Around 1970 I became a listener to classical music rather than pop. After all, the Beatles had just broken up, so pop was obviously over (heh!). I also transitioned from being a rock/blues musician to being a classical guitarist. For about ten years I never paid any attention to pop music. But since the early 80s I have enjoyed checking in on the pop world from time to time. Lately that has meant watching some clips from Rick Beato. Here is one that went up two days ago and already has over 5,000 comments.
If we step back a bit and take a more historical view, we might want to ask how were previous musical eras characterized? It is fair to say that the "Classical" era which was centered on Vienna between, say, 1770 and 1830 was characterized by a certain kind of musical vocabulary that, influenced by Italian opera buffa, simplified the intricate counterpoint and chromatic harmony of the Baroque in favor of clarity, simplicity, rhythmic vivaciousness and dramatic harmonic contrasts. For the details, have a look at The Classical Style by Charles Rosen. By the end of this era and the music of Franz Schubert the vocabulary has become much richer and starts to show signs of the Romantic inwardness. Where did this style or genre come from? Pretty clearly from the explorations of people like Mozart and Haydn followed by the development and elaborations of Beethoven and Schubert. Was it influenced by publishers, marketers and record labels? Certainly not as none of these existed at the time (with the exception of publishers, but they had little influence on what composers actually wrote).
Throughout the 20th century the development of recording and broadcast technologies brought to the fore the influence of business people whose main interest was ensuring a profitable return on their investment. That is certainly fair enough, but the unintended consequence we see in the 21st century is that musical taste seems to be being shaped by algorithms more than anything else. Sure, the individual curating of micro genres is happening--the Music Salon is an example as I definitely tend to promote the music that I think is significant and ignore everything else. But honestly, there is a mainstream genre consisting of Taylor Swift and similar acts with much of the songs written by that committee of guys in Sweden. To me this feels rather like the tail is wagging the dog. I think it is better that we develop our own musical taste rather than have it curated for us.
How do we do this in the current environment? Now that's an interesting question!
Music to meditate with, the Piano Sonata No. 21 in B-Flat Major, D. 960 by Franz Schubert, first movement, played by Sviatoslav Richter.
That remarkable photo is of a convent that the Spanish built on a hill near the town of Puebla. In the background is the active volcano Popocatépetl. Hundreds of years after the convent was built, it was discovered that the hill it was sitting on was actually a huge pyramid, seriously overgrown. Here's another photo:
While we are on Mexico, this past Thursday was the day celebrating the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico who appeared to Juan Diego in 1531. Each year there is a pilgrimage to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe outside Mexico City. This year over eleven million people visited the Basilica. When I saw that number I thought it had to be a mistake: 11 million! But I asked my friend and she said, no, this is normal, her parents took her when she was three years old. The tradition is to dress your child up in indigenous costume, put them on a burro and take pictures.
Some musicians that particularly impressed me this year
The Norwegian Chamber Orchestra whose performance of Verklärte Nacht by Schoenberg from memory was remarkable:
Patricia Kopatchinskaja doing almost anything:
Thomas Dunford and the Jupiter Ensemble with Lea Desandre:
The young French (Russian) pianist Alexandre Kantorow:
And still, Grigory Sokolov playing Bach with crystal clarity:
Alongside the three transcendentals, the Good, the True and the Beautiful, we might set the three taboos: politics, religion and sex. This goes back a long way; the Royal Navy prohibited discussion of politics, religion or women at the officers mess going back to early in the 19th century. I'm not sure of the current etiquette in this area. Here at the Music Salon we avoid politics with the single exception of when politics threatens to invade the world of music and the fine arts. But I would like to just put a toe onto the dangerous waters of religion.
I recently had a discussion with two colleagues about religion. I'm afraid I rather heatedly pronounced that in my view this whole climate crisis was nothing but an ideological scam and it was "insane" for Germany, for example, to deindustrialize its economy trying to achieve net zero carbon dioxide. I will mercifully spare you the details. One of my colleagues, both of whom are very committed Christians, retorted that in her view it was equally insane not to accept Jesus Christ into one's life. Woo-hoo, that energized the discussion!
At one point, I made the slightly excessive claim that religion was nothing but a "category error" a technical term in philosophy taken from The Concept of Mind, a work of analytic philosophy by Gilbert Ryle. It is a category error to extend the idea of a personal deity to the universe. Well, maybe, maybe not. My real point was that the idea of an all-powerful, all-knowing God is simply beyond our ken.
But the truth is that my colleagues and I really are coming from two different traditions. When I am not engaged in an intellectual discussion, I have profound respect for my Christian and Jewish colleagues based on the view that anyone pursuing virtue is to be admired as it is not so easy in this world. I respect the traditions and literature of both those religions and have done a fair amount of reading of both.
I wanted to respond in a more thoughtful manner to the discussion so I got copies of the slim volume published by Hackett of the Five Dialogues of Plato (Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno and Phaedo). I accompanied this by a brief note saying that I both respected and was acquainted with the sources of their beliefs, but wasn't sure that they had much knowledge of the sources of my beliefs.
UPDATE: For some inexplicable reason, I forgot to mention that I gave these copies to my two colleagues--but I guess that was obvious.
It is my understanding that Western Civilization really derives fundamentally from two places: Jerusalem and Athens. For some reason, my early experiences with Christianity were not too inspiring, but over the years I became more and more attracted to Ancient Greece. Judaism gave us monotheism and a profound sense of moral duty while Christianity added the virtues of mercy, love and administration (borrowed from Rome). Sure, that's a grotesque simplification, but bear with me! Athens, on the other hand gave us cosmology, geometry, ethical reasoning, logic, history, aesthetics, comedy, tragedy, democracy, political science and a bunch of other things.
I chose Plato because his dialogues are a wonderful entry to the thought of Ancient Greece and Aristotle is just too difficult.
Pierre Boulez rather unkindly published an essay when Arnold Schoenberg passed away titled "Schoenberg est mort." But as a conductor he was a great contributor to very good recordings of the music of both Schoenberg and Stravinsky. And so, in commemoration of this being the 150th year since Schoenberg's birth in 1874, Sony has released a handsome box of thirteen CDs containing all Boulez' recordings of Schoenberg on Columbia and Sony. These were recorded in the 70s and 80s, but the sound is excellent. Here are the contents:
Gurre-Lieder (two discs)
Moses und Aron (two discs)
Pierrot Lunaire
Verklärte Nacht and Berg: Three pieces from the Lyric Suite
A Survivor from Warsaw, Variations for Orchestra op. 31, Five Pieces for Orchestra op. 16 and Music for a Movie Scene
Serenade op. 24, Lied der Waldtaube and Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte op. 41
Die Jakobsleiter and Erwartung op. 17
Die glückliche Hand, Chamber Symphony no. 1 and 2, Three Pieces for Chamber Orchestra and Four Orchestral Songs, op. 22
Suite op. 29, Verklärte Nacht (sextet version)
Choral Works: Friede auf Erden, Kol Nidre, 3 Volksliedsätze and 2 Kanons and 3 deutsche Volkslieder
Interesting omission: no concertos! I've only listened to the Gurre-Lieder so far. This, plus the piano music and the string quartets and you have Schoenberg pretty well covered. Oh, and the concertos!
UPDATE: Boulez did record both the violin and piano concertos, but it was on Erato.
The study concluded that under current regulatory frameworks in most countries, creators stand to lose on two fronts. Unauthorised use of their works by generative AI models will eat into remuneration earned through copyright, while at the same time work opportunities will shrink as AI-generated outputs become more competitive against human-made works.
The report predicted that by 2028, exponential growth in generative AI music would account for about 20% of traditional music streaming platforms’ revenues, and about 60% of music libraries’ revenues.
AI developers and providers in the music industry stand to gain €4bn (up from €0.1bn in 2023) while developers and providers in the audiovisual sector stand to gain €5bn over the same period.
It will be revenue “derived directly from the unlicensed reproduction of creators’ works, representing a transfer of economic value from creators to AI companies”, the report warned.
Reports like these are actually written mostly to benefit governments (who provided the grants to fund their production). They provide governments the opportunity to do something:
“We must ensure strong protections for their work, especially Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property, so that AI platforms respect protocols and enhances rather than exploits First Nations culture. The Australian and New Zealand governments need to take the lead and act decisively to protect the livelihoods of creators and the future of our creative industries.”
That's just blather, of course--and poor grammar. The real truth is that music, as an art form, is not actually an industrial "sector" because it is not actually a commercial product. Of course the music business consists entirely of commercial product, that's why it's a business, but that has little to do with music as an art. If you are a creative artist working to create music, your should not expect to have remuneration or earnings or income from copyright or work opportunities. Because you are not producing a marketable commodity. Whew. That's a relief.
Our non-commercial envoi of the day: Carlo Gesualdo, Moro lasso
The original ensemble at the premiere. Schoenberg is third from the left.
Schoenberg's music is no state of normalcy.
It takes place in a realm that is otherwise
ringed around with taboos and that the
conventional language of art does not reach.
--Theodor Adorno
I just realized why I have always felt a special connection to Pierrot Lunaire. Way back in my late teens when I was first discovering classical music, including 20th century music (I found Stuckenschmidt's book on 20th century music in the local library), I had listened to some Schoenberg and found the idea of atonal music fascinating. At the same time a friend of mine who played piano and I (on electric bass) had a gig every Friday night at the local legion (the Canadian equivalent of the VFW) playing cocktail music. He was also into Schoenberg so sometimes, after midnight, when everyone was pretty liquored up, we would start doing surreal music. We would take a popular song but modulate up a semitone every verse. Then, as a finale, we would do free, atonal improvisations in the style of Schoenberg. Here's the funny thing, no-one ever came over and said, "hey, what is that crap, stop it!" I guess they just didn't notice. So when Malcolm MacDonald calls Pierrot Lunaire "a kind of surrealist cabaret act," I'm right there. I've felt very at home with Schoenberg's surrealist side from a young age.
(I have this fantasy that one night on her tour, Taylor Swift comes out and sings a Schoenberg lieder, maybe Herzgewächse! That's his op 20, written just before Pierrot. Now that would be actually cool. Instead of having pop music culture infiltrate the classical world, let's have the opposite.)
Forgive me a slight digression: I was very lucky in first year university to have an outstanding professor for my English literature class. We had been assigned to read the short story, written in 1914, by Franz Kafka titled "In the Penal Colony." The story is rather grim:
The story is set in an unnamed penal colony and describes the last use of an elaborate torture and execution device that carves the commandment that the condemned prisoner has transgressed on his skin as he slowly dies over the course of twelve hours.
At the next class our professor strode into the room, dumped some books on his lectern and said "This is a very funny story." And so it is, once you realize how comic the excesses in the story are. Also, it is interesting that Richard Taruskin in his discussion of Pierrot Lunaire (composed in 1912) describes Der Mondfleck as a "thoroughgoing irony ... and a much funnier one (in a bewildering sort of way)." He also says "From a bogus masterpiece of counterpoint, Der Mondfleck becomes a genuine masterpiece of self-mocking irony." All the theorists, including Charles Rosen, seem to have missed the joke, failing to notice that canon, fugue and palindrome present no challenge once you have emancipated dissonance. [Taruskin quote is from The Oxford History of Western Music, volume 4, Music in the Early Twentieth Century, pp 462-465]
Another delightful irony is that Pierrot Lunaire was, at the time, Schoenberg's breakaway hit: he and the original "singer" Albertine Zehme toured Pierrot for more than a decade. Nowadays, due to the tireless efforts of generations of theorists, we are forbidden to notice the jokes and the delicious delirium of this masterwork of expressionism.
Speaking of theorists, general writers on Pierrot have also missed the boat, an excellent example being the only book in English specifically devoted to the piece, Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire by Jonathan Dunsby. This book is so stifled by the author's academic Englishness that it goes to great lengths to avoid actually saying anything about the piece.
With the genre and the cult gone, the 'thorny surface' of Pierrot remains, and, though 'baffle' is a strong term, threaded throughout this volume will be found indications of how inherently ungraspable Pierrot is. [op. cit. p. 9]
Compare Taruskin's discussion of the first piece, Mondestrunken:
The music is very easy to analyze, since its all-important Grundgestalt--the intervallic shape or "cell" that provides the melodic and harmonic raw material--is presented at the very outset in the form of an ostinato in the piano part. It may be very easily traced throughout the piece... [The Oxford History of Western Music, volume 4, Music in the Early Twentieth Century, p. 461]
Yeah, "inherently ungraspable." Later on Professor Dunsby casually mentions that "elaborate, music-theoretic description .. would be inappropriate here." Though he details the shifting orchestration and dates of composition of the various pieces, actual discussion of the specific musical detail is avoided in favor of generalities: "densely chromatic harmony," "fragmentary interludes," "semiquaver figuration," "motivic repetitions," --after dozens of pages of this one longs for some actual concrete detail. Professor Dunsby's volume is a slim eighty pages, I guess if he had grasped Pierrot it would have been longer.
Mondestrunken (Drunk with Moonlight) and Der Mondfleck (The Moon Spot) are favorites with theorists, so let's look at another piece, number 8, Nacht (Night). The Grundgestalt is easy to pick out as this is a passacaglia. In melodic form, the ten-note motif is:
This is preceded by a brief introduction where the motif is compressed and buried deep in the bottom register of the piano. It continually reappears, in eighth notes in the piano:
And in the cello, in a varied form:
Also in the bass clarinet (in Bb):
The best explanation of how atonality works in Schoenberg is found in Charles Rosen's book Arnold Schoenberg published by the University of Chicago Press.
What Schoenberg, consciously or unconsciously, realized before anyone else is that the concept of themes and the system of motivic construction were bound up with a symmetrical system of harmony clearly oriented around a central triad... Schoenberg was not the first composer to abandon "triadic" harmony; but he was the first to realize fully the implications of such a revolution for all the other aspects of musical form. [op. cit. p. 42]
Th[e] emancipation of tone color was as significant and as characteristic of the first decades of the twentieth century as the emancipation of dissonance. [p. 48]
[A] new ideal of harmonic consistency is supported by Schoenberg's idiosyncratic form of motivic construction in parts of Pierrot Lunaire... A short motif of from three to fourteen notes provides the nucleus not only for the entire melodic development but for almost every note of the accompaniment as well. [p. 51] The harmony implied by these motifs pervades the music completely: they are meant to give any work composed by this method an individual and characteristic sonority. [p. 52]
Let's listen to Nacht with the score:
I think that the main reason Schoenberg remains controversial to this day, a hundred years after these pieces were written, while others like Stravinsky and Bartók are fully absorbed into the canon, is that he has been consistently misunderstood the whole time--including by Theodor Adorno!
One of my favorite ensembles is voice and guitar. Due to an enlightened voice teacher, my very first public concert was a performance of Benjamin Britten's Songs from the Chinese in 1972 at the University of Victoria (British Columbia, not Australia). And by the way, the guitar part is quite difficult so I don't recommend it as your first voice and guitar repertoire!
The combination of voice and some guitar-like instrument is probably thousands of years old, though evidence is scarce. The first notated repertoire is for voice and vihuela in 16th century Spain and after that is a flood of music from Italy, France and especially England where we have the wonderful and extensive repertoire for voice and lute from John Dowland, Thomas Campion, Philip Rosseter, Thomas Morley and others.
Due to the collaboration of Peter Pears and Julian Bream, England saw an efflorescence of music for voice and guitar post-WWII with the previous mentioned cycle by Benjamin Britten and another by Lennox Berkeley. Britten also did some lovely folksong arrangements with guitar.
This post is prompted by a review by Jay Nordlinger of a concert by Karim Sulayman, an American tenor, and Sean Shibe, a British guitarist in New York. The concert was very well-received but ironically, my favorite section from the review was:
Speaking of sounds, I heard a dog not barking in this recital: Sulayman and Shibe did not talk. They did not lecture. They did not recite the program notes from the stage. What a blessing this was. It preserved the musical ambience of the evening. The program was ripe for pontification, and the musicians refused to indulge.
Yes, please let's lay this need for commentary from the performers to rest. In Europe it never happens.
Now let's have a listen to some of the songs by Lennox Berkeley from the cycle Songs of the Half-Light because we rarely get to hear them. None of the recent live videos are very accomplished so here is Pears and Bream with the first song.
It’s odd, but most of this odyssey, which to be authentic should take about ten years, actually transpired over a fairly brief stretch of time from when I was eighteen to when I was twenty. But it has taken me the rest of my life to really understand what went on and to marvel at what else has been going on in the musical world.
My mother was a Canadian old-time fiddler, which means she played jigs and reels for Friday night dances in small towns in Western Canada. And, I suspect, often for little or no money. None of that music had any attraction for me. My mother arranged for piano lessons for me when I was nine or ten, but I had so little interest I often forgot to go. Later, in my teens, when we had moved to Vancouver Island, I stumbled across an LP of Ferrante and Teicher, Juilliard piano grads who had a successful career playing easy listening and light classics. I remember quite liking their version of Malagueña.
But then I discovered rock music and started playing the electric bass. I soon found myself in a garage band (they always need a bass player) and we played our first gig six months later. I think we earned $16 but I don’t recall if it was each or all together. Based on this I can claim to have been a professional musician most of my life. We played Eric Burden and the Animals, the Rolling Stones, the Monkees, Herman’s Hermits and we attempted to play the Beatles when we could figure out the chords.
I need to stress that this band was not very good, didn’t last very long and was probably quite annoying to listen to. But we mostly had fun. When we discovered Cream we got into lengthy formless jamming. After a while I drifted into folk-rock under the influence of Bob Dylan. The peak of that career phase was probably when I performed “Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” all fifteen minutes of it, at a little folk concert in a Chinese restaurant.
At some point a friend of mine played me a recording of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto and that instantly converted me into a classical music lover. I listened to everything I could and stated buying budget LPs which at this time (1969/70) could be had for $0.99. As I was an avid reader and haunted our local library I soon discovered that there were actual books written about classical music. I read them all, but the only one I can recall is Stuckenschmidt’s history of 20th century music which is where I first heard about Arnold Schoenberg and his system of composition using all twelve tones of the chromatic scale.
Mind you, early on it was not Schoenberg that I listened to. The only recording I had was of Verklärte Nacht, which I did really like. Mostly I was discovering Debussy, Beethoven and Bach. It was a real thrill when I discovered, via a Christopher Parkening record, that you could play Bach on guitar. That pretty much set the stage for the next twenty some years of my life. Due to the good luck of traveling to Spain in the mid-70s and studying with Maestro José Tomás I had quite a successful career as a concert guitarist—by Canadian standards at least.
When that finally petered out and I retired due to frustration and burnout, I moved to Mexico and avoided music altogether for a few years. Then I made a fresh start, but this time as a composer. I had actually composed all along: first songs, then the occasional piece for guitar or ensemble, but it was always a fringe activity. Now I was going to do it on a more serious level. After several years of modestly acceptable compositions I realized that I hadn’t even understood what the challenge was!
The “challenge” of course, is what Schoenberg was aware of from his early years. As Theodor Adorno describes it:
In traditional music, and precisely in the great constructive composers like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, there was always still the attempt to achieve something like a balance between the schema and the uniqueness of each work of through-composed music. This resulted in a peculiar duality in the structure. One part is on the surface. This the part reached by the usual analyses based on the basso continuo schema and the theories of modulation and musical forms, and that is fully expressed in the general relations of tonality. But underneath this there is the second part, which Schoenberg called subcutaneous, a structure under the skin, which derives the whole from very specific germ cells and which first generated the more profound, true unity. Only this inner structure makes a difference in the work’s actual quality, but it, precisely, is barely perceived in traditional music by most listeners.
Understanding that, and composing music with that awareness is the actual challenge and one that I (and I suppose most people) was blissfully unaware of for nearly all my life. But it explains, for one thing, why the music of Schoenberg seems so much more substantial than most other music.
Here are his Five Pieces for Orchestra op 16 from 1909:
In April 2019 a fire destroyed much of Notre Dame de Paris, one of the monuments of Medieval civilization and the birthplace of polyphony. It is about to re-open, fully restored to as it was before the fire.
And a personal thanksgiving. Over the last few months, possibly years, I have been suffering a progressive hearing loss. In the last week it worsened to the point that half of my hearing was gone. Yesterday a visit to my doctor, who applied hydrogen peroxide and vigorous flushing, dislodged two large lumps of hardened earwax and today my hearing is fully restored! This happened to me once before, in my twenties. It is like being reborn. My world had slowly turned into purgatory or limbo, where sounds were half-heard, a ghostly existence. Now, the sound of my slippers on the floor is deafening! I have all those high frequency sounds back. Who knows, maybe I will be able to return to composing. Ah, sound!
A friend and I years ago exchanged lists of the things we hated the most. His list had all to do with places. Number one was having to move house because he has an enormous library. He pointed out that my list all had to do with sounds. One item would be if a student baritone saxophone player moved in next door. Agh!
So let's have a celebratory envoi. The Brandenburg Concerto no. 3 by J. S. Bach:
I don't usually do seasonal or topical posts, but this seemed a propos. Let us give thanks for Western Civilization.
We seem to be in the waning days of Western European civilization and its adjuncts. It had a pretty good run, synthesizing elements from Jewish, Christian, Greek, and Roman civilizations and cultures from around 1100 AD when Notre Dame in Paris was being built and Léonin and Pérotin were inventing polyphony up in the choir loft, to around 2000 AD when it all started to fall apart. See Jacques Barzun's book From Dawn To Decadence: 1500 to the Present for the details of the last phase.
This being so, we really don't need any progressivism in the arts, politics or culture. Down with the avant-garde, that moment is long gone. Instead, in this twilight of civilization let's explore what was before it is gone forever. I could do a list, from Organum to high Renaissance polyphony, to vivid madrigals to meltingly lovely French Baroque to transcendentally profound J. S. Bach, to brilliantly rambunctious opera by Mozart and on an on--and of course, that is just the music. What about the astonishing quantity and variety of poetry and prose? Or the stupendous architecture of the Medieval cathedrals, the synthesis of theology and philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, the empirical wisdom of David Hume. And I am completely forgetting the artists: El Greco, Dürer, Hieronymous Bosch, Van Gogh... Really, a comprehensive list would take volumes.
Let us be deeply grateful for all the magnificent art and music and culture generally that those centuries have given us.
And I have avoided picking any really famous pieces!
This is going to be the opposite concept to the last post: there we had the phenomenon of musicians subjecting themselves to the Procrustean beds of Autotune, pitch correction and other kinds of editing and processing--all of which have the cumulative effect, as Fil points out, of erasing individuality and leaving a host of standardized human units. Why would we do that? He mentions fear, but there must be more.
Anyway, what I want to talk about here is something quite different: the idea in composition of choosing ahead of time to work within strict limits of form or texture. Some of these forms are rather hard to describe. Take the Baroque prelude as Bach and his claveciniste predecessors composed. It is a remarkably fluid form, but it certainly has a distinct character, particularly when it precedes a fugue or an allemande. The prelude is often arpeggiated harmonies with no clear melody; the rhythm might be very loose or improvisational and so on. It has characteristics, though they are loosely defined. But Bach sat down and wrote twenty-four of them in all the keys, preceding twenty-four fugues. The fugue is another form, though it is often described as more of a polyphonic texture. But again, especially in the hands of Bach it has a distinct character that contrasts nicely with the prelude. The fugue immediately establishes a clear meter and rhythm with a subject, a theme that defines a musical space right away. Then this space is expanded with other iterations of that same subject. There are a zillion ways to do this and Bach writes each of those twenty-four fugues in an entirely different way. The first fugue in the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier uses stretto--the piling up of the subject on itself--to a maximum extent. The next fugue uses no stretto whatsoever. Each fugue, like each prelude, is an entity in itself. Then a couple of decades later, Bach did it all over again with a new set of twenty-four preludes and fugues in all the keys.
What I want to draw your attention to here is the returning again and again to the same kind of challenge and finding new ways each time to solve the problems. It's the new approach each time that is marvelous. This is the kind of creativity that has astonished every composer since. We find it especially admirable when a composer can, again and again, create something entirely new within very specific boundaries. Every Bach prelude and fugue sounds like no other kind of piece. Similarly, Domenico Scarlatti took up the keyboard sonata and composed five hundred and fifty-five of them, each one most definitely a Scarlatti sonata, but each one a unique individual. It is that combination of individuality within a form or genre that we find so compelling. Perhaps because it is a model of the whole problem of human society: how do we live as individuals within a community?
Lately I have been fooling around with poetry since I am in a dry spell as a composer. I first took up the very familiar and very easy form of the haiku: just three lines with five, seven and five syllables. And traditionally there is a mention of the season. Haiku tend to be inspired by nature. Over the last couple of years I have probably written five hundred haiku, most of them bad, or at least dull.
Recently I have been looking at Pierrot Lunaire by Schoenberg (and there are a couple of posts in the works) and in so doing I have examined the poetic form of the text. These twenty-one poems are taken from a German translation of an original set of fifty poems in French by Albert Giraud, the nom de plume of Emile Albert .Kayenbergh. The poetic form he chose is rather an obscure one, the Rondel Bergamasque originating in 14th century France (though obviously, from the name, previously coming from Bergamo). The form is quite strict: there are two quatrains and a quintet. The first two lines are a refrain that repeats as the last two lines in the second quatrain (a quatrain is a set of four lines and a quintet, of five). Then the first line comes again as the last line of the quintet. This gives the form as follows where the capital letters are an exact repeat: ABba abAB abbaA. Here is an example so you can see how that works:
A Columbine
Les fleurs pâles du clair de Lune,
Comme des roses de clarté,
Fleurissent dans les nuits d'été:
Si je pouvais en cueillir une!
Pour soulager mon infortune,
Je cherche, le long du Léthé,
Les fleurs pâles du clair du Lune,
Comme de roses de clarté.
Et j'apaiserai ma rancune,
Si j'obtiens du ciel irrité
La chimérique volupté
D'effeuiller sur ta toison brune
Les fleurs pâles du clair de Lune!
Of course the translator into English doesn't attempt the rhyme scheme:
To Columbine
The pale flowers of the Moonlight,
Like roses of clarity,
Blossom in the summer nights:
If I could pick one!
To relieve my misfortune,
I search, along the Lethe,
The pale flowers of the Moonlight,
Like roses of clarity.
And I would soothe my rancor,
If from the irritated heaven I obtained
The chimerical sensuousness
Of depetaling upon your brown fleece
The pale flowers of the Moonlight!
And neither does the German translator:
Columbine
Des Mondlichts bleiche Blüten,
Die weissen Wunderrosen,
Blühn in den Julinächten--
O bräch ich eine nur!
Mein banges Leid zu lindern,
Such ich am dunklen Stome
Des Mondlichts bleiche Blüten,
Die weissen Wunderrosen.
Gestillt wär all mein Sehnen,
Dürft ich so märchenheimlich,
So selig leis--entblättern
Auf deine braunen Haare
Des Mondlichts bleiche Blüten!
Since the poetic form evaporates when you translate, I decided to try out the form myself. Here is my third attempt:
Wildflowers
Wildflowers dance across the meadow
Rising to the nearby height
Los Picachos catch the morning light
Illuming every hollow.
This is no place for sorrow
Surrounded by such a sight
Wildflowers dance across the meadow
Rising to the nearby height.
I say I'm moving here tomorrow
Leaving urban noise and blight
But really it is so I might
Find inspiration in Nature mellow
Wildflowers dance across the meadow.
It was an interesting exercise. You write entirely different poetry depending on the form you choose. When I was young I just wrote free verse, but as T. S. Eliot once said "no vers is libre for the man who wants to do a good job." Now I'm interested in the influence of form on content. If you are attempting a Rondel Bergamasque, be careful what rhymes you choose because you are stuck with them for the whole poem!
Here is Sviatoslav Richter with the second prelude and fugue from the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier:
Theodor Adorno saw the promise of Enlightenment ideals betrayed by commercialism, standardization and the misuse of technology--this was certainly the product of his experience with the promise of modernity, the destruction of European culture by Naziism and disillusionment with the "paradise" of America. I'm much more of an optimist because my experience has been a happier one, but there are aspects in which one has to admit that Adorno was right. Let's let Fil from Wings of Pegasus give his observations:
The combination of fear of not being "perfect" along with the commercialization (or rather industrialization) of music has led us to a very unhappy place. Everything he is talking about here is purely technical. It really has almost nothing to do with aesthetics. And frankly, it's nuts. Every singer I have ever worked with has shaded or bent the pitch for enhanced expression. This A-440 equal temperament standard is, of course, useful, but players of bowed instruments, singers and even wind instruments shade the temperament to enhance the performance. And pop musicians used to do this a lot. Equal temperament is actually pretty sterile.
And at the same time, the situation for classical music, outside of a few oases of idealism, is not better, though certainly different. Our problem is that we turn out virtuosos and highly trained theorists and musicologists from a myriad of institutions and frankly, there are almost no jobs for them. There is a tiny minority who have won a place in the international virtuoso and scholar network, but for everyone else, there is little other than frustration. Mind you, we classical musicians can still get together and play chamber music to our mutual enjoyment while ignoring society and the wider audience. I don't know what pop musicians can do. Are there still "folk festivals"?
Stepping aside for the moment from the discussion of Sprechstimme that seems to be developing in the comments on my last post, let's take a moment to look at a developing discussion in the pop music area.
The notion of "authenticity" comes up now and then in regard to music. Sometimes classical musicians are criticized for not being "authentic" the way popular musicians are, imagining pop musicians to be a supposed "working class" category of artist, out there sweating every night, exposing their individual struggles with life and love to the audience. While classical musicians are coddled elitists all dressed up in white tie, singing and playing music written by someone else.
Of course Richard Taruskin had a wonderful time blowing up this whole notion of authenticity used as a marketing tool by the early music folks. See his collection of essays, Text & Act.
Still, there is a meaning of authenticity that comes from knowing who you are and being who you are irrespective of the needs of marketing. Some performers stand out for this quality: Jascha Heifetz, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash. But this kind of performer is less and less part of the contemporary scene where how you appear is far more important than who you are.
So we have an interesting analysis by Fil from Wings of Pegasus of performances by Taylor Swift:
That seems to show quite conclusively that Taylor Swift is miming singing to prerecorded tracks instead of actually singing. The audience are paying, as Fil says, to watch her move around on stage. She is essentially impersonating herself singing her songs. Seems a bit light in the authentic department.
UPDATE: Or rather, afterthought. It seems to me that we live in a time with an astonishing amount of sheer fakery: musician's biographies are a list of half-truths, recordings are "heavily edited" which means phony, the narrative in the mass media is a farrago of outright lies and I don't even want to mention political campaigns! Everywhere you turn you encounter the exaggerated, the malicious distortion, the artificial, the misrepresented. Maybe we should bring back the sixties, at least they tried to be the real deal.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Fil from Wings of Pegasus probably deserves some kind of medal. Here is one of his most passionate videos exposing a really shocking bit of outright fakery:
In preparation for the first performance of Pierrot Lunaire in Berlin in 1912, they held forty rehearsals! For comparison, a typical orchestral concert these days would likely have two, perhaps three rehearsals and the recording of an orchestral soundtrack for a motion picture would have no rehearsals. Yep, they just sightread it. Now, of course, chamber music is different and a piece using new techniques for an entirely new kind of ensemble with a singer using an entirely new kind of vocal technique would require quite a few rehearsals. But I very much doubt that any performance of any kind of music whatsoever gets forty rehearsals these days. So, yes, this is a different kind of piece than pretty much anything else you have encountered. You have to listen very closely and very carefully. Let's start by listening to this fine performance (especially by the pianist, Pierre-Laurent Aimard who I heard play a huge program focussed on Schoenberg in Salzburg this past August, and the soprano, Kiera Duffy) with English sub-titles:
What you should do now, is, wait for it, listen to it again! In that special concert series Schoenberg organized, the Society for Private Musical Performances, they actually did this in concert: the same piece might be played twice.
Now for some context: Schoenberg was a very creative person across various genres: the self-portrait at the top of the post was painted just before he composed Pierrot Lunaire and is a quite respectable artwork in the German expressionist tradition. He was also very influenced and inspired by poetry. As we learn from the Wikipedia article, Pierrot Lunaire is a setting of 21 poems from the cycle of the same name by the Belgian symbolist poet Albert Giraud.
Schoenberg's career came at a moment of severe transition in music history spanning the movement from late 19th century lushly orchestrated works for large orchestra, such as his Gurrelieder, through a period of free atonality, where Pierrot falls, through a Neo-classic period with reference to older forms, to a serialist phase using 12-tone technique. Schoenberg was a leading figure in all of these phases.
He was obsessed with numerology which in this piece involves the numbers 3 and 7: three main sections, each with seven poems, many seven-note motifs throughout, the ensemble (including conductor) comprises seven performers, and so on.
Here is another performance of the piece:
And here is an analysis by Samuel Andreyev:
After walking through a piece like Der Mondfleck with its multiple canonic imitations, motivic density and palindrome structure, you can certainly see why it took a lot of rehearsal. The corollary to that is that it requires that we listen to it lots of times. Here is yet another performance, this time by an Irish ensemble:
I might come back to this piece in a followup post, but for now this will serve as an introduction.
I'm trying to recall if we talked about Schoenberg very much in my years at university. I don't think we did. We talked a lot about Bartók, Shostakovich, DuFay (not much about Messiaen), and a host of others so obscure I don't even recall their names. But Schoenberg? Despite the fact that he was and is a huge boulder in the stream of music history, professors deftly execute manoeuvres to slip by Schoenberg without engaging. Why is this?
Early in the volume of the Oxford History of Music devoted to the early twentieth century, Richard Taruskin handles Schoenberg by setting him alongside contemporaries like Mahler and Richard Strauss, framing him as just another modernist of the day. The main chapter on Schoenberg, subtitled "Schoenberg, Webern, and Expressionism; Atonality," observes:
Schoenberg's whole career was fraught with ironies, contradiction, and ambiguities, beginning with the paradox that one of the outstanding academic music theorists and composition teachers of the twentieth century was himself self-taught.
In a similar irony, the greatest composer of all was just an underpaid church musician in Saxony, also pretty much self-taught.
The claim I want to make, after trying to figure out Schoenberg for much of my musical life is that he is not just an important modernist, or inventor of atonal music, or composition teacher--no, Schoenberg is actually the most important composer of the twentieth century--certainly the first half, and probably of the whole century. Never mind his social alienation, his difficult reconciliation with his Jewish heritage or his struggles with the musical establishment. He just wrote the most important music, next to which the music of so many of his well-known contemporaries is mere lemon meringue.
Let's have some examples. His early rival was Stravinsky, who attended one of the first performances of Pierrot Lunaire and was impressed. He had just written The Rite of Spring, which many (myself included) have considered the greatest work of the twentieth century. But, you know, with a bit more thoughtful consideration, while The Rite is a brilliant ballet based on primitive Russian themes--an astonishing compilation of so many harmonic, melodic and rhythmic inventions that it still feels avant-garde, Pierrot on the other hand is actually a deeper and more profound work, synthesizing much of the devices in Western music into an expressionist tapestry of unique expression: a new kind of ensemble (since imitated many times), a new vocal technique (Sprechstimme), a new kind of music theatre and so on. The measure of just how radical this music is, is that while it took audiences a year or two to appreciate The Rite, most audiences today, over a century later, still don't know what to make of Pierrot.
I could go on, listing other pieces by Schoenberg that easily surpass in their substance more famous pieces: Verklärte Nacht over Berg's Lyric Suite, the Piano Concerto, op 42 over any piano concerto by Stravinsky or Prokofiev (but yes, those by Bartók stand up pretty well), the Violin Concerto, op 36 over any violin concerto by Stravinsky, Bartók, Prokofiev and so on (but, the Violin Concerto no. 1 by Shostakovich is pretty good competition), even the opera Moses und Aron over Wozzeck or a bunch of other 20th century operas (but I haven't such a broad knowledge of them, so I accept correction), and so on. The point is, just about everything Schoenberg wrote was and is hugely important. And I haven't even mentioned all the amazing piano music.
The empirical reason I am saying this is, in this 150th anniversary of Schoenberg's birth, as I come back to listen to some pieces, I realize that I have been listening to them all along, never stopped listening to them and I want to hear music by Schoenberg more than almost any other music. It is pure, solid, musical truth, and there is not a lot of that around.
One of the things that makes Bach's music seem so eternal and inevitable is the harmonic sequence. He had more ways of elaborating and decorating a sequence than even Vivaldi. Another heavy user of sequences in quite a different harmonic context is Anton Bruckner.
Occasionally the thought crosses my mind to write a book or two. With almost 4,000 posts, many of them a thousand words, this blog already comprises the equivalent of quite a few books. But the thought was sparked again recently when I was introducing an old friend to the music of Bruckner. He read some stuff on his own and found it too technical, so I sent him a link to a post I did which he said he found much more useful. He's a painter and spent a session listening to Bruckner and quite enjoyed it.
So the thought has crossed my mind to write a book on something I have become more aware of over the years: the triumph of credentialism in advanced societies. I am more aware of this because nowadays I live a life that is mercifully free of credentialism.
Let me share some details: I am going to design and build a house for myself in the next couple of years and there are essentially no credentialed persons involved. In order to find a suitable and affordable lot I searched for a few months without much success. Finally, just before going to Europe for three weeks in August I asked my long-time driver (also a musician) to have a look around. He comes from a large family (eight brothers, five sisters) and seems to know everyone. When I got back he had a lead for me and I liked it. Here is a video, my driver, wearing sunglasses is in the middle:
I am buying one normal sized lot in the middle of a few dozen lots, all surveyed. It appears as if mine will be the first house. Nice view of the hills. This is a 360° shot.
Here is what is uncredentialed about it. My driver, of course, has no real estate credentials and neither did the seller's representative. There is no deed to the property yet (though there will be in a few years) so I had my lawyer (yes, she has credentials) look over the very skimpy papers which she said were ok. No escrow, no wire transfers and no checks. Instead I handed over a bag of actual cash and now have a "Carta de posesión" from the local village that says I own the land. I did have a surveyor mark the boundaries, but I'm not sure what his qualifications are. Civil engineer? So there were no closing costs and there will be no taxes and no building permit is required.
My architect, Canadian, has no credentials. She was a photographer and is an excellent designer, though with no credentials there either. Her builder might be an engineer, I'm not sure. But none of his crew have any credentials. The reason we can do things this way is because we are in Mexico. Even if we did have to get a building permit, which we don't, no building inspector would come. I don't think we have any, just people from the archeological branch of government in the case of historic buildings.
Looking back on my career as a musician, right from the beginning I had no faith in credentials. My first instrument was electric bass in a rock group and when I converted to classical music and became a classical guitarist the first ones I met, while enthusiasts, had no credentials. I finally learned the trade with José Tomás in Spain, but I have no idea if he had any degrees. His "credential" was to be one of a few select students of Andrés Segovia--a great artist, but with no credentials that I am aware of. My first exposure to academia was wonderful in that I became exposed to the whole panoply of Western Civilization, but as regards the guitar, it was disenchanting.
I arrived at university, guitar in hand, only to find that the guitar instructor, a fine musician and student of Julian Bream (no other credentials) had left town so I was handed off to a couple of hack amateurs while they tried to persuade me that my instrument(s) were actually lute and piano. Nope. Later in life I did attend a serious musical institution, the Mozarteum in Salzburg, but at the end of the summer master class, I didn't even bother picking up my certificate. As far as I was concerned your only "credential" as a performer was your last concert. Funny story, I was riding around with a retired organist looking at houses and he was bragging about attending Juilliard. I have a weak character so I was unable to restrain myself from casually mentioning that I attended one of the very few musical institutions with a higher reputation than Juilliard. That caused a deafening silence. Yes, the Mozarteum. Mea culpa!
So I actually have a long-standing bias against credentialism that extends to the present day and is even stronger now. Of course, in Mexico, this is a fairly common view. No-one has much faith in government bureaucrats.
But when I visit supposedly more advanced countries like Canada, Austria, or Germany, I can see the devastation that out-of-control credentialism has wrought. Universities are rigid ideological camps, cities are ruined by zoning and ordnances to the point that houses are unaffordable, and renovations are impossible. The costs of everything keep climbing and the reasons are connected to the layers of bureaucracy and regulation that control every aspect of life. The benefits of a rational society are eaten up by the parasitism of the unproductive. These are vampire societies with a minority (though, sadly, not a tiny minority) sucking the life out of the people. In Canada in the last few years, while the number of employed in the private sector increased by 3.5% the number of government workers increased by 31%.
But statistics are not as important as the feel, the attitude of societies. In Canada, small businesses have almost been erased from the landscape, crushed by taxes and regulations, things that only big businesses can easily tolerate. People are junior partners in their own lives. And yet, all I hear is discussion of how much more taxes can be raised, how many more government regulations are required, how more minutely people's lives have to be controlled.
On the other hand, the best thing I have heard lately is that Javier Milei, the president of Argentina, is actually doing the right things. He just got rid of the entire federal tax department, a hive of corruption, and it will be replaced by a new, much smaller and more efficient department. I'm sure Canada, and many other countries, could benefit from the same kind of treatment.
So that's just a brief sketch of a prospective short book. What do you think readers? Scandalized? It's not political exactly, it's more anti-political.
A recurring theme here has been the difference between the European and North American musical scenes. As a young player I studied in Spain and Austria and have returned to debut in London and tour in France, Germany and Italy. In recent years I have attended the Salzburg Festival on three occasions.
Things are very different in Europe: audiences are more numerous, younger, and don't clap between movements. The concert repertoire is also far broader. Heather MacDonald offers a detailed description after a recent visit to Prague and Vienna: Europe’s Music Meritocracy.
Vienna was the cradle of Western classical music from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century; it remains one of the three or four most important musical centers today. Not surprisingly, the soloists are more international than in Prague. A Mongolian bass-baritone, Amartuvshin Enkhbat, was the high point of a Tosca performance at the Staatsoper; I had heard him in 2021 in a preposterously updated Rigoletto (think: a dry-cleaning shop under a subway station) at the Teatro del Maggio Musicale in Florence. The other leading cast members were from Bulgaria, Italy, and Russia. The conductor, Yoel Gamzou, was an Israeli-American. At the Volksoper, I attended a feminist bastardization of Puccini’s La Rondine, ending with a fin-de-siècle version of Thelma and Louise, gleefully targeting the patriarchy. The production featured a German-British conductor, a Dutch director, a Swedish lead soprano, and an Italian-American Juilliard graduate as leading tenor.
The most striking aspect of these Central European orchestras, from an American perspective, is the lack of Asians. Not a single Asian is to be found in the Vienna Philharmonic’s violin, viola, cello, and double bass sections—something almost inconceivable, from an American perspective. In fact, there are no Asians in the entire orchestra. This is neither inherently good nor bad. It is just radically different. In the violin section alone of the New York Philharmonic, there are 20 Asians, including the concertmaster, out of 26 members.
Why the difference? Central European orchestras retain remnants of a guild system: students apprentice in local conservatories and get hired into the orchestras where their teachers play. Reflecting that close bond, performers’ biographies in concert programs often pay charming tribute to teachers, something one rarely sees in American programs.
Yes, Europe has a lot of problems, but the lack of appreciation of cultural traditions is not one of them.
Here is the Brno Philharmonic with La Valse by Ravel.
We haven't put up a Wigmore Hall recital for a while. This one just appeared on YouTube.
Wigmore Hall, in London has always been a favorite of mine, not least because I did my debut there, many years ago. It is a lovely small hall with excellent acoustics. It seats a modest 545 listeners and specializes in solo recitals, chamber and early music.
What makes Bruckner extraordinary to conduct is that it’s probably the one composer who can really touch the absolute of playing music in a group, or singing music together, which is that it’s not about individual reward or pleasure — it’s really about a surrender to the collective. It doesn’t give you many solos if you are an orchestral player. You play a lot of tremolos if you’re a string player. Brass players tend to be more enthusiastic about it at first, because they get a lot to play. It’s been the same journey with every orchestra I’ve done Bruckner with. It starts with a little bit of, “Oh, it’s going to be long, it’s going to be tiring,” and once you get into a certain zone with this composer, it elevates you, and you feel like you’ve experienced what is truly the symbolic power of orchestral playing.
The Times introduces the article with this:
There was a time, as recently as three or four decades ago, when this composer was a relative rarity, especially outside Central Europe. His reputation preceded him. He was a religious man alien to the modern world, the author of monumental symphonies that many listeners found monumentally dull.
He was a provincial, uncouth, hardly a sophisticate like Brahms or Mahler. There was the forbidding editorial history of his nine (or is that 11? 18?) symphonies, and the lingering unease at his adoption by Nazi propagandists. If Bruckner was never exactly absent from the repertoire, he was long its resident eccentric.
The reason the Bruckner and Shostakovich were both deemed insignificant, minor, boring was due to the aesthetic hegemony of modernism. Music had to be 'progressive', ironic, crisp and dissonant in order to be taken seriously. It had to be on an intellectual foundation that rejected religion and emotional sincerity. Both Bruckner and Shostakovich massively failed this test, albeit for somewhat different reasons.
But as Nézet-Séguin hints, Bruckner (and Shostakovich) both used the large orchestra of the late romantic era in masterful ways. Bruckner especially, as another conductor hints at, is a kind of summation of hundreds of years of music history in his almost medieval melodic lines, quasi-Baroque sequences, and ecstatic use of all the resources of the myriad instruments of the orchestra. He synthesizes everything from Gregorian chant up to Wagner and goes slightly beyond. From a certain angle he could be seen as the apotheosis of Western Civilization in music.
The contrast with Mahler is instructive because with Mahler the autumn of the West starts to be felt. Where Bruckner is glorious, Mahler is unsettled and we start to see the exaggerated postures of decadence. Mahler died in 1911 and within three years the fabric of Europe would be torn to shreds by the First World War. But for Bruckner, there was nothing of this on the horizon.
This is mostly my own speculative take. The Times article is journalism, of course, and doesn't delve deeply. And the great majority of scholarship on Bruckner is still by German scholars, many of the earlier ones compromised by their association with the Nazi era in Germany. There is a new generation, of course, but I have the sense that they are still working out just what is going on with Bruckner!
One of the great Bruckner conductors was Sergiu Celibidache. Here he is with the Fourth Symphony:
I don't have favorite recordings that last over time because I am in a process of constant discovery. One summer I spent listening only to gamelan music, the next summer it was Haydn string quartets. Right now I am listening mostly to Bruckner symphonies in this recording:
Not that long ago I spent a month or so listening through this box:
I think the problem with The Music Salon was that it was getting into a rut, so the solution seems to be to simply widen the horizon a bit. To that end, let's consider some outstanding movies of the last fifty years.
I'm not going to do a numbered list, that's too clickbaity, so I will go from well-known to obscure. The star of three of the best-known and frankly best movies of the last fifty years is, of course, Bill Murray. In order of well-knownness they are Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day and Lost in Translation. They combine real wisdom with great entertainment value and not a trace of pretentiousness.
Two really good movies from a French director are Le Grand Bleu (The Big Blue) and Leon, The Professional, both by Luc Besson. He did a lot of other movies, some specifically for the English-speaking market, like The Fifth Element, but I think these are the most interesting.
Another great director is Australia's Peter Weir whose really great films include Gallipoli, The Year of Living Dangerously and Dead Poets Society. Every one of his films is utterly different from every other--no formulas!
I have to mention a couple of Japanese directors: Masaki Kobayashi who did Hara-Kiri and Akira Kurosawa who directed Seven Samurai, the inspiration for The Magnificent Seven western.
Finally, the most remarkable film I have seen in recent years, La Belle Noiseuse by Jacques Rivette.
Some have said that the greatest novel of the 20th century is The Gulag Archipelago by Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn. I'm not a literary critic so I can't say yea or nay to that, but I am re-reading it and it is certainly a very powerful and important book.
First a little context from the Wikipedia article on the Old Believers:
Old Believer theology is characterized by this strict adherence to pre-reform traditions, as well as the belief that the reformed church's heresy is coeval with the arrival of the Antichrist.
As a result of this eschatological belief, as well as the church and state's mass persecution of the Old Believers, many fled to establish colonies and monasteries in the wilderness.
Now to Solzhenitsyn:
The Old Believers--eternally persecuted, eternal exiles--they are the ones who three centuries earlier divined the ruthlessness at the heart of Authority! In 1950 a plane was flying over the vast basin of the Podkamennaya Tunguska. The training of airmen has improved greatly since the war, and the zealous aviator spotted something that no-one before him had seen in twenty years: an unknown dwelling place in the taiga ... What they had found were the Yaruyevo Old Believers. When the great and longed-for Plague began--I mean collectivization--they had fled from this blessing into the depths of the taiga, a whole village of them. And they lived there without ever poking their noses out ... In this way the Yaruyevo Old Believers had won themselves twenty years of life! Twenty years of life as free human beings... [The Gulag Archipelago, pp 431-2]
Now here is the fantasy part: in a world where the arts have been collectivized, including music, and the Swiftian dinosaurs, velociraptors of the backbeat, roam the land, crushing all before them, a small village of contrapuntalists, following the ancient rites of DuFay, Josquin, Ockeghem, and Bach flee into the taiga and for many decades preserve the tapestries of counterpoint, completely isolated from the world. Like the Old Believers before them, once a year they send a single representative by obscure woodland paths to the local WalMart to purchase salt, blank paper and HB pencils to continue their quest for salvation and really good music.
And, of course, once a year they perform Nuper rosarum flores by Guillaume DuFay:
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