that he was forced to stop students from playing Cage’s 4’33”—a seminal work that’s effectively four minutes and 33 seconds of silence (though Cage-heads might disagree with that description)—because of the demonstrations. According to McWhorter, that silence, which would have made room for the chants outside, would have inflicted cruelty on his students, some of whom he identified as Israeli and Jewish American.

But I think it is safe to say that no-one has the ability to read John Cage's mind, especially since he is dead.

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What is Slavoj Zizek's favorite music? Schoenberg.

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Why am I not surprised? Establishment Corruption in Big Art

"Art is the only unregulated business that I know of in the world outside of the illicit drug business since the public had to be protected from criminal abuses in the stock and real estate markets over a hundred years ago," said Volpe.

Well, and big government itself, of course. 

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An excellent long read from the New York Times about a project by Kirill Gerstein: The Wartime Music of Debussy and Komitas, Still Resonating Today

Now comes Gerstein’s latest project, “Music in Time of War,” a recording that is expansive in its program and packaging: a 141-minute double album of works by Claude Debussy and the Armenian composer and ethnomusicologist Komitas Vardapet, accompanied by a 174-page book of conversations, essays and photographs that situate the music deep in its historical context. 

During the early days of the pandemic, as Gerstein thought more about Debussy’s final years, he also revisited a pile of scanned piano music by Komitas (1869-1935) that he had received from an enthusiastic member of the French-Armenian diaspora 20 years earlier. A pairing of late Debussy and late Komitas made for an intriguing fit: They were two composers who, for a brief time before World War I, existed in the same Parisian orbit and channel the darkened spirit of the age in their art.

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From the new Madame Butterfly at the Met:

Here is an etude by Debussy from the new Gerstein album:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ugyb98fmBM

And piano music by Komitas:

And of course, Zizek's favorite Schoenberg: Gurrelieder: