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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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.
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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:
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.
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‘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.
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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:
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