What I'm Reading/Watching

First, what I'm currently reading:

This book, that I just finished this morning, is known particularly as the target of a vile attack. Wikipedia informs us:

In 1989, Supreme Leader of Iran Ruhollah Khomeini declared a fatwa against Rushdie, resulting in several failed assassination attempts on the author, who was granted police protection by the UK government, and attacks on connected individuals, including the Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi who was stabbed to death in 1991. Assassination attempts against Rushdie continued, including an attempt on his life in August 2022, in which he lost sight in one eye and the use of one hand.

I doubt very much the Ayatollah read a word of the book. It is a difficult read with a wealth of terms from Indian and Islamic culture, a wealth of characters and an extremely tangled narrative. That being said, it is a formidable piece of writing. The only work I could compare to it, though utterly different, would be James Joyce's Ulysses.

I read this book way back in the 70s and re-reading it now, it seems utterly different. Told in first person narrative, it is an observation of the life of an underachieving misfit, Holden Caulfield, who just got kicked out of a private high school and  is wandering aimlessly. He pretty much hates everything. One online critic thinks that the book captures the nihilism and malaise that infects current culture even though it was written just after the end of WWII, a time of optimism in America. Or maybe it is just the story of a jerk. That's my impression and I'm 4/5ths of the way through.

I'm rather a fan of Japanese culture and lately I've been delving into novels. I've read two by Yasunari Kawabata and, on the recommendation of another online critic, I'm just starting this one by Osamu Dazai. There are a couple of others, Yukio Mishima and Kazuo Ishiguro, that I am likely to look at. After that I am probably going to re-read St. Urbain's Horseman by Mordecai Richler to see if Canada has any culture after all.

Ok, culture. After living nearly three decades in Mexico I have come to the conclusion that Mexico has a great deal of history (the small city where I live is 500 years old and the ruins of older civilizations go back to 1500 BC with the Olmecs) and a great deal of culture. Canada, on the other hand, has very little history and almost no culture. Let me defend that statement with a little video by Canadian commentator J. J. McCullough:

Yes, he does have a really exaggerated Canadian accent, but if you scroll to the 16:37 mark he tells us about Vincent Massey who between 1949 and 1951 headed a Royal Commission on the Arts which noticed that while Canada was, in the wake of WWII, a significant world power with growing prosperity, it had very little in the way of culture (outside Quebec, that is, more on that later). So the recommendation was to set aside $100 million to support the arts. That doesn't work of course. Culture is not something you sprinkle on a people like a condiment. Culture has to come from the people in my view. So what happened then and is still happening now is that government bureaucrats give money to their allies, friends, cliques of the well-connected and a couple of artists just for show. Genuine creative artists will see virtually none of it.

Quebec is a bit of an exception as they do have a local grassroots culture. If you make a list of non-popular Canadian musicians you might come up with Glenn Gould, Oscar Peterson, Leonard Cohen, Yannick Nézet-Séguin and most recently Angine de Poitrine. With the exception of Glenn Gould they are all from Quebec.

Speaking of supporting Canadian culture, this is a nice satiric summary:

https://x.com/SatireSquadHQ

Actually, Canada does have a culture, but it is largely an imported one from the various peoples that have settled in Canada. But a lot of it doesn't survive the first blizzard, so it is more like faint wisps of European culture spread rather thinly. Again, with the exception of Quebec.

Finally, a fragment of a movie review. Lately I've been collecting a few DVDs of films worth having. The Seventh Seal, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Le Grand Bleu, Fanny and Alexander and lately, Ben-Hur from 1959. Apart from anything with Bill Murray I'm not a big fan of American cinema, but this film is widely admired. I won't go over the strengths of the movie--it won eleven Academy Awards--but I would like to share the oddities. Here are some things that you don't find in more recent movies: an orchestral overture before the film starts and another orchestral piece at intermission. This is thinking of a film as being vaguely like an opera. The soundtrack by Miklós Rózsa I found rather over-ripe. I like slow-paced French films, but I found this film to be excessively turgid with so very many long, long shots of the lead actors just standing there emoting soulfully. One very interesting oddity is that the protagonist, Ben-Hur is Jewish, something you would not encounter in contemporary film for political reasons. But the aspect that I found most curious was the religious one. The film takes place at the same time that Jesus is traveling in Judea and delivering his Sermon on the Mount. We never see his face, but he crosses paths with Judah Ben-Hur on a few occasions, once bringing him water. We also see his progression to the Crucifixion which Judah accompanies. What is the purpose of this, inserted into what is basically a story of vengeance? Well, it is essentially to make it not a story of vengeance and forgiveness. Judah never forgives the Roman responsible for the imprisonment of his mother and sister where, abandoned in a dungeon, they contract leprosy. The divine intervention is that during the Crucifixion a gentle rain falls on his mother and sister whom he brought out from their isolation in a leper colony, and they are miraculously cured of the disease so removing the need for forgiveness.

Divine intervention, a miracle, essentially ruins the moral quality of the narrative. The old name for this is deus ex machina and for me it is always a cheat and a disappointment. But that may be just because I am not religious. Another film where I thought the moral structure of the narrative was ruined is Million Dollar Baby, directed by Clint Eastwood. Hilary Swank's character is paralyzed through the vile action of an opponent, but the story from then on is about her acceptance and request for a merciful death when morally it should be about the punishment of the one who caused it. Or so it seems to me.

Let's have some religious music: Hildegard von Bingen.

 

Friday Miscellanea

 

Italian commedia dell'arte costumes

From reading people like R. G. Collingwood (The Idea of History) and Northrop Frye (Anatomy of Criticism) I have the sense that trends in history and the arts are often a fusion of the old and the new. Look at Neo-classicism in music, for example. So when I encounter something so radically new as the Quebec group Angine de Poitrine that I put up this week (and that everyone and their dog seems to have posted a reaction to), after noticing what is new: the costumes, the quarter-tone guitars, the intricate looping, the irregular time signatures and so on, the next thing I notice is that there are historical precedents for all this. The illustration above is meant to show that their costumes might be influenced by the commedia dell'arte costumes (just add polka dots); the use of quarter tones goes back a hundred years or so, I recall using tape loops in a 20th century performance practice class in 1976, fifty years ago; and irregular time signatures go back at least to the Rite of Spring composed in 1913. I'm also intrigued that their looping structures might have some relationship to the medieval isorhythmic motet! But what we might most deeply admire is that Angine de Poitrine have managed to make quarter-tone music addictive!

* * *

Students cram in Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw as musicians play

AMSTERDAM (AP) — From the stage of Amsterdam’s historic concert hall, violinist Hyunjin Cho and cellist Efstratia Chaloulakou look out over row after row of young faces illuminated by the glow of laptop screens.

The plush red seats of the Concertgebouw’s main auditorium are occupied by students cramming for upcoming exams and finishing dissertations as classical music fills the hall.

The students aren’t being rude by ignoring the musicians. At this event, they’re meant to be studying — and the music is intended to assist rather than distract them.

The study sessions were first organized during the COVID-19 pandemic by Entree, the youth association of the Concertgebouw, to help students improve their concentration and introduce them to the charms of classical music.

AP correspondent Karen Chammas reports a well-known classical music venue in Amsterdam has found a new way to attract a younger crowd.

They have been a hit ever since.

Seems like a great idea. My only quibble is that this encourages passive listening, which I'm not a fan of.

* * *

Crrrritic!

What do we even need music critics for, anyway? Do they add anything of importance to the musical landscape, or are they just arrogant, carping malcontents who exist to take potshots at the great artists of the day? Wouldn’t things be better if the entire enterprise were to simply disappear?

These rhetorical questions, and the embittered perspective underlying them, have been around for a very long time — for all I know, since the modern practice of music criticism began in the early 19th century.

Sure, read the whole thing.

* * *

I am, inescapably, a critic myself which trait came to the fore a few days ago. I had attended a charity benefit and was seated next to an attractive and intriguing woman with whom I had a brief conversation. A few days later I asked a mutual friend about her. As she was single, my friend mentioned an event that the woman was going to be the star of in a few days. So we arranged to go as a group. It was some sort of St. Patrick's Day event so I was unclear as to what was going on. It turned out that the woman, let's call her Patricia, was the singer for a blues band with violin, guitar, saxophone, electric bass and drums. Ok, could be good. I'm actually quite fond of the blues. Alas, it was not so good. The drummer was a brutal, insensitive sadist, smashing his drums with great violence,  plus his snare was tuned to the wrong note, something I hadn't previously realized was possible. The violinist was a non-entity, the saxophone, guitar and bass were generic. But the singer, Patricia, was the real show. She's not actually a singer, more of a poser. She poses as a singer, and offers many poses on stage, wriggling her fingers at us, adjusting her fashionable hat and, most alluring, displaying pelvic thrusts to show her female strength. Alas again, the second song they chose to massacre was The Thrill is Gone by B. B. King, a truly great blues artist. That song has a unique nostalgic sadness, unusual in the blues. I massacred it myself when I recorded a version of it some fifty-five years ago! The excessively loud drummer really killed it, but he was aided and abetted by the singer, whom I doubt even knew all the words. This is what it should have sounded like:

 I had the great privilege of hearing him perform this song in concert in Montreal in 1990 and it brought the house down. I'm afraid that in future I will be unable to even look Patricia in the eye, let alone have a conversation.

* * *

Rather thin pickings this week, so let's move on to some envois. First up, if you haven't listened to Angine de Poitrine five times yet, you really should:

Here is the String Quartet no. 3 by Alois Haba, in quarter tones:

What makes the Angine de Poitrine use of quarter-tones so effective is the rhythmic energy and stepwise motion, among other things. Speaking of rhythmic energy, let's listen to Eight Lines by Steve Reich:

And that's it for one of the odder Friday Miscellaneas.

Sunday Miscellanea

Stradivarius violin

One reason I don't always get out a miscellanea on Fridays is lack of material. But here is a good article on the wood that goes into violins: Tree Rings Reveal Origins of Some of the World’s Best Violins 

But the average tree-ring sequence for a sizable fraction of the violins in their sample correlated well with tree rings from near Trentino in northern Italy, and specifically the high-altitude reaches of the Val di Fiemme. And interestingly, those violins tended to have been produced during Stradivari’s so-called “Golden Age” from roughly 1700 to 1725, a period noted for particularly high-quality Stradivarius instruments. Perhaps Stradivari produced his best work when he found a source of wood in the Val di Fiemme and stuck with it, Dr. Bernabei said.

This strikes a chord with me because Robert Holroyd, who built my guitar, sought out wood for the soundboard from high-altitude spruce in British Columbia.

The wood that goes into making a violin — particularly the front surface, known as the soundboard — is critical. Parameters such as wood density and stiffness all affect how a violin ultimately sounds. “The wood choice is very, very important,” Mr. Beare said.

Stradivari is known to have favored spruce, but where exactly he sourced his wood has long been steeped in mystery. That’s where the study of tree rings — dendrochronology — comes in.

Most trees produce a ring of growth each year, and the widths of those rings depend on environmental conditions. High levels of moisture tend to result in wider rings, for instance. So a sequence of tree rings is like a bar code that records the conditions experienced by a tree year after year.

What they don't mention in the article is the particular benefit of using wood from high-altitude trees. The growing season is short so the growth rings are very narrow, which gives a more even acoustic response.

* * *

Here's an article on the mechanics behind Jimi Hendrix' unique guitar sounds: Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer

3 February 1967 is a day that belongs in the annals of music history. It’s the day that Jimi Hendrix entered London’s Olympic Studios to record a song using a new component. The song was “Purple Haze,” and the component was the Octavia guitar pedal, created for Hendrix by sound engineer Roger Mayer. The pedal was a key element of a complex chain of analog elements responsible for the final sound, including the acoustics of the studio room itself. When they sent the tapes for remastering in the United States, the sounds on it were so novel that they included an accompanying note explaining that the distortion at the end was not malfunction but intention. 

Hendrix’s setups are well documented: Set lists, studio logs, and interviews with Mayer and Eddie Kramer, then the lead engineer at Olympic Studios, fill in the details. The signal chain for “Purple Haze” consisted of a set of pedals—a Fuzz Face, the Octavia, and a wah-wah—plus a Marshall 100-watt amplifier stack, with the guitar and room acoustics closing a feedback loop that Hendrix tuned with his own body. Later, Hendrix would also incorporate a Uni-Vibe pedal for many of his tracks. All the pedals were commercial models except for the Octavia, which Mayer built to produce a distorted signal an octave higher than its input.

Speaking of a 100-watt Marshall stack, when I was asked to play an obligatto guitar part in a contemporary piece for orchestra I found I had to double on electric guitar so I asked the concert office to get me a guitar and amp as I hadn't played electric guitar for years. What they got was a Stratocaster and a hulking Marshall stack that I never managed to turn up to more than 3. The whole viola section shuddered as I wheeled in the amp behind them.

* * *

It's very odd being a composer these days, it seems. Let's let Sarah Davachi talk about it.

* * *

The Critic tell us Classical musicians should spread their wings

Where is this devotion to interpreting a singular new contemporary composer these days? Deep musical friendships between well-established pianists and composers seems to have disappeared. Is there no time for long-term collaboration? A composer writing music who sees you especially in mind, for your unique musical fingerprint, is a magical thing. You don’t take it for granted. And it’s true the other way. Composer colleagues of mine always feel awe in how the right musician brings their music to life, or even to a place where they thought not possible in their heads. 

Perhaps established musicians are playing it too safe. Commercialisation of their albums are top of the agenda, hoping that another Beethoven or Prokofiev Sonata cycle will keep the sales in the green. Or even that professional musicians simply don’t have the time to devote to curating life-long musical friendships with other established composers on the stage.

* * *

In the New York Times: What Can Musical Variations Teach Us About Creativity? 

Several times during his hourlong performance of Beethoven’s “Diabelli Variations” at Carnegie Hall last month, the pianist Igor Levit made the same nonmusical gesture. At the end of a variation he would briskly swipe the flat of his hand horizontally above the keys as if clearing a whiteboard of the previous idea’s scribbles. 

The motion seemed to be a mental reset — as if Levit were reminding himself to return to the blank slate of the theme, just as Beethoven had done, so as to ask the same question anew: What else might this music become? It was a reminder that variations are not merely a decorative form but also a kind of problem solving, in which each new section challenges the composer, the performer and the listener to approach the same material with a beginner’s mind. 

Human beings have what’s called the serial-order effect: The longer we spend thinking about something, the wilder and more unusual our ideas tend to get.

Gen A.I. is constrained to the most statistically likely solutions. It’s fast, but it stays within a very small sphere of possibilities. Human beings go to edge cases. Time gives us the opportunity to diversify ideas and to see how well what we’ve made holds up.

* * *

Let's have some musical envois. Of course we have to start with Purple Haze:

And of course, the version by Kronos:

The Critic article also talked about the Piano Sonata no. 6 by Prokofiev and there was an article I didn't put up announcing that Yuja Wang got Norman Lebrecht fired from the BBC for sending her a snippy email. So here is Yuja Wang with the Prokofiev Sonata no. 6:

And finally, of course, the Diabelli Variations by Beethoven played by Grigory Sokolov:

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 

* * *

 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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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:

 

 

Friday Miscellanea

...basic impulse underlying education is willingness to continually revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty...

--Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

Orchestral color:

James Zimmermann was the principal clarinetist of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra (NSO) for more than a decade until he was fired in 2020 over accusations of "racial harassment." As the Washington Free Beacon reported at the time, Zimmerman had reportedly "insulted, intimidated, and even stalked his black colleagues, going so far as to menacingly drive by their homes."

None of that was true, as six of Zimmermann's colleagues and the Orchestra's own documents showed, the Free Beacon reported. Instead, they correctly called Zimmermann an "early victim of the ideological cold war that turned hot in the summer of 2020."

* * *

 And speaking of orchestral color, the oboe is one of the orchestra's most important wind instruments, specifically for its unique timbre: If You Think This Instrument Is Hard to Play, Try Building One

Frank Swann, administrative director of the International Double Reed Society, also known as the International Double Nerd Society, agreed that the oboe is the most difficult woodwind: “really awkward technically, fingering-wise, every-wise.”

The “double reed” in the name of Swann’s organization is part of the problem: You basically blow air at high pressure through tightly pursed lips into a tiny lentil-shaped opening between two pieces of dried grass to make them vibrate. And if doing that doesn’t mark you as an outcast — or give you a stroke, as has happened more than once — the confounded reed-making process, which involves scrapers and thread and takes more years than there are in life to master, is even worse.

The New York Times has a lovely and lengthy piece on one person's quest to revive a renowned American oboe manufacturer. It is a most curious and most difficult instrument, both to play and to build. The article reveals much about the complexity of the instrument. I was good friends with an oboist years ago and one of the biggest challenges is the making of one's own reeds, a complex and lengthy process, but something every professional oboist spends half their life engaged in. 

* * *

 Also in the NYT: Bach Doesn’t Need a Glow-Up

For classical music to endure, we need to demonstrate to a new audience that the form is not similar to modern music but actually very different in important and — once you acquire a taste for it — enjoyable ways. In execution, this theory works very simply: Don’t change the music; change the way you deliver it. Do the opposite of what institutions are doing when they offer radically shortened operas or watered-down symphonies.

Of course, the value of classical music lies precisely in not being like other kinds of music. Recently Rick Beato had a clip in which he said one of the weaknesses of pop music these days is its lack of expressive dissonance. I think what he was trying to get at was that while pop music has lots of rhythm (though little rhythmic nuance) and even lots of harmony, what it does not have is counterpoint and it is through counterpoint that classical music creates and controls dissonance.

* * *

I'm a long-time fan of Esa-Pekka Salonen, both as conductor and composer, so this was a welcome tribute to his artistry: Old Is New Again: Salonen Returns to the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

His first program assembled rarities by Sibelius and Debussy, as well as a brilliant recent work by Gabriella Smith and the delightfully outrageous Scriabin tone poem “Prometheus.” Far from a typical orchestra evening, it called for two vocal soloists, a choir and a pianist (a splendid Jean-Yves Thibaudet). As if that weren’t enough, there was also a light installation by Grimanesa Amorós that hung benignly in front of the hall’s organ, with an opening around the console made of tendrils that draped and curled like plants at the mouth of a cave.

Salonen premiered the Smith piece, “Rewilding,” with the San Francisco Symphony last year, near the close of his short-lived music directorship there. Plenty of conductors look like they’re simply keeping time when leading contemporary works. But, as is often the case with Salonen, you could sense the same interpretive care he would have given a classic by Beethoven.

That helps for a score like “Rewilding,” whose 25 minutes contain a lot of openness and freedom in pitch and tempo. At times, the music evokes a field recording, with erratic chirps and natural sounds conjured through dull plucks, scratched strings and mallets hitting the spokes of spinning bicycle wheels.

But there is also a broad architecture to “Rewilding,” a steady but subtle journey to a blossoming apotheosis that Salonen shaped with steady control

* * *

 Let's have some envois. First some Schumann for oboe and piano:

A spectacular Monteverdi madrigal, "Ah dolente partita" from Book 4:

Hey, why not a Bach oboe concerto?

Finally, Elsa-Pekka Salonen conducting Berlioz:

Friday Miscellanea

Here's some good news: Blogger has moved the extremely annoying Google links icon from its position blocking the text off to one side where it is more easily ignored. Thanks Google, our friend and master. Let's see if we can find something interesting in this seasonal season.

* * *

Here's something: Is the Internet Making Culture Worse? Well, obviously.

In Marx’s history of American pop culture, which places heavy emphasis on media, music, and fashion, with glancing mentions of literature, art, and dance, a theme emerges: Everyone is selling out or trying their best to. Craven commercialism has replaced creativity. Culture has become “a vehicle for entertainment, politics, and profiteering — but at the expense of pure artistic innovation.

Another way of looking at it is that creativity has been almost completely replaced by formula. The only path for anyone working in the internet is to find the formula that generates immediate appeal and hence clicks or traffic. But formulas are exactly what any creative artist avoids because they are the opposite of creativity. The ability of AI to instantly "create" plausible facsimiles of popular music styles is proof that these styles are nothing but empty formulas.

* * *

Here's a theory for you: Anton Bruckner's symphonies are the high water of Western Civilization. While he personally doubted his own abilities, the music shows no doubt or anxiety about the worth of the musical culture. A few years later, the symphonies of Mahler are angst-ridden as the culture starts to disintegrate. Then World War I lays waste to Western Europe. Most of Mahler's symphonies were composed after 1900. In between we have the extremely revealing work Verklärte Nacht from 1899 by Arnold Schoenberg which to my mind perfectly reveals the beginning of the disintegration of the romantic phase in music. Soon after Schoenberg turned to atonality, a kind of aesthetic mirror of cultural alienation. Let's listen to this musical evolution.

I don't know if you hear what I hear, but the expansive expression of Bruckner is followed by the dark, internal doubts of the Schoenberg and then by the neurosis of the Mahler, despite its external brilliance. As Yeats said, "the centre cannot hold."

* * *

LANDR Study Uncovers How 87% of Artists Really Use AI

LANDR, the AI-driven music tech and distribution platform used by more than 7 million creators worldwide, today shares results of its international study showing that a large percentage of musicians and producers are leveraging AI tools across almost every area of their workflow.

From songwriting and production to promotion and fan engagement, AI is shaping how music is made and shared.

And someone once said that 90% of art is bad, so I guess that tracks.

* * *

Instead of composing (I'm in an extended dry spell) I have been writing haiku for the last few years. Let's end with one:

I'm very grateful

For my life, but I do not

Know quite whom to thank.

To all my readers I wish a happy and healthy new year with abundance and joy.

Friday Miscellanea

For our pre-Christmas and Hannukah miscellanea let's have an all-envoi extravaganza.

These were all chosen because they are all performances and works that have captivated me recently. In the case of Bach, it was not that piece, but the St. Matthew Passion by the Netherlanders, but I think I just posted it a few weeks ago, so let's have something seasonal. But I have definitely been captivated (obsessed by?) the Haydn symphonies recently. And by Celibidache's Bruckner. And by Alain Altinoglu's Shostakovich. Right now, I am convinced that the 4th Symphony could be the finest ever written. I could happily listen to nothing but it, over and over. And the Grigory Sokolov concert is as perfect as a piano recital could be. Not least because he played five pieces by Rameau as his first five encores (!) followed by some Brahms.

If this is the last gasp of a disintegrating European civilization, then at least it is a glorious one.

Friday Miscellanea

Let's start with a clip from a composer I had not previously encountered. Saad Haddad gives us some excellent advice for young composers. The sixth section, about not using music software until well into the process is one I strongly agree with.

 * * *

The New York Times gives us the Best Classical Performances of 2025 and a lengthy and worthy piece it is. In a year when I have had to forgo traveling to Europe to attend music festivals, it was a treat to read:

Shostakovich’s music was seemingly everywhere this year, 50 years after his death, in programs showcasing the dazzling stylistic breadth of his catalog. Among his fiercest champions is the conductor Andris Nelsons, who led two illuminating Shostakovich programs with the Boston Symphony at Carnegie Hall and later ignited the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig on the opening night of a Shostakovich Festival. The genial sparkle of the Festive Overture and the clean-lined lyricism of the Second Piano Concerto, with a searching Daniil Trifonov, set up a shattering account of the Fourth Symphony. Clarity, weight and ferocity converged in a performance that captured Shostakovich at his most buoyant, embattled and enigmatic.

And my favorite rogue violinist, Patricia Kopatchinskaja:

In her long-awaited New York Philharmonic debut, the maverick violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja brought the intensity of a method actor to Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto, playing with full-body commitment and sounds that included expressive scratches, whispers and wolf tones. What may live longest in the memory of the electrified audience was Kopatchinskaja’s encore, Jorge Sánchez-Chiong’s “Crin,” a 90 second anarchist tour-de-force of vocal and violinistic virtuosity.

* * *

At some point everyone, even Rick Beato, just has to get away from pop music and play a little Handel.

* * *

It shouldn't need to be said, but beauty in music requires dissonance. Some of the most heart-rending passages in Mozart depend on piercing dissonance--resolving, of course. Let's read what Jay Nordlinger has to say: The Beauty of Dissonance.

I often hear people say, “When I go to a concert, I like to have the music wash over me. It relaxes me, takes my cares away. It settles me down.” They speak of music almost as if it were a sedative.

Dissonance, on the other hand, is often disturbing. It prickles and piques, rather than soothes. Harmony is a crucial part of music, obviously. But disharmony, a.k.a. dissonance, is too. It has been embedded in music from the beginning.

The works of Bach are loaded with dissonance. Typically, he uses it to create tension and then gives us the resolution – the return to harmony.

* * *

All the other stuff this week is pretty humdrum so let's leap into some envois. Taking a cue from the NYT, we really have to have a listen to the Symphony No. 4 of Shostakovich, a frequently underestimated work. Here is Andris Nelsons conducting the Boston Symphony.

 

And, of course, the Water Music by Handel.

One of my favorite Mozart dissonances, in the Andante from the F major Divertimento, K. 138.

Finally here is PatKo in a fierce battle with the Stravinsky Violin Concerto.

Friday Miscellanea

Not so miscellaneous today: before going to Thanksgiving dinner yesterday with friends, I had a couple of free hours so I listened to most of the St. Matthew Passion by Bach. What an amazing work! This is the version I heard:

I grew up with the Klemperer recording, but this version is very much better. There are two small orchestras, two mixed choirs, two sets of four vocal soloists and six boy sopranos. The way Bach uses these forces is really remarkable. There are frequent montages where the choirs interject short, brisk phrases into a texture that might be one or both orchestras with obbligato solo parts, or a chorale like texture with the melody of the boy sopranos floating above, within a narrative carried by recitatives from a host of characters: Judas, Pontius Pilate, priests, bystanders and, of course, Jesus with his surrounding halo of strings. This is as close as Bach ever got to opera, but it is nothing like opera. Oddly enough, the montage sections remind me of Stravinsky's Petrouschka.

Speaking of the Netherlands Bach Society's project to record all of Bach, I have listened to many recordings so far and I have been impressed with nearly all of them. No big stars, but very accomplished and committed musicians. Listening to this it is hard to see classical music as a dying genre, no longer of any relevance as a recent series of YouTube clips would have us believe!

Here are a few recent recordings in the series:

Friday Miscellanea

Finally something interesting: two new pieces by J. S. Bach. No, not newly written of course, but newly discovered. Here is the New York Times:

In 1992 Peter Wollny, then a Harvard graduate student in musicology, was researching his dissertation at the Royal Library of Belgium when he came across two unsigned music manuscripts so strikingly original that he had copies made and set them aside. 

“This is actually how I work,” Wollny said Tuesday. “Whenever I find something that poses a scholarly problem to me, I keep it. Even if it takes three decades, I don’t put it aside.”

Wollny began to develop a hunch about who wrote these two anonymous, undated works for organ: Johann Sebastian Bach. But finding evidence required years of musical detective work, and it was not until this week, 33 years after the random discovery he made while doing research on one of Bach’s sons, that he officially announced the discovery.

And here they are:

 * * *

As is often the case, the subhead is a nice summary: Cultural products are more than ever a class of financialized assets, whose owners are even further removed from artmaking

THE HISTORY OF THE MUSIC industry is a history of conglomeration. For decades, the business has been ruled by a dwindling number of corporations, each controlling an enormous market share that grows larger with every new merger or acquisition. Today just three record companies—Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group—control more than 80 percent of all recorded music released through a recognized label. And they do so with a collective iron fist, jealously guarding access to their vast catalogs, whether through album sales, streaming platforms, radio airplay, or commercial licensing. The Big Three’s disproportionate market-making power, according to scholar and musician Aram Sinnreich, has all the trappings of an oligopolistic cartel. And in turn, streaming itself, once a domain of renegades and upstarts, has consolidated around its own Big Three: Together Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music account for 90 percent of all streaming subscriptions.

I guess my problem is that I have no interest in music as an industry--only as an artform. But this is where we are.

* * *

The answer is "no". Granderson: AI can perform a song, but can it make art?

* * *

Here is a particularly fine exemplar of human-created music. Jean Rondeau playing the Tombeau for M. Blancrocher from the new Louis Couperin collection:

A lovely recent performance of the Debussy Sonata for Cello and Piano:

And finally, the Piano Sonata no, 8 by Sergei Prokofiev:

Friday Miscellanea

I'm just not keeping up with The Guardian, which is why I missed this article: In an era of AI slop and mid TV, is it time for cultural snobbery to make a comeback? (hat tip to On an overgrown path).

The lowbrow dominates culture and anyone who questions the status quo is dismissed as an elitist killjoy. But with bland algorithmic content on the rise, perhaps we consumers should start taking our art a bit more seriously

That subhead neatly summarizes the argument so we can probably skip reading the article. But yes, speaking as one who never left cultural snobbery, it is always a good time to take notice of cultural things that are not actually crap. Sure, they take a bit more time. Reading Don Quixote takes more time than watching Netflix, but perhaps not if you factor in the time spent trying to find something to watch on Netflix. Thanks to On an overgrown path for the delightful use of the word "enshittified." Yes, the enshittification of culture and, well, social institutions in general, is far advanced.

* * *

 Alex Ross posts a tribute to substack:

Of late, an increasing number of voices, some new and some thoroughly familiar, have converged on Substack. Such erstwhile blogging heavyweights as Steve Smith, Tim Rutherford-Johnson, and Joshua Kosman are in residence. The great Paul Griffiths, who has been observing new music longer than most of us have been alive, has launched what music!

* * *

The Atlantic avers: How to Make Music Popular Again. And follows that clanger with an even more mistaken subhead:

The rise of headphone listening has changed us profoundly—and maybe not for the better.

No, no, no, they have it all wrong. If anything, music is too popular, or, more accurately, there is too much popular music. About the only ray of sunshine is the widespread use of headphones which has saved so many of us the torture of listening to other people's music. If only we could make the use of headphones mandatory in all public spaces.

* * *

YouTube paid out $8B to the music industry in 12 months. I guess that's good news. Mind you, I would love to see a breakdown of who got what. If Taylor Swift got seven of the eight billion, well...

* * *

Now for some listening. One cannot be too familiar with the symphonies of the always inventive Joseph Haydn. Here is his Symphony No. 31, nicknamed "Hornsignal" and yes, there are lots of horns.

You also cannot be too familiar with the symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich. Here is the 8th with Alain Altinoglu conducting the Frankfurt Radio Symphony. This clip just appeared on YouTube six days ago.

For our last envoi, not a symphony but a serenade by Mozart. Even when writing music for diversion or background to a banquet, Mozart was simply incapable of writing anything less than superbly beautiful.

Friday Miscellanea

 A very good article on Luciano Berlo's Sinfonia this week in the New York Times: His Music Saw Our Age of Information Overload Coming

“Sinfonia” remains one of Berio’s most popular and indelible pieces. It appeals to lay listeners yet continues to fascinate experts. Throughout its five movements, the piece shows an inventive, clearly audible approach to form, an unsentimental melodiousness and extraordinarily skill in orchestration. Its most radical section is the third movement, which feels presciently overstimulating.

The piece “reflects a world marked by crises and conflicts — themes that remain profoundly relevant today,” De Benedictis said. “Wars, the destructive effects of capitalism (even more evident now than in 1968), the disintegration of the fundamental principles of coexistence, the frenzy of a fragmented and disjointed existence.”

At the opening of the third movement, a loud chord is followed by at least three distinct musical quotations in the space of seven measures: a climbing brass motive from the fourth movement of Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra; the coldly biting flutes, sleigh bells and inviting violin phrase from the opening of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony; and cresting music from the second movement of Debussy’s “La Mer.”

What makes the article particularly useful is that it offers a host of music clips as examples.

* * *

This kind of reminds me of the Hofstadter book of years ago Gödel, Escher, Bach: Bach is a Strange Loop

Prelude

Every night, ten-year-old J.S. Bach reached his little fingers through a locked bookshelf with a latticed front, rolled up a book of sheet music inside, drew it out, and copied it by moonlight, for he was not allowed a candle. It took six months for him to finish this difficult endeavor, only for the copied manuscript to be found by his older brother and taken away.

This was a child who had music pouring into and out of his ears since before he could talk. As little as we know about his life story, this fact is undeniable. Something was going on inside his head, strongly, forever. So does it make sense to look at his life in terms of events, or something more, something equally internal?

Allemande

Even if you hate classical music, you’ve heard Bach’s six cello suites. At least, the prelude of the first suite, in movies and on television. Like in Master and Commander and Family Guy and The Hangover Part II. And in this American Express commercial showcasing household objects making frowny faces and smiley faces. In fact, it’s often heard in commercials advertising financial services. “In the case of recent television commercials, Bach has more or less taken on a single function: reassurance,” said musicologist Peter Kupfer. “It is no coincidence that most companies that use Bach in their commercials offer financial or insurance services (including American Express, MetLife, and Allstate), thus requiring a message of trust.”

There is a paragraph or two for each of the six movements of the Cello Suite No. 1, so you should read the whole thing.

* * *

Frankly, looking in the usual places, I don't see anything else over the last week worth comment. Your mileage may vary, of course. But let's just move on to the envois. First up, of course, the Berio Sinfonia:

And the Bach Cello Suite No. 1:

Here is the Charpentier Te Deum, the drum-friendly interpretation:

And finally, in my travels in Oaxaca the last couple of weeks I stumbled across the 1969 film of The Battle of Britain. An all-star cast for a film that I have never known before. The main casting problem was that the average age of the pilots that flew in the Royal Air Force in 1940 was twenty! They simply couldn't find many actors that young. The best lines were from Laurence Olivier as Air Chief Marshal. When they finally turned the tide and were shooting down a lot more German planes than the Germans were shooting down British planes, he was asked to comment on a statement from the German ambassador in a press conference that the British numbers were simply wrong. Olivier said "I have no interest in propaganda. If we are right, they will give up. If they are right, they will be here in a week." 

Friday Miscellanea

 

Arvo Pärt

Another article on Arvo Pärt on the occasion of his 90th birthday, this one rather better than the one in the NYT a couple of weeks ago: Arvo Pärt: the holy minimalist who defied the Soviets

Arvo Pärt, the pre-eminent religious composer of our time, was born in 1935 in Estonia, before its Soviet occupation. His music suggests the contemplative devotion and purity of Gregorian plainchant and Renaissance church chorale, though it could only have been written today, being at once archaic and abstract-modern. With its sense of stasis and light, the music reflects the immensity of the Baltic landscape and Estonia’s own forested plains. Under communism, Pärt fell foul of the Soviet censors as his music defied official atheism. His work is shaped by his Eastern Orthodox faith; it is a form of prayer.

One cannot miss the parallels with the Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina, whose music is also a form of prayer.

Pärt emerged from his silence with the exquisite piano composition Für Alina. Often used in films today to conjure a mood of sadness, Für Alina was music distilled to its purest essence and the first piece in Pärt’s new musical style of tintinnabuli. The compositions now began to pour out of him. Tabula Rasa, a landmark in 20th-century music, premiered at Tallinn’s Polytechnic Institute in September 1977 and reportedly left the audience speechless. The clanging of the prepared piano (achieved by inserting screws between its strings) showed the anti-classical influence of John Cage.

* * *

If, like me, you have cast a critical eye on the whole rush to artificial intelligence, here is a Dutch philosopher to put it in perspective. He explains, very clearly, what it is and what it isn't:

* * *

Here is a post about a composer I had no knowledge of: Art has been hijacked by the addiction-directed internet

Composers throughout the ages have used ‘models’, have paid homage to their imperishable predecessors in ways that are more often than not loving tributes: think Josquin’s Déploration sur la mort de Jean Ockeghem, Mozart’s very early piano concertos that are unabashed ‘arrangements’ of Johann Christian Bach, or Alban Berg’s Violinkonzert ‘Dem Andenken eines Engels’. Much of what is being written today is, however, merely derivative; betraying a lack of courage or of vision, straining our faith in music as an art-form with any future at all. Much contemporary art qualifies, indeed, barely as ‘entertainment’ any more, for it has been hijacked by the ‘addiction-directed’ processes of the internet, whose attention span is measured not even in minutes, but in seconds.

* * *

It is hard to envy the life of a contemporary concert soloist: A VIOLINIST’S LIFE IN THE AIR

This has been quite the past 30 hours! My crazy travel day started with an incident on my United flight from Indianapolis to Houston, when some poor guy had a mental break and ran up to the front of the plane just as we were about to land and pulled open the emergency door (luckily he was subdued before he could throw himself out, so he is, as far as I know, OK).

We sat on the tarmac surrounded by police and firefighters for a couple of hours, I managed to get to my connecting flight to Buenos Aires ‍♂️but they told me it was closed. I begged, they relented, but of course they had given away my lovely business class seat so I spent the next 9.5 hours in 43D. 1 hour of sleep on the flight, 1 hour spent at Buenos Aires airport filing a claim for my lost suitcase, arrive at hotel 11AM, sleep until 1:30PM, find a clothing store, purchase an entire concert outfit in 30 minutes (that’s my kind of shopping), quick lunch, rehearsal at 4:30PM, Beethoven Concerto at 8PM with Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie and Riccardo Minasi at the incomparable Teatro Colón, post concert dinner at the most beautiful home of our wonderful presenters @mozarteumargentino_ , back to hotel 1AM. Pickup tomorrow at 7AM to head to Montevideo!

But that was what I worked hard to try to achieve in my career!

* * *

Now for some envois. It seems forever since we have had something from Gustav Holst. Here is Mars from The Planets:

Here is the Symphony No. 9 by Valentin Silvestrov:

And finally, some not well-known Handel, an Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne, 1713:

Friday Miscellanea

I've been saying for years that much of popular music these days is produced by a committee of Swedes led by a guy named Max: When Taylor Swift Met Pop’s Supreme Hitmaker, Max Martin

Even listeners who pay little attention to liner-note credits are likely familiar with Martin and Shellback’s handiwork. Martin’s career as a hook wizard took off in the late 1990s, when he helped write and produce such evergreen earworms as Robyn’s “Show Me Love” and Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way.” In the years that followed, Martin established a reputation for songs that combined precise instrumentation with expansive, inescapable choruses, like Kelly Clarkson’s 2004 smash “Since U Been Gone.” 

“He writes songs. He’s not an artist,” Robyn said in a 2008 interview with Pitchfork. “He doesn’t have the need for expressing his personal thoughts in a song. For him, it’s about the melody. It’s about cracking a code, being as efficient as possible.”

Martin, who is press shy (“I’d rather not do this,” he told Joe Coscarelli during a 2022 New York Times interview), was a onetime rock frontman who was mentored by the Swedish pop mastermind Denniz Pop, who was known for wedding irresistible beats to sweeping choruses. “Not growing up here,” he said, referring to the United States, “you hear music differently. There was a big part of my life where I didn’t even understand what they were saying, so phonetics are super important to me — how things sound.”

This does, sort of, explain why popular music is more and more the product of an abstract process, like cheese slices, even while it masquerades as heartfelt individual expression.

* * *

This is a look at the price-history of concert violins: With Strings Attached

In March 2025, an anonymous buyer purchased the 1715 “Baron Knoop” Stradivarius for $23 million (U.S.), making it the most expensive violin ever sold. (The seller, the American stringed-instrument collector David L. Fulton, had purchased it for a more modest $2.75 million in 1992.) Previous record setters have included the 1721 “Lady Blunt,” which fetched $15.9 million in 2011, and the “Joachim‑Ma,” which went for $11.25 million in February 2025.

All three of these models were made by Antonio Stradivari, a Cremonese luthier whose output in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is said to epitomize perfection in violin manufacturing. Depending on your point of view, they may indeed be examples of flawless human handiwork. Or they might be, as the fiction writer and journalist Ambrose Bierce once put it, objects that “tickle human ears by friction of a horse’s tail on the entrails of a cat.”

Compare this to what high-value guitars are selling for:

The guitar may exist on a similarly high level of symbolism, but the appraisal of an individual six-string turns more on its provenance and on any alterations by famous owners than on the maker. As two examples, an acoustic Gibson owned by John Lennon sold for $2.4 million in 2015, while the 1959 Martin D‑18E that Kurt Cobain used on Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York album went for just over $6 million in 2020 (he had picked it up for just $5,000). Pricey, but not near the numbers a Stradivarius commands.

Read the whole thing for a lot of interesting observations.

* * *

Norman Lebrecht weighs in on a crisis in music criticism: Wanted: classical music influencers

he death of music criticism, long foretold, came a whole lot closer this summer. One day in mid-July, the New York Times sacked both of its chief music critics, pop and classical, along with chief theatre critic Jesse Green and Margaret Lyons, who covered TV.

The reason given for their “reassignment” was more alarming than the bloodbath itself. A memo from the culture editor, Sia Michel, warned that “new generations of artists and audiences are bypassing traditional institutions” — the New York Times — whilst “smartphones have Balkanised fandoms”. What readers crave, Michel feels, are “trusted guides to help them make sense of this complicated landscape”.

In plain English, what the Times is looking for is music critics who are as different as possible from the expert, well-dressed, wisecracking reviewers who delivered first-night juice (wisecrack intended*) daily at breakfast. Those dodos have had their daybreak.

What are we missing?

Why does this matter? Because a hostile New York Times review is worth more than a rave in ten other papers. Readers trust it, and artists use it to test their blood pressure. It has been over half a century since the Times last had a firebrand music critic in Harold Schonberg, who famously wrote: “Last night at Carnegie Hall, Jack Benny played Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn lost.” Schonberg earned the undying enmity of Leonard Bernstein, but New York devoured his every word.

* * *

Sorry, no time for more this morning, so let's have some music. I haven't put up a late Beethoven string quartet for years and years. Here is the C# minor with the Danish String Quartet. I doubt there is any more profound music.

Friday Miscellanea

For all those folks who have been missing it! Let's have a quote from Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Bk 3:

Vermin were the death of Democritus, and vermin of another sort killed Socrates.

The editor tells us that Marcus Aurelius was likely thinking of Pherecydes of Syros instead of Democritus of Abdera. The "vermin" who killed Socrates were a jury of 501 fine and upstanding Athenian citizens.

* * *

The New York Times did a big piece on what an amazing genius Taylor Swift is, but they seem to have memory-holed it already. Oh well. However there is another piece from the New York Times worth reading: Celebrating a Buffalo-Born Titan of the French Baroque Revival. William Christie is a nearly legendary figure who was hugely important in reviving the performing traditions of the French Baroque. The article delivers a well-earned tribute:

It was late August in Thiré, the tiny town in the Vendée region of western France where Christie has spent decades restoring an abandoned 17th-century manor house and planting a spectacular baroque garden. Now he was preparing to host his annual weeklong music festival there, Dans les Jardins de William Christie, which this year was the culmination of a season-long celebration of his 80th birthday and the improbable musical empire he has built. Born in Buffalo, N.Y., Christie is venerated in France, where he played a key role in the revival of French baroque music and the reputations of composers like Lully, Charpentier, Couperin and Rameau. His inventive, vital performances showed that early music could be exciting and chic, and have sold out venues from the opera house at Versailles to the Brooklyn Academy of Music...

* * *

A sardonic comment from Norman Lebrecht: NOT ONE SINGLE FORTE IN THIS WEEK’S CHART. Referring to the dreary somnabulance of the Apple streaming top ten:

1 Tchaikovsky: The Seasons Yunchan Lim

2 River of Music. The Kanneh-Masons

3 Sleep Max Richter

4 Max Richter: Sleep Circle (Faded) Max Richter, Louisa Fuller, Max Ruisi

5 For Arvo. Georgijs Osokins

6 Spanish Serenades Raphaël Feuillâtre

7 The First of Everything Eunike Tanzil DSO

8. Chopin Intime Justin Taylor

9. Moonlight Variations Pablo Ferrandez

10 Somnia Denis Kozhukhin

* * *

Over at The New Yorker Alex Ross pens a tribute: Bohuslav Martinů Is One of Music’s Great Chameleons

The Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů, the focus of this summer’s Bard Music Festival, at Bard College, had one of those voices which reveal themselves in a matter of seconds. Take the opening of his Second Symphony, from 1943, which the Orchestra Now performed on the festival’s first weekend, under the direction of Leon Botstein, Bard’s president and chief musical curator. The first violins unfurl a lilting, lightly bopping tune in D minor. Ascending patterns elsewhere in the strings blur the outlines of that governing idea. The real Martinů giveaway is an underlying buzz of activity in the piano and the harp—D-minor triads mixed with C-sharp-minor, B-flat-major, and E-flat-major ones, suggesting a rickety machinery behind the lyrical action. These and a few other basic elements recur throughout Martinů’s œuvre: curt themes, darting rhythms, tangy harmonies, glittering textures.

This is just the sort of thing that Ross does very well.

* * *

One of the reasons I have reduced my postings is that I don't find much I want to comment on these days. Looking in all the usual places I find mostly the usual things: who died, who was appointed and who committed what sexual transgression. The news oriented sites like Slipped Disc are all about mundane events, the more scholarly sites are still beating the race/gender/colonization drums with the added spice of AI. And listeners seem to be tending towards the more soporific music. So let's listen to some non-soporific music:

Of course we have to have some Martinů. Here is his Symphony No. 2:

And just for fun, since we have never had any Martinů here before, here is the Symphony No. 4:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laI5pnq5X7g

Oddly, Blogger simply refuses to embed that clip. Usually heard on violin and sometimes on guitar this is Bach's gussied up orchestral version of the prelude to the E major violin partita:

And finally, for the hard-core among you, Sviatoslav Richter playing an all-Schumann recital in Moscow in 1985.

Friday Miscellanea

Wow, I haven't done one of these for a long time. First up, this is what I am currently reading:

This is something I have wanted to read for a long, long time. Marcus Aurelius was the fifth of the "Five Good Emperors" of the Nerva-Antonine dynasty of the Roman Empire. The shocking thing one finds, even after reading just the first book, is that the Roman Empire during this period, 96 to 192 AD, was far better run than our contemporary democracies. As Winston Churchill averred, democracy is the worst of all systems, except for all the others. Nice quip, but, as we can see from this era of the Roman Empire, not actually true. As a philosopher manqué I have always had my misgivings about democracy. After all, it was 501 good Athenian citizens that voted to condemn Socrates to death in 399 BC, causing Aristotle to depart Athens so it would not "commit a second crime against philosophy."

Why was this era of the Roman Empire so well run? Let's let Marcus Aurelius explain with his list of things he is grateful for:

From Severus: love of family, love of truth, love of justice; ... to have conceived the idea of a balanced constitution, a commonwealth based on equality and freedom of speech, and of a monarchy which values above all the liberty of the subject...

If only we had governments that adhered to those virtues! Instead, the incentives that drive our politicians are all bad: they are constantly pressured to lie, to curry favor with financial contributors, to form partisan tribes for mutual support--and all in order to win elections. Policies are not chosen for their economic virtues, but so as to buy the votes of the citizens. There are a thousand ways this drives us towards the kind of dysfunctional politics we have today. The interesting thing about this succession of emperors is that they typically did not follow the usual rules of succession: the eldest male heir inherits the throne, but instead adopted as heir the person they felt would make the best ruler. This ended with Commodus, the natural son of Marcus Aurelius, who was a horrible ruler.

* * *

The palace in an Italian village where two retired US sopranos ‘repair’ broken opera voices

Singers of all backgrounds come here every year: fresh out of the conservatory or with five-figure fees per performance, mainly from the world of opera, but also from pop and jazz. “Our three basic principles are spontaneity, beauty, and freedom,” Paglin sums up. “These days, the voice is highly planned; natural singing isn’t cultivated, and there’s an unhealthy obsession with power and volume that generates great muscular tension.” For Brilla, the key lies in breathing: “You only need a thimbleful of air, but it must be well managed, as babies do intuitively. That was baritone Gino Bechi’s best-kept secret…”

The two sopranos behind this school made a thorough study of vocal production:

Almost simultaneously, they decided to put their singing careers on hold to retrain their voices. “We studied historical recordings, consulted specialists like Maria Carbone, and read treatises by the great masters in search of our own method,” continues Brilla, who, after consulting 27 teachers, applied for a Fulbright scholarship that allowed her to research the roots of bel canto in their place of origin, Italy. “We lived in Rome, Florence, Milan…” adds Paglin. “But it was in Osimo that we set up our own studio.” Almost three decades later, the locals of this historic hill overlooking the Adriatic Sea describe the former palazzo the pair acquired at the time as a “sanctuary of voices.”

Voice is probably the most difficult "instrument" to teach as it is part of your body and invisible to the eye.

* * *

Here is Jay Nordlinger on this year's Salzburg Festival:

In the Great Festival Hall was a concert by Utopia, the orchestra founded in 2022 by Teodor Currentzis. Utopia is composed of players from some thirty countries. Currentzis is a Greek Russian conductor, wizardly and individualistic (and not to everyone’s taste). He was duly on the podium for this concert. The first item on the program was a Shostakovich piano concerto—No. 2, in F.

This is less popular, or less frequently programmed, than the Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 1. Why, I don’t know. A great recording of No. 2 was made by Yefim Bronfman, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen. Bronfman once told me that orchestras seldom request the second concerto. If they want Shostakovich, they want the first.

The soloist with Utopia and Currentzis was Alexander Melnikov, a Soviet-born pianist who studied in Moscow with a legendary teacher: Lev Naumov. Shostakovich’s second concerto ought to have a number of characteristics, including military precision, melting lyricism, and electricity. Melnikov was never less than competent—but I could have used more of what makes this concerto lovable.

He played an encore, a piece introduced to many of us by Vladimir Horowitz: Scriabin’s Poème, Op. 32, No. 1. Melnikov rendered it expertly.

After intermission, Maestro Currentzis conducted the Utopians in a Mahler symphony: No. 4 in G, sometimes known as Mahler’s “Mozart symphony,” for it has an air of the Classical. Under the baton of Currentzis—or rather, under his hands, because he goes without a baton—every part was clear. All parts were in balance. Moreover, Currentzis communed with Mahler, reflecting his spirit. (Mahler was “wizardly and individualistic” himself—also “not to everyone’s taste.”) Currentzis is a shape-shifter, conforming his body to the music, able to represent it physically, somehow. His orchestras respond.

Members of his orchestras stand while playing—excepting cellists and a few others. Does this make a difference? Well, here’s a difference, possibly: I think I hear the woodwind solos better. These players sing or pipe more directly to you.

I heard Currentzis and his orchestra in an all-Rameau program a couple of years ago and it was magical. The only time I have seen the Salzburg audience actually give a standing ovation.

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Let's end with the suitable envoi of the Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 2. This is Anna Tsybuleva with Risto Joost conducting the Wuppertal Symphony.