Friday Miscellanea

 Ur music?

The Italian-born composer-pianist Ferruccio Busoni was a clairvoyant who will never cease to magnetize a coterie of adherents. In his Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music (1907), Busoni proposed the notion of “Ur-Musik.” It is an elemental realm of absolute music in which composers have approached the “true nature of music” by discarding traditional templates. Sonata form, since the times of Haydn and Mozart a basic organizing principle governed by goal-directed harmonies, would be no more.

An example?

Encountering Adams’s Become Ocean on a 21st-century symphonic program is so fundamentally enthralling that it risks cliché. It is the proverbial oasis in the desert. The Sahara here is contemporary American concert music inscribed in sand. The ocean Adams supplies is equally physical and metaphysical. Its tides heave and recede. In place of tunes, it proposes shifting modulations of texture, pulse, and harmony. The harmonies are triadic but barely directional; they shimmer atop anchoring brass choirs.

Read the whole essay which covers a lot of ground 

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 A remarkable concert on the river Thames:

Travelers coming to London by sea were sometimes surprised when their sailing ships anchored at the mouth of the Thames and then simply waited—not for a shift in the wind but for a change in the water. Depending on the hour, the river flowed either forward or backward, pushed along by the estuarial tide, carrying lost boots, schools of pike and carp, occasionally corpses, and just now royals and nobility headed toward supper and an evening’s entertainment at a garden villa upstream in Chelsea. Early the next morning, with the water returned to its normal state, George floated back home and allowed everyone finally to retire to bed.

Two days later, when a newspaper gave an account of the outing, the most remarkable thing was reckoned to be not the king and his mobile court, swept along by a reversible river, but rather “the finest Symphonies, compos’d express for this Occasion,” and the German who had written them. He was thirty-two years old, graced with a royal pension, and comfortable in four languages. He was said to have survived a sword thrust when an opponent’s blade landed on a button. He had attached himself to dukes who became princes and princes who became kings. It would take the better part of a century for other people to rearrange his latest work, composed in bright major keys built for the outdoors, and drag it into a concert hall. Its title, Water Music, would forever carry a whiff of cow parsley and river mud. But chroniclers were already calling him “the famous Mr. Hendel,” and on this splendid July evening, a few months into his thirty-third year, he had every reason to believe one obvious thing: the right river, taken at the flood, could work miracles.

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Painting ancient statues:

Ancient Greek and Roman art tends to look really good today. 

This is not a universal rule. The Greeks weren’t always the masters of naturalism that we know: early Archaic kouroi now seem rather stilted and uneasy. As in all societies, cruder work was produced at the lower end of the market. Art in the peripheral provinces of the Roman Empire was often clearly a clumsy imitation of work at the center. Even so, modern viewers tend to be struck by the excellence of Greek and Roman art. The examples I have given here are far from exceptions. Explore the Naples Archa­eological Museum, the British Museum, the Louvre, or the Metropolitan Museum and you will see that they had tons of this stuff. Still more remarkable, in a way, is the abundance of good work discovered in Pompeii, a provincial town of perhaps 15,000 people.

Here is another Roman statue, this time depicting the Emperor Augustus. It is called the Augustus of the Prima Porta after the site where it was discovered. Something interesting about this statue is that traces of paint survive on its surface. This is because, like most though not all ancient statues, it was originally painted.

You really have to read the whole thing for a fascinating argument that the reason that our attempts to paint ancient statues come out looking so horrible is because we are doing it wrong.

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Bachtrack’s Classical Music Statistics 2025

Just picking out some interesting tidbits:

In 2025, Yannick Nézet-Séguin tops our list of busiest conductors, with an amazing 120 listed engagements – and looking back over the last decade of data, Nézet-Séguin has been a consistent presence among the busiest.

European orchestras are similar in their distance travelled. The Berliner Philharmoniker, Wiener Philharmoniker and Budapest Festival Orchestra all visited 11 countries in 2025. Their raw number of total listed performances are notable too – 137, 132 and 100 respectively, including concerts in their home bases, though the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester outpaced them with 187, visiting 8 countries outside Germany.

In the last decade, we have seen a steady rise of Maurice Ravel in our listings. 2025 marked the composer’s 150th anniversary, so it is no surprise to see his pieces in among the most performed concert works, La Valse and the Piano Concerto in G major both placing within the top five.

I didn't see statistics for most active soloists which would have been interesting.

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Now let's have some musical envois, Let's start with Become Ocean and work up from there.

Now some water music by Handel:

And here is Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting Tchaikovsky:

Finally Maurice Ravel: