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.