Today's Listening: Dylan and Bernard van Dieren

Two very different pieces of music. First, from Blonde on Blonde, "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands":

An early piece by Bernard van Dieren: Elegy for Cello and Orchestra (1908). Unusually, he was influenced equally by Delius and Schoenberg:

Quotes

 The flesh is sad and I have read all the books.

--Mallarmé

Scientism is the fallacy of believing that the method of science must be used on all forms of experience and, given time, will settle every issue.

--Jacques Barzun

No matter with what skill the great manage to seem other than they are, they cannot conceal their malignity.

--La Bruyère (1688)

Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.

--Horace Walpole

Pantagruel then asked, 'What people dwell in this fair bitch of an island?' 'They,' said Xenomanes, 'are all Hypocriticals, Dropsicals, Bead-tellers, purring Counterfeits, Sanctimonious, Black-beetles and Hermits: wretched folk, all of them, living on wayfarers' alms...'

--Rabelais

Today's Listening: Rodrigo

 I've often thought that the best description of the music of Joaquin Rodrigo would be "flamenco music if written by Igor Stravinsky!" Here is the very fine guitarist Koki Fujimoto with the last movement of the Sonata giocosa.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTJ03mLh1Wc

Today's Listening: Schoenberg for Chamber Orchestra

These three very brief pieces for chamber orchestra, no opus number, were written in 1910 and only came to light after Schoenberg's death. They are from that atonal transition period between his late romantic style and his later development of twelve-tone music. Quite interesting.

Miscellanea

I have stopped doing the Friday Miscellanea so there are a number of items worth mentioning the foremost of which is

Vast Trove of Arnold Schoenberg’s Music Is Destroyed in Fire

An estimated 100,000 scores and parts by the groundbreaking 20th-century composer Arnold Schoenberg were destroyed last week when the wildfires in Southern California burned down the music publishing company founded by his heirs. The company rents and sells the scores to ensembles around the world.

“It’s brutal,” said Larry Schoenberg, 83, a son of the composer, who ran the company, Belmont Music Publishers, from his home in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles and kept the firm’s inventory in a 2,000-square-foot building behind his house. “We lost everything.”

No original scores were lost as they are all kept in an archive in Vienna. But performing parts and scores will be in short supply for a while. The fires in Los Angeles were a terrible disaster for everyone. Wishing a complete recovery to those who lost their homes and businesses.

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How Spotify is ruining music

From the perspective of a music fan, streaming is, unfortunately, a spectacular product: the universal jukebox! If some have a twinge of discomfort about the ethical compromises that enable its convenience — as when they use Amazon, or Uber — the uneasiness can be ambient and unspecific enough to keep them from changing their usage: Are the alternatives really any more righteous? For musicians, though, Spotify has been a more existential threat than the file-sharing revolution that spawned it, because it has the veneer of legitimacy. Meanwhile, says Liz Pelly, the company leaches profits from working musicians while preparing the ground to replace those musicians with AI-generated neo-Muzak. 

The broad strokes of the indictment — the neo-payola promotional schemes; the minuscule royalties paid to artists, not to mention the royalty-free “ghost artists”; the designation of huge swaths of artists as royalty-ineligible “hobbyists”; the investments in podcasts, military technology and aural wallpaper repackaged for wellness culture — may be familiar to those interested in the issues confronting musicians in the 21st century. But it’s invaluable to have the brief for the prosecution in one place, narrated in plain language with a sense of righteous outrage.

* * *

Selling Schoenberg?

It would be hard to come up with a more radically divisive major composer than Arnold Schoenberg, who was born in Vienna in 1874 and died in Los Angeles in 1951. It would be equally hard to come up with a more radically inclusive composer, who remade European music in his image and then came here and did the same for Hollywood. Or a more devotedly progressive — you could even say obsessively progressive — composer who honored the past yet paved the way for a kicking-and-screaming future.

We still don’t quite know how to sell Schoenberg. There is the scary modernist Schoenberg — inventor of the 12-tone system, replacing traditional harmony with the democratic notion that all notes are equal — who reputedly drives audiences away. But there is also the Schoenberg who carried on from the 19th century Romantic tradition in his lush early scores like the massive post-Wagnerian and post-Brahmsian “Gurrelieder.”

This next one sounds a lot like my post on Artisanal Music:

Analogue revival

From the dumb phone trend to a vinyl revival, analogue has been back on the rise in the cultural zeitgeist. This could shake up the digital ecosystem and unlock potential opportunities for entertainment –– but the 'why’ behind the trend needs to be better understood to action the opportunity to its full potential. This report explores the extent of the analogue revival, with insights from companies and organisations operating at the heart of it, dives into what is driving the trend, and what comes next –– looking at longevity, threats, and the next set of opportunities.

Tár finally appeared on Amazon Prime so I tried to watch it last night. Didn't make it to the fifteen minute mark. I usually have a problem with movies about music--with the exception of Amadeus and A Hard Day's Night--and this was very much not an exception. Watching the opening interview was painful as an unconvincing and embarrassing portrayal of a famous conductor. Nope.

* * *

‘Experiencing Sound’ Review: Hearing Is Believing

In “Experiencing Sound: The Sensation of Being,” Lawrence Kramer captures all sorts of heard moments, and in superb prose. He has assembled 66 brief chapters on music and sound, ranging from a couple of paragraphs to four or five pages. His aim, in part, is to make us intensely aware of the sounds that surround us and how they orient us. As he puts it: “Sound directs our passage through time. It shapes our orientation to the future moment and also to the moment when the future stops.”

What Adorno Can Still Teach Us

The normative ideal of happiness or human flourishing has its origins in classical philosophy—in Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics such as Seneca. In Kant, it gained a central importance in the thought that in moral reasoning, we must postulate an ultimate convergence between our virtuous conduct and our just deserts. Kant thought of this convergence as the summum bonum, or the highest good. The implication is that the demands of morality and the natural expectation for happiness do not in principle conflict. Of course, Kant believed that to conceive of this convergence, we must presuppose an afterlife. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno draws upon Kant’s reasoning but sharply rejects the inference that the highest good would lie beyond mortal life. As he explains, the essence of Kant’s philosophy is the “unthinkability of despair,” but the demand for happiness can be retained without appealing to Kant’s postulate of eternity. On the contrary, Adorno says that we can affirm the postulate of happiness if and only if “metaphysics slips into materialism.” I find this conclusion fascinating. Adorno is sufficiently realistic in his social criticism to acknowledge that we do not possess any certain or perfect conception of what our happiness would consist in. His basic view is that in a damaged world, all of our ideals are likewise damaged; this reflects his Marxist reluctance to fill out any pictures of utopia. This is why all current intimations of happiness are (in his words) “precarious” and interlaced with despair.

 * * *

Let's have some music! First Alexandra Dovgan with the Partita No. 6 by Bach:

At age 17 she is just beginning her career. Grigory Sokolov is one of her fans. Next, Stravinsky, L'histoire du Soldat:

Finally, the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with Hilary Hahn:

Salzburg 2025

 

This is the cover of the 2025 Salzburg program, which, oddly, is the first program book I have ever seen as I usually go online. The reason I have it is that the Festival, without my asking, just mailed it to my office. Probably because I have attended three festivals in recent years. I'm in the process of planning and building a house for myself, so I was rather planning on not attending this year. BUT!

The program is a hefty 156 page book which heralds what seems to be a renewed approach to the festival programming. I have mentioned before some differences between current programming and what was done in the late 1980s when I was a student there. Back then they had two prominent living composers in attendance with their music: Karlheinz Stockhausen (whom I met) and Witold Lutosławski (his new violin concerto was being premiered). But in recent years, no living composers, instead they had a "focus" on a 20th century composer. Last summer it was Arnold Schoenberg. And most of the festival programming was core repertoire. But for the coming festival they have changed the approach considerably. For one thing, instead of seven opera productions, there are twelve and it looks as if five of them are by living composers. There are also some premieres of new dance projects. And instead of a focus on one 20th century composer, they honor two: Dmitri Shostakovich and Pierre Boulez. Finally the chance to hear concert performances of Boulez, rare in recent years. There are also performances of major works by Hans Werner Henze and Luigi Nono and of two major works by Igor Stravinsky: L'Histoire du Soldat and Oedipus Rex. From Shostakovich we have not only the Symphony No. 10 in the version for piano four hands and the orchestral version, but also a piano concerto and the whole of the 24 Preludes and Fugues for piano. Oh, and three string quartets and an evening of chamber music.

In a real tour-de-force, pianist Víkingur Ólafsson is playing the last three piano sonatas by Beethoven in the first half of his recital and the Art of Fugue by Bach in the second half. And don't despair, there will be a lot of Mozart--five concerts entirely devoted to his music.

I've just skimmed the surface as there are loads of other concerts devoted to a long list of composers. For example, there are five concerts by the Vienna Philharmonic under various conductors and ten guest orchestras including the Royal Concertgebouw and the Berlin Philharmonic. Also ten piano recitals including, of course, Grigory Sokolov.

I really can't afford to attend this year, but maybe I will find a way. We have until January 21 to apply for tickets at the festival site:

https://www.salzburgerfestspiele.at/en/tickets/programme?season=9

Artisanal Music

From Wikipedia:

An artisan (from French: artisan, Italian: artigiano) is a skilled craft worker who makes or creates material objects partly or entirely by hand. These objects may be functional or strictly decorative, for example furniture, decorative art, sculpture, clothing, food items, household items, and tools and mechanisms such as the handmade clockwork movement of a watchmaker. Artisans practice a craft and may through experience and aptitude reach the expressive levels of an artist. 

The adjective "artisanal" is often used in describing hand-processing in contrast to an industrial process, such as in the phrase artisanal mining. Thus, "artisanal" is sometimes used in marketing and advertising as a buzz word to describe or imply some relation with the crafting of handmade food products, such as bread, beverages, cheese or textiles. Many of these have traditionally been handmade, rural or pastoral goods but are also now commonly made on a larger scale with automated mechanization in factories and other industrial areas.

I've been away from the blog over the holidays, but I'm back and it feels like a new phase in culture so let's talk about it. I've made critical comments about a lot of the trends in popular music such as miming in concerts, industrial production, songwriting by committee and just generally a decline to repetitive mediocrity that we can see in rhythm, harmony, melody and lyrics.

In classical music the criticism clusters around accusations that it is elitist, obscure, outmoded and just generally irrelevant. And when artists like Yuja Wang try to make it more relevant by, frankly, dressing like a hooker, it becomes a caricature of itself.

So it feels like time to refresh and renovate both popular and classical musics. Before I start sounding like a caricature of Ted Gioia (who by the way did an interesting post recently on Anna Akhmatova) let me get to the specifics. The fine arts and the marketplace always have an awkward relationship. I genuinely believe that producing music for entirely commercial purposes is a mistake--at least I am quite certain that it holds no interest to me whatsoever. This is why my career as a concert guitarist was never entirely successful. Careerism, the single-minded focus on advancing one's career, never seemed to have anything to do with music as such.

Of course, musicians live in the world just like everyone else and they have to pay the bills. So one does need some financial security as an artist. In the past, patronage was common, but today, apart from the unreliable support of government, artists find they have to enter the marketplace or an educational institution. For many, it seems this results in a kind of endemic mediocrity.

What still attracts me to classical music over popular music is that so much of it is still artisanal. Aspiring musicians still have to, in nearly all cases, apprentice themselves to a maestro to learn the trade. Often these maestros are found in musical institutions though those are also inhabited by many careerists as well. Playing your instrument is a lifelong hands-on task as is being a scholar or historian. Composers may find themselves seduced by the myriad technologies of music production available today, but that feels to me very like the deal Mephistopheles offered Faust: infinite knowledge and magical powers at the cost of your soul.

A musical experience is for me is one where one hears a performer playing an instrument with no technological processing. This rules out nearly all current popular music, which is ok with me. The reason one wants to exclude technological processing is that it reduces (almost to nothing in some cases) the actual human agency of the artist. A music performance, in order to be aesthetically valuable, has to involve all the subtle shades and nuances that come directly from the artist. Popular music also used to be largely like this.

I feel that one of the strongest urges behind the growth of early music performance is precisely this: it puts the individual human artist at the center, playing instruments that are themselves handmade. The total opposite of this, of course, is the use of Artificial Intelligence to compose and perform music. For human listeners, let's have human performers and composers.

Speaking of Anna Akhmatova, years ago I set this poem of hers:

Music

There is a magic burning in it,

Cutting its facets diamond clear,

And it alone calms me in minutes

When others do not dare come near.

When my last friend cast down his eyes,

It was at my side at the grave,

It sang as thunder in spring skies

As if all flowers started raving.

Here is one of my favorite examples:

A Bach Film

I haven't been able to watch all of this film, but judging by the first part, it seems quite good.