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

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * * 

What is Slavoj Zizek's favorite music? Schoenberg.

* * *

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. 

 * * *

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.

* * * 

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:

Today's Listening: Barenboim, John Williams, Concierto de Aranjuez

 Here is a performance I have not seen before:

What's remarkable about that is that Williams delivers a terrific, flawless performance with one of the world's great orchestras and greatest conductors in front of what must have been an audience of 10,000. Rather the concert of a lifetime...

Music for Dark Academia

Dark Academia is not a cult, no, really. Here, listen to this guy:

 It's a collection of aesthetic ideas that include fountain pens, journaling, traditional academic disciplines and values, fine literature, architecture and, of course, classical music. One of the things that got the trend started was this novel by Donna Tartt:

The Peter Weir film Dead Poets Society is also an influence:

I'm not sure that representative musical examples have been chosen, so let me make some suggestions. One that comes to mind is the ballet Giselle which featured in an episode of Angel, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer spinoff, which might be another contributing influence:

Another suggestion would be Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake:

Personally, I think something like the Symphonie fantastique by Hector Berlioz would fit with the aesthetic as well:

That should get you started, at least. Now go get yourself a tweed jacket and a fountain pen. I recommend this one:

https://www.amazon.com/Tigerwood-Refillable-Converter-Handcrafted-Collection/dp/B08QGYPG6N/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2ZUD3WP9UMZMJ&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.btZNAMY01Dny8f7wGDfcfwKZW5SNzmDyMtmBCWAOkyI_ol6HMP8aQEhvKfznjb_CMeB8YCB3_lCV5JheqoybIt7fCQFXkM9pDDlSmzliUJPMkPyJaRWxSuv6gVTX0TFVn9curkR_gdn7eGQmiTMFcUt9HALotJci9W_cuhpAnbu_l-sAcrDtVZ2DV0sr02bV.RfX5MYVw58e0flYbxiUx1rAqWazs4ioApbVSk76jdJY&dib_tag=se&keywords=jinhao%2B9056&qid=1714500618&sprefix=jinhao%2B9056%2Caps%2C157&sr=8-2&th=1

For the jacket, you're on your own!

Today's Listening: Quatuor Danel at Wigmore Hall

 A Shostakovich quartet bookended by two quartets by Weinberg

Helpful Sunday Grab-bag

YouTube used to be much, much better than it is now, even though now it has many times as many clips. The problem now is that the advertisements are more and more ubiquitous and annoying. But even worse than that is that the majority of the clips seem to be very scam-like. The image luring you to view the clip often has little or nothing to do with the actual content; the claim of the title is often wildly exaggerated and so on. But, there are still some pretty good items. One I ran across this morning is a very brief and very clear discussion of why Ludwig Wittgenstein is an important thinker and actually, a very useful one. Here it is:

In the clip the narrator calls the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus a "beautiful" book and indeed it is, it has a kind of mystic clarity to it that is so rare that I can hardly think of another example. Here is a quote:

6.13 Logic is not a set of teachings but a mirror image of the world.

5.632 The subject does not belong to the world but is a limit of the world.

Every sentence--proposition--in the book is numbered in a logical hierarchy. But really, quotes like these remind me of Chinese philosophy.

* * *

John Cage is absolutely unique among composers in that the piece for which he is most famous is nothing but silence. Think about that! The piece is 4'33 in length and that is the title by which it is known: 4'33. Here is a famous performance by Kirill Petrenko and the Berlin Philharmonic.

This was made as a statement about the cancelling of performances due to the COVID closure in Germany. You might notice that as this clip is only 3'42 long, he rushes the piece! Use a stopwatch, Kirill!

* * *

Here is an example of a somewhat misleading YouTube clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNpvzGEMQmY&t=358s

Sure, interesting, but the reason you click on it has very little to do with Picasso, right?

* * *

Reading Dilla Time, this was one of the examples. I warn you, if you don't want to have a fragment of Joni Mitchell stuck in your head for all eternity, don't listen to this!

* * *

Just wandering slightly off the reservation, one of the things I have liked about the French author Michel Houellebecq is just that name. There are too many somethings in there: vowels, consonants? Reminds me of a neighborhood in Montréal: Longueuil. That definitely has too many vowels. Anyway, here is a very funny, very deadpan, review of a recent book:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyZzhtM41x4

* * *

We really must end with some excellent music, so here you go. A lot of the younger singers I have enjoyed  recently have been French.

Friday Miscellanea

MEA CULPA! I FORGOT TO POST THIS THIS MORNING! 

The artist can mislead the public more easily than can a man of any other profession, for setting aside the affinity of the herd for all that is superficial, a sort of halo surrounds the painter; he profits by a number of institutions very favourable to mediocrity, which give a certain importance to the métier as such, and are readily turned to account by the adroit

--Julius Meier-Graefe (1867 - 1935) This quote is from 1904.

* * *

I've always been fascinated with Leonard Cohen, and not just because he was a fellow Montrealer: Leonard Cohen: Hippie Troubadour and Forgotten Reactionary

IN THE EARLY ’70s, Leonard Cohen was in crisis. His life felt meaningless, although, in theory, it shouldn’t have. He’d spent the past decade doing all the things people were supposed to do in the ’60s. He’d joined shadowy religious orders and dabbled in Eastern mysticism. He’d written a sexy experimental novel that thrilled the young and enraged the establishment. He’d reinvented himself as a singer-songwriter and played to crowds of ecstatic flower children. He’d taken all the drugs, smoked all the cigarettes, slept in all the iconic hotels—the King Edward, the Chelsea, the Chateau Marmont. If the ’60s counterculture were a mountain, he was the rare mountaineer who’d made it to the summit.

Read the whole thing for a thoughtful look at an artist that has a lot of relevance for us today.

* * *

A problem that refuses to go away: TENOR STOPS MID-CONCERT IN BIRMINGHAM TO STOP PHONE SNAPPERS

The tenor Ian Bostridge shocked Symphony Hall Birmingham last night by stopping after the third song in Britten’s Les Illuminations to denounce the CBSO’s new audience rules, which read:

“We are very happy for you to take photographs and short video clips at our concerts, but please refrain from recording the whole performance.”

Bostridge, a thoughtful, courteous man, stepped forward and – clearly fuming – requested that audience members turn off their phone cameras. He said taking photographs was ‘extremely distracting’ for a performer.

For the love of all that's holy...

* * *

This could well be true: An education in music makes you a better employee. Are recruiters in tune?

One of the most powerful traits instilled by a music education is a deep sense of professionalism. 85% of survey participants identified the trait as the skill that most influenced expectations of themselves and others, and the quality of their work. 

A common industry saying about rehearsal reflects this attitude of consistency and punctuality – “early is on time, on time is late, and late is left behind.”

Other notable skills included autonomy and self-direction, resilience and perseverance, and creativity.

Learning an instrument fosters disciplined, focused attention, a highly valuable skill in other contexts. ArtBitz/Shutterstock

Participants attributed the development of these strengths to the disciplined and focused attention required to learn music, and the intrinsic motivation needed to practise and perfect an instrument over a long period of time.

You are not likely to learn these sorts of skills in too many other places.

* * *

You get industrialized mass production: What Happens to Songwriters When AI Can Generate Music?

If you think 100,000 songs a day going into the market is a big number, “you have no idea what’s coming next,” says Alex Mitchell, founder/CEO of Boomy, a music creation platform that can compose an instrumental at the click of an icon.

Boomy is one of many so-called “generative artificial intelligence” music companies — others include Soundful, BandLab’s SongStarter and Authentic Artists — founded to democratize songwriting and production even more than the synthesizer did in the 1970s, the drum machine in the ’80s and ’90s, digital audio workstations in the 2000s and sample and beat libraries in the 2010s.

* * * 

Our first envoi really has to be Leonard Cohen:

 

Here is Ian Bostridge with Britten's Les Illuminations, op. 18

Here is a piece you rarely hear, the Septet in E flat major by Beethoven:

And now, if you will excuse me I have to go decolonize my bookshelf.

Today's Listening: Bruckner, Symphony No. 8

I've been listening to the Symphony No. 8 of Bruckner quite a few times lately. The main reason is that a performance of the piece by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Riccardo Muti on August 15 is the finale of my visit to Salzburg this summer and I want to become really familiar with the work. And, if you are wondering, nope, no tickets are available, it is sold out. Yes, already. So don't tell me that classical music is dying--only in some places. I have always rather liked Bruckner ever since singing in the university choir in a performance of his Te Deum. Sure, I fell under the spell of Mahler for a while--didn't we all--but I did come to my senses. Bruckner comes at the apotheosis of Western Civilization when it was frankly luxuriating it its accomplishments. With Mahler we are starting to feel the loss of confidence and premonition of the cataclysm that is soon to come.

Here is Günter Wand and the NDR Elbphilharmonie in a performance from 1987 in the Lübeck Cathedral.

Perfection Achieved

I taught myself how to write by writing letters to the editor of the Globe and Mail in Toronto. You had to address an issue of the day in pithy and original prose and not exceed 800 words. I got so that I could get quite a few letters published. And now, in the limited world of musical discussion on the Internet, I think I have achieved beatitude. Yesterday Rick Beato put up a particularly wacky video titled "What Is Wrong With Everyone?" Here it is:

Assuming that the comments are sorted according to Top Comments the first comment you will see is this one, attributed to Speusippus:

I was quantized once, but I got over it. Then I went all Pythagorean...

For some obscure reason way back in the early days I chose the nom de plume of Speusippus, the nephew of Plato, as my YouTube identity. You can tell it is me from the photo, the same one I use here. So that is my comment. Now here is the beatitude, it is the first ranked of 11,461 comments!! So that was a very cool comment but I bemoan how huge Rick Beato's appeal is compared to mine. Maybe I should be more wacky and hysterical?

Is AI Knowledge?

I'm reading Edmund Husserl's book The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness right now and he is a turgid writer--one suspects that all phenomenologists have to attend a special class in inspissated prose. In any case, noticing that the Brave browser now has an AI component I decided to put it to the test so I asked:

Summarize Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of time

The reply:

Edmund Husserl, a prominent philosopher, described phenomenology of time as a study of the structures of experience and consciousness. He believed that time is experienced as a continuous flow, which he called "internal time-consciousness." It consists of three aspects: retention (past), impression (present), and protection (future). This model emphasizes the subjective, lived experience of time, rather than objective, physical time.

Which I was initially very impressed by. But then I noticed:

Actually, isn't anticipation of future events called "protention"?

It answered:

Yes, you are correct. I apologize for the mistake. The term "protection" in Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of time refers to the anticipation or pre-awareness of future events. It's a form of intentionality that prepares us for what is about to happen. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.

So I said:

But you said "protection" again?

The reply:

 I apologize for the oversight. Yes, I mistakenly used the term "protection" again. The correct term is indeed "protention," which refers to the anticipation or pre-awareness of future events in Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of time. Thank you for your patience and for helping me improve my response.

So here is what I think: AI seems to temptingly facilitate the task of summarizing the thoughts of an obscure philosopher, but it is not actual knowledge because the fact that it is a mechanical sifting of acres of prose floating around on the internet means that both the source of the information and the methodology of how it is collected are unknown or at least obscure. So it isn't genuine knowledge because it is both unreliable and possibly unjustified.

I'm going to put up my review of the Husserl book alongside a fascinating new book on the rap producer J Dilla titled Dilla Time because, oddly, they often are talking about the same thing: how we perceive time.

 

 

 

Friday Miscellanea

This seems like a good thing: Brooklyn Museum Names Cellist Niles Luther First Composer In Residence

Luther is kicking off his residency by composing three musical arrangements to accompany the exhibition Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo (feat. Takashi Murakami), which opened today.

The museum said, “While not aiming to precisely replicate sounds of 19th-century Tokyo (then Edo), Luther’s compositions deftly incorporate traditional Japanese scales, modes and techniques to evoke the era’s ambiance as reflected in Utagawa Hiroshige’s prints. Drawing on his own experiences in Tokyo and collaborations with Japanese instrumentalists, Luther blends Eastern and Western musical elements to capture the essence of Hiroshige’s work, underscoring its lasting relevance. In this way, Luther’s music serves as a link between eras.”

I took a similar approach in setting the poems in my collection Songs of the Poets. The texts were drawn from a wide variety of poets and I tried to find a suitable musical style as an analogue to the poem. Mind you, in the case of a translation from an Aristophanes comedy, that meant using stylistic ideas from a Rossini opera buffa! 

* * *

Finally: In praise of the viola.

What’s special about this release is the eclectic menu assembled by a young Jamaican-American, Jordan Bak, who is clearly going places. Bak opens with a three-minute Chant by Jonathan Harvey, dinking back and forth between tonal and post-tonal contemplation. A Romance by Ralph Vaughan Williams, discovered among posthumous papers, is just what I need in these stressed-out times. 

Bright Sheng reimagines a South China folksong about a woman missing her lover in moonlight. It’s called The Stream Flows and it has vivid imagery. Augusta Read Thomas has made several alternate versions of her successful 2018 Song Without Words. The viola original still works best.

The album’s two most substantive, and sumptuous, pieces are by British composers. Arnold Bax’s viola sonata of 1922 is massively mellifluous, rippling with tunes that sound half-remembered and might even be original. Imagine Copland and Holst taking a country walk. The finale is so satisfying.

Gosh, I wish I could write something "massively mellifluous"!

* * *

I think they should have named it "Odio" instead: Udio. But here is the problem: for me, music is an intrinsic good, something that is good in itself. For most people, I guess, music is an instrumental good, something that adds a bit of flavour to life, puts a nice soundtrack in the background. Not for me. But this gives me problems that perhaps others don't have. For example, I tried to watch The Two Towers movie the other day but I turned it off after a few minutes, largely because of the music. I can't watch a Tolkien story with Wagnerian style music. But, on reflection, I realize that this is just an indicator of how the film itself, especially in the characterizations, is also shifted far away from the books. So I can't watch it for that reason as well. In that way, the music is a valuable warning sign. Your milage may vary.

* * *

A Secret Code May Have Been Hiding in Classical Music for 200 Years

But even discounting those final revisions, the Opus 132 that the world came to know was not exactly the Opus 132 that Beethoven handed to his copyist. The composer littered his original score with unusual markings that the copyist simply ignored. Below one staff, for example, Beethoven jotted “ffmo”—a tag that wasn’t a standard part of musical notation, and wasn't used by any other major composer. In another place, he drew an odd shape like an elongated diamond, also a nonstandard notation. None of these marks made it into even the first clean copy, let alone the published version. Almost no one would see those marks in the roughly 200 years after Beethoven first scribbled them down.

Then, one evening in 2013, the violinist Nicholas Kitchen was in New Mexico coaching a quartet through Opus 132. Kitchen is a man of obsessions; one of them is playing from a composer’s original handwritten manuscripts, rather than printed music, so he had a facsimile edition on hand. The errant “ffmo” caught the eye of the quartet’s cellist. “What’s this?” he asked.

As soon as Kitchen saw Beethoven’s mark, something in his brain shifted; later, he would tell people that it was as if someone had turned over a deck of cards to reveal the hidden faces behind the plain backs. Suddenly, he had a new obsession. Over the next several years, he would come to believe he had discovered Beethoven’s secret code.

As a performer I have always been fascinated by the idea that there are special hints and instructions from the composer that somehow fell through the cracks.

* * *

Here, thanks to a commentator, is the nightmare of Spotify:

Questions have arisen about Spotify’s possible inclusion of AI-generated music in its artist radio playlists. This comes after Adam Faze, studio chief of FazeWorld, on Twitter shared a playlist of 49 songs that appeared to be the same track, but with different artist names, song titles, and album artwork.

* * *

Over at The New Yorker, Alex Ross asks What Is Noise? and in the process reveals quite a lot about himself:

With a universal definition hovering out of reach, the discourse concerning noise often starts with the personal. My history with the thing is fraught: I hate it and I love it. As a child, I was extraordinarily sensitive to loud sounds. Family expeditions to Fourth of July fireworks displays or steam-railway museums routinely ended with me running in tears to the safety of the car. When, in early adulthood, I moved into the noise cauldron of New York City, I was tormented by neighbors’ stereos and by the rumble of the street. I stuffed windows with pillows and insulation; I invested in industrial-strength earplugs; I positioned an oversized window fan next to my bed. This neurosis has subsided, but I remain that maddening hotel guest who switches rooms until he finds one that overlooks an airshaft or an empty lot.

All the while, I was drawn to music that others would pay money to avoid. Having grown up with classical music, I found my way to the refined bedlam of the twentieth-century avant-garde: Edgard Varèse, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, György Ligeti. In college, I hosted a widely unheard radio show on which I broadcast things like Ligeti’s “Poème Symphonique”—a piece for a hundred metronomes. When someone called in to report that the station’s signal had gone down, I protested that we were, in fact, listening to music. Similar misunderstandings arose when I aired Cage’s “Imaginary Landscape No. 4,” for twelve radios. When I moved on to so-called popular music, I had ears only for the churning dissonances of Cecil Taylor, AMM, and Sonic Youth. I became the keyboardist in a noise band, which made one proudly chaotic public appearance, in 1991. At one point, my bandmates and I improvised over a tape loop of the minatory opening chords of Richard Strauss’s “Die Frau Ohne Schatten.”

* * *

‘Misguided wokeism’ puts people off opera, says top London conductor. I think we were just talking about this.

“I think opera in many quarters is seen as something elitist,” Pappano told BBC Radio 4’s This Cultural Life. “The [British] politicians, for instance, don’t come to the opera house, they used to, whereas in Italy, the president of the republic would come and there’d be big applause, it would be celebrated by the audience ... in Germany too.

“Here it’s looked on with great suspicion. That drives me nuts, I have to tell you. England is a haven for culture whether it is pop culture or classical culture, literary culture, theatrical culture, this is one of the great addresses and yet we’re embarrassed by it.”

Pappano said the opera industry had had a “rough time because the money becomes less and less every year”.

“Why be embarrassed about something that is a treasure?” he said. “The Royal Opera House, the English National Opera, the Welsh National Opera are beacons, they’re internationally recognised and centres of excellence, you know, honing talent.”

* * * 

We have a couple of obvious choices for envois today. First up Jordan Bak, viola, with through the filtering dawn of spreading daybright by Jeffrey Mumford. There wasn't anything on YouTube from his new album and the title of this piece almost sounds like one I might have chosen!

Next, Nicholas Kitchen and the Borromeo Quartet with the third movement from the String Quartet 132 by Beethoven:

Lastly the Lachrimae Pavan by John Dowland played by Elizabeth Pallett:

Going Down with the Ship?

There is a kind of drumbeat of despair that accompanies the discussion of classical music in the public fora--at least in North America. There are so many voices: Ted Gioia, Greg Sandow, me in posts like this Classical Music's "Business Model" and a host of others. Let me offer some thought-provoking propositions:

• A certain model of society, in the US often called the "blue model" seems to be undergoing a severe disruption witnessed by people simply leaving: Chicago, New York, California.
• Unfortunately for classical music, these are also main cultural centers for classical music, but they are less and less able to fund the costs, never mind the reasons why
• Classical music is often described as the music of white elite taste
• So the question is, does classical music and high art generally have to go down with the ship of progressive ideals?
• Doesn't it make sense to perhaps separate the fine arts from the DEI model? They are strange bedfellows at best
• I am making a number of assumptions here: that classical music is basically music of long-standing value that doesn't need to be and in fact should not be fused with the progressive project to transform society.
• That classical music has over long stretches of time thrived in socially conservative environments and could do so again.
• That the association of classical music and the fine arts in general with the progressive project is actually of fairly recent vintage, dating from between the world wars.

So, I had this passing thought and I'm just throwing it out there so you can kick it around. Here is some suitable listening music. Stravinsky, Symphony in C, Leonard Bernstein conducting the Israel Philharmonic.

Reviewing YouTube

The other day I recommended three philosophy channels on YouTube and I want to start this post by re-recommending one of them. I just started watching Prof. Victor Gijsbers series of videos on epistemology and they are really great. Here is the third one:

 You should get a couple of things from this clear, balanced and well-argued clip: epistemology, along with logic and ethics (and probably aesthetics as well) is a normative discipline, i.e. it is not about digging up knowledge so much as it is about discovering why you should be seeking knowledge. The other main point is that the search for knowledge is an intrinsic good, not an instrumental good (of course it could be both). Like friendship and love and kindness and things like that, the search for knowledge, not the simple possession of it, is intrinsically good.

So, let's do some searching for aesthetic knowledge cleverly disguised as a review of some classical guitar videos. I used to do what I called micro-reviews of music videos, almost exclusively of pop music, but it got tiresome and I had the feeling that it was a bit, well, cruel. This is what often restrains criticism: some poor musician is striving to deliver a fine performance and some nasty ankle-biter (avoiding the use of the obvious term) has the nerve to criticize their sincere efforts, even if obviously flawed. But, assuming the logic of the bell curve, most performances will be mediocre, a few will be excellent and a few will be horrifically bad. This is true despite the best efforts of all the marketing and promotional people.

I have the most appropriate expertise to review classical guitar recordings rather than pop music or orchestras or pianists or violinists, but there is a caveat. A producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that I had done a lot of work with called me up one day to ask my opinion of some pianists. I asked him why me, I'm a guitarist? His answer was that he certainly would not ask me my opinion about guitarists even though that is my instrument. The reasons for that are well-founded. The music world is very competitive and one's view of rivals is distorted by this. One does not ask one soprano their opinion of another soprano! The other main reason is that well-established performers have arrived at certain decisions regarding style and interpretation and therefore they have little interest in how other artists work nor do they have much empathy for differing approaches.

But these issues aside, I think I might have some useful views on classical guitar performers these days as I retired as a performer a long time ago so I don't see anyone as a 'rival' any more and second, I take a more objective interest in performance and interpretation as I am no longer giving performances. So, let's have a look at some classical guitar clips on YouTube. I will try to focus on recent ones, but an older one might creep in.

David Russell has recently done music videos of all the Bach lute suites on location in some beautiful places in Spain and Portugal (he has lived in Spain for many years). He is the most well-known member of the second generation of British guitarists the first of which consisted of Julian Bream and John Williams. Bream has passed away and Williams has retired so Russell is really the most prominent British guitarist of his generation even though he has lived most of his life in Spain. He attended the Royal Academy and won the Julian Bream prize twice. He has had a very successful career and performs at guitar festivals all over the world. Here is his performance of the Lute Suite no. 3 (which you will have to click over to YouTube to view):

Nothing wrong with that, right? Technically perfect, musically assured, all together a fine performance. Now go back and just listen to the gavottes, starting at the 18:16 mark. I want to focus on those because I learned and performed them a year and half ago so they are fresh in my mind. Ok, so what do you think? First of all, to my ear, they are just a bit too quick. This is a frequent problem with performances of Bach. His music is often technically difficult so performers sometimes mistake this for being music that calls for a virtuoso approach. This is a misunderstanding, of course. Bach's music is not difficult because he intended a virtuoso display, unlike a lot of Vivaldi or Paganini. No, it is difficult because the musical ideas are original and texturally complex. So, this brisk tempo rather misses aspects of the music. Sometimes I think of it as like being frog-marched through the piece in handcuffs! As we reach the end of the first section we find another problem: there is absolutely no acknowledgement that we have come to the end of a section with a cadence and a repeat from the beginning. I'm sure David is aware of the structure, but he just does not let that cause any deviation in his rigid tempo. These observations apply to the whole performance. The main aesthetic ideal here seems to be perfectly clean technical perfection at the expense of musical expression. You might speculate as to the psychological reasons for this, but I won't. So while we can certainly admire the result of many years of disciplined practice, I find it very hard to listen to Bach played as if musical expression were of no importance.

Here is really recent video, just posted a couple of weeks ago. Jan Depreter at the Antwerp Guitar Festival. Again, I want to focus on just part of the performance so I can make detailed observations instead of vague generalizations. Let's listen to the Weiss Passacaglia and the first part of the Bach Chaconne.

We cannot accuse Jan Depreter of a rigid performance. There is lots of expression in the dynamics, the articulation, the tone-color and in the tempo. However, we might consider if all this is appropriate? Quite a lot of it, yes. Performances of Baroque music certainly do not need to avoid expression! However, the kind of ubiquitous vibrato we hear in this performance does not strike me as a very Baroque type of expression. There were also some missed opportunities to shape rhythms and phrases in ways reflecting what little we know about performance practice. For example, a piece like this with its obvious French antecedents could well benefit from some inégale. Now let's have a listen to the Chaconne, which begins at the 4:31 mark. In the first minute I notice six places where he failed to insert a very obvious ornament such as filling in a third, a couple of trills, a couple of mordents, and so on. Instead, we had the ubiquitous vibrato and chords rolled in a romantically guitaristic manner. Again, ok, but not terribly Baroque and frankly, after a while, tiresome.

Another new clip: this was posted just eight days ago. This is Cristina Galietto playing the Romanza by Paganini.

Here we have a performance entirely appropriate to the music--honestly how could a guitarist from Napoli get it wrong? Her tone is warm and her dynamics are finely shaded. She thoroughly understands the music and is delicate when needed and aggressive when needed. It is a treat to hear a performance so expressive of the musical content, not feeling as if it is applied a posteriori with a butter knife.

Let's hear Scott Tennant play the Sonata K. 322 by Domenico Scarlatti.

I met Scott at one of the Toronto guitar festivals. He is a superb guitarist and placed very well in the competition. This is an excellent performance with loads of clarity, but also the right observation of musical expression. Absolutely nothing wrong with it. But just for fun, let's compare this to an older recording of Scarlatti by an absolute genius. Less precise, but wow. This is Leo Brouwer with K. 544.

I didn't review any of the vast mass of mediocre performances and didn't happen to stumble across any of the really awful ones--if I had, that would have felt cruel!

Any thoughts from my commentators?

UPDATE: I just ran across this clip from a few years ago by Xuefei Yang playing some music from Latin America. Just to show that you don't have to be from Napoli to play Paganini or 18th century Leipzig to play Bach--you can be Chinese and be a master of Latin American style. This is really excellent: