Classical Careers and Economic Pressures

I just read a fascinating little item over at Slipped Disc: "Big Banker Shows Pluck for Classical Guitar." Norman writes:

Marcelo Kayath is head of Latin American Securities at Credit Suisse in Sao Paolo. That’s big in banking, we’re told.

UPDATE: He’s been promoted to managing director of Credit Suisse in Brazil.

Before he climbed behind a desk, Marcelo was Brazil’s bright hope on the classical guitar. He was pretty good, we hear.

To stay in touch with his past, and to promote the instrument’s future, Marcelo has now launched an online launchpad for new guitar talent – such as Naumburg winner Jorge Caballero – and international guitar events.

The thing is that I know Marcelo Kayath--I mean we aren't beer-drinking buddies or something, but I remember him very well from the Toronto guitar festival and competition way back in, I think it was 1978. For a few years the Toronto Guitar Society held some very successful festivals and competitions. I think the years were 1975 (when the winners of the competition were Sharon Isbin, first and Manuel Barrueco, second), 1978 when the winner was Marcelo Kayath, and, I think 1984. I don't remember who the winner was then, but I was possibly distracted because I was giving a solo recital as part of the festival.

In any case, in 1978 I followed the competition very closely. Marcelo Kayath wasn't my favorite of the finalists. I think that would probably have been David Tannenbaum whose repertoire I liked better. But Marcelo was a very fine player indeed: big, beautiful romantic sound and a near-impeccable technique. For the final round he did an outstanding and lyrical performance of the Concerto by Castelnuovo-Tedesco with orchestral accompaniment. He won the competition and soon after released a pretty darn good Cd. But, according to the Slipped Disc item, he gave up his career as an international classical guitar virtuoso for a career in banking--which he seems to be doing splendidly at.

I have a lot of familiarity with this sort of thing as I have experienced some of it myself. Notice something first of all: both of the finalists in the 1975 competition went on to big careers. I don't recall who else was a finalist, but I have the vague recollection that they had pretty good careers as well. But the finalists in the 1978 competition have not fared nearly as well. Marcelo Kayath has become a banker and David Tannenbaum had a very modest career. And I don't even remember who the finalists were in subsequent competitions. The winners of a similarly high-profile competition, the Guitar Foundation of America one, held annually, are also having careers of remarkable obscurity. Just to cite one example, the winner of the 1994 GFA competition, which I attended (I was giving a lecture on the Brouwer guitar concertos as part of the festival) was Margarita Escarpa, a Spanish guitarist who gave one of the most delightful and liquid performances of Bach I have ever heard. But she seems to be virtually unknown career-wise. She released an obscure recording of Fernando Sor on Naxos (that's one of the competition prizes) and teaches at an obscure Spanish conservatory.

I think something started trending in the late 1970s that has just gotten worse ever since. The earliest recitals I gave, in the mid-70s, were very well-attended, paid not bad and were not hard to organize. But as time went on, the attendance dropped, it got harder to find recital engagements and the pay didn't get any better. A very high-profile concert where I was the soloist with the CBC Vancouver Orchestra in a concert honoring Brazil with the Brazilian Consul in attendance in the biggest and best concert hall in Vancouver and that was recorded and broadcast nationwide paid, wait for it, $1300 CAN. I played the Villa-Lobos Guitar Concerto and some of his solo music.

The solo recital has become an endangered species as two important trends collide: on the one hand, mass market pop music dominates the music business so much that classical musicians can barely earn a living, especially in the mass media which includes radio, television and the new streaming services. And on the other, people are much less inclined to attend live concerts when they can sit at home and listen to recordings.

For these reasons, even highly talented artists such as Marcelo Kayath or Margarita Escarpa or (blush) myself have two unattractive options: on the one hand, like Margarita, you can keep slogging away with the occasional concert and a whole lot of low-paying teaching. I did this for 30 years. Teaching music, much of the time, consists in being trapped in a small room for hours on end with people who have little or no musical talent, telling them over and over again that there are TWO beats in a half note. The alternative is that you give up your music career entirely and become a banker or some other profession that rewards intelligence and creativity instead of punishing it as the music business often seems to do.

The most talented student I had who was a high-school student when I taught him, never for a moment considered a career in classical music even though he had the ability. Instead he chose to study law.

Like Marcelo Kayath, the option I have chosen is to have a remunerative non-musical career, but one that allows me enough time to devote to composition, something I never had before.

But there are still a few super-stars like Hilary Hahn that undoubtedly could do something far more economically rewarding, but choose to do music and can earn, if not really large amounts of money like a mid-rank hip-hop artist, then at least a pretty decent living. I just hope that continues.

This is Hilary Hahn playing the Brahms Violin Concerto with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Paao Järvi:

Transitional Figures

Perhaps the two greatest figures in music history are J. S. Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven. Bach flourished during the first half of the 18th century, dying in 1750, and Beethoven flourished during the very end of the 18th century and the first quarter of the 19th, dying in 1827. Bach's career was a summation of all the glories of the Baroque with his mastery of harmony, motivic development and counterpoint where Beethoven summed up the Classical style with a rather different concept of harmony and development. His later symphonies, piano sonatas and string quartets were written as pure developments of the fundamental principles of Classical style and against the more superficial decorative chromatic style that was popular in the early decades of the 19th century. In so doing he laid down a powerful challenge to all composers for the next hundred years and more. Similarly, Bach's influence continued long after his death. The quality of their work and its lasting influence are two reasons why they are both considered to be in the first rank of composers.

But what about those more shadowy figures, the ones that provide the transition between these two mountain peaks? Who are they and can we trace the movement from one era to another? In this case, the change from the Baroque to the Classical era, we can indeed. Music history, like all history, is enormously complicated, but the fundamentals are clear. In this case, we need to go back to J. S. Bach and in particular his sons. Uniquely in music history, Bach had three sons, all trained by himself, that were three of the most important composers in the next generation. I wrote about the Bach family in this post titled "Bach Family Values."

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach went to Berlin and Hamburg for his career, both in northern Germany. The northern style was more emotionally intense (termed the empfinsamer Stil) than the southern style that we will get to in a minute. Here is a painting of him accompanying Frederick the Great at his palace San Souci in Potsdam outside Berlin. Notice that C. P. E. Bach is sitting with his back to the audience, which answers a recent question:

Click to enlarge

They were likely playing a flute sonata by C. P. E. Bach. Here is one for violin, flute and continuo that I chose because we can see how modern performers have changed the positioning of the instruments onstage:

The younger J. C. Bach followed a different path journeying to Italy and then settling in London. His style, influenced by the sunny lyricism of Italy, was lighter and more melodic than that of C. P. E. Bach and is usually called the galant style. Both sons adopted a more harmonic, less contrapuntal texture than their father. They are both transitional figures between the High Baroque and the Classical eras. How did that work? Leaving out a lot of detail and minor figures, C. P. E. Bach was a large influence on Joseph Haydn. As I said the other day, C. P. E. Bach came up with about half of the fundamentals of Classical style and Haydn took it the rest of the way. J. C. Bach, on the other hand, was a big influence on Mozart who met him in London as a boy. Mind you, a boy on a major European tour! The first few piano concertos by Mozart are actually his arrangements of keyboard sonatas by J. C. Bach. Here is one of them:

We can see traces of the influence of the northern style in Haydn's sometimes striking harmonic leaps and his focus on just a few motifs. In Mozart, the southern style shows itself in the melodic luxuriance and sheer charm of the music.

There are lots of transitional figures in music history and I always find them fascinating--probably because we are in one of those transitional phases right now, stumbling to find our way from the strictures and extremes of Dada Modernism to whatever comes next. For quite a while now we have been rediscovering the pulse and consonance, but apart from that, the engine of the next musical style is not yet clear.

Another couple of interesting transitional figures are Monteverdi, bridging the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque, and DuFay, the one between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Beethoven, one of the most complex figures in music history, as I was hinting at above, is not a transitional figure. Virtually everything that you read about him in program notes and liner notes on CDs, not to mention the Wikipedia article, says that he was:

A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western art music

Not true! He showed signs in his earlier music of being just that, but instead changed course and honed and focused his style on being the culmination of Classical style and not a harbinger of Romantic style. The Romantics tended to dilute the focus of Classical harmony in favor of adding chromaticism and remote harmonic regions. Not Beethoven. As Rosen writes:

The works of Beethoven's last period, indeed, often represent a contraction or even a distillation of classical procedure rather than an expansion ... For these reasons it may be justly claimed, as Tovey did, that Beethoven's innovations are largely a conflation of Haydn's and Mozart's different methods, and that he is best comprehended within their tradition; to Haydn's dynamic sense of continuous motivic development he added Mozart's feeling for long-range movement and the massive treatment of subsidiary key areas ... In this respect above all Beethoven stood almost alone in his time: as the underlying material in the works of all his contemporaries grew more complex and more chromatic, the basic motifs of Beethoven's music became simpler and more diatonic, very often the fundamental elements of the tonal language itself.

I think that the reason that we have so widespread a wrong conception of Beethoven is that the Modernist ideologues have distorted music history to support their concepts. Beethoven was a great composer, therefore he was innovative, radical and looking to the future. And in some ways he was, but not in the way they required for their ideology!

The true transitional figures from the Classical to the Romantic eras were figures like Carl Maria von Weber, Hummel, Clementi, Dussek and, possibly, Schubert. So much of what he did was Classical and he died so young that we don't know what path he might have chosen. He may well have distilled out the Classical style as Beethoven did, or developed a more Romantic concept of harmony as we see in his frequent use of the flat submediant.

To end this rather long post, here is a very late Beethoven string quartet that has everything to do with the Classical style and nothing to do with Romantic style. The String Quartet in F major, op. 135. The performers are the Alban Berg Quartet:

Too Many Notes?

There is a famous scene in Amadeus, the movie based on the life of Mozart, where the Emperor congratulates the composer backstage after the successful premiere of an opera. Excellent work, he avers, but there were just too many notes:

While the movie is a good effort, well, decidedly that, the characterization of Mozart is rather off at times, such as here where Tom Hulce begins by doing his Sally Fields impression: "you like me, you really like me!" And ends by directly contradicting the emperor, something a tad unlikely.

Ironically, while the real Mozart, as opposed to Haydn, luxuriated in a wealth of themes in his music, you really couldn't accuse him of writing too many notes. That honor should be reserved for people like Jan Ladislav Dussek, who was famous for never writing one note where he could write a dozen. He was an influence on the later composer/pianist Franz Liszt who also excelled at excess.

Let's have some examples. First of all some piano music by Mozart. This is the Piano Sonata No 16 C major, K 545, played by Daniel Barenboim:

Now for some Dussek. This is the first movement of the Sonata op. 75 in E flat major, but we are not told who the performer is:

At first you might think it sounds a lot like the Mozart and they do share the same musical vocabulary. But as the music progresses I think you might notice the redundant octaves, the fortes and the repetition just for the sake of repetition. Dussek tends to just overdo everything. But for the real specialist in too many notes we have to turn to Liszt. Here is his Transcendental Etude No. 4:

Apologies to all the pianists out there, but the piano seems to specialize in wretched excess, probably because it is a very cleverly designed mechanism for producing the greatest number of notes with the least effort. Though there are quite a few examples for the guitar as well! Of course, the great composers did not fall into the trap of writing "too many notes" but just the right number. This is the Haydn Piano Sonata nº 59 in E flat, Hob. XVI:49 played by Alfred Brendel:

Friday Miscellanea

You would think that this might be interesting, but it really isn't: a compilation of different versions of the first two opening chords of the Symphony No. 3 by Beethoven by different orchestras and conductors from 1924 to 2011:

What we are mostly hearing are small differences in tuning (and later on, with the Early Music folks, the difference between A = 415 and A = 440) and variations in hall ambiance. Courtesy of Slipped Disc.

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This next item calls for a trigger-warning: Norman Lebrecht over at Slipped Disc shamelessly posts this guaranteed clickbait: "The Bad Sex Guide to Opera." Featured are the worst sex scenes in contemporary opera productions. This blog would never sink that low just to attract more traffic. Almost that low, perhaps, but not quite that low.

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I'm not sure, but I think this is depressing:

Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.

That's from this article "The Battle Is For The Customer Interface." I'm not sure what the implications for music are, but they don't seem good. Interface companies, as they deal with people in great numbers, are always erasing subtle variations in favor of a pipeline of essentially bland content. At least that's my sense of how it works with music. Uber, though I haven't used it, sounds like a terrific idea, but I am less a fan of Facebook and the streaming music services. In the battle for the music-lover's dollar, it seems that the musicians and composers are getting less and less. What do my readers think?

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This, from the New Yorker, is my favorite cartoon:

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The Wall Street Journal has a consumer's guide to wireless sound systems. This quote should give you an idea: "You tap on your phone or tablet and you’re grooving to any song in any room in seconds." Not me, dude, not me! I think I got my Harmon Kardon system just in time, because soon they are going to stop manufacturing systems that play CDs entirely. That's going to be another problem for those few companies that are still putting out CDs...

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It is the 21st century: Clapping Music by Steve Reich is now available as an app for the iPhone.

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And, in other 21st century news, "Hip-hop is the most listened to genre in the world, according to Spotify analysis of 20 billion tracks." The record for the most number of streams in a day was 9.6 million achieved by Kendrick Lamar with his new album "To Pimp a Butterfly". I looked at a couple of tracks from it and there is nothing there that I would want to post on this blog. For several reasons.

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Here, from the Guardian, is Philip Clark's excursion into the weirder corners of the music world with several people of whom I have not heard before (and a couple I have). No promises, but you might find something interesting there. The odd thing for me is how often these supposedly extreme examples of music experimentation sound just like a 60s jam session aided with psychedelic pharmaceuticals:

Cool picture of Edgar Varèse, though:

Click to enlarge

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Another piece of new music from Alex Ross: The Difference Engine by Dario Palermo (b. 1970) sounds just like, well, a hundred other pieces of its ilk. How to describe it? Agony in outer space? There always seems to be these random floaty sounds interspersed with unpleasant little moments. Sure, its all about the inhumanity of man to man. But, frankly, shouldn't it be a little more, well, interesting? Musically?

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Neil Young is contemplating taking all his music off the streaming services because of the quality of the audio. Oddly enough, in his case, I find myself not too concerned. It seems that all we hear about lately is how one artist or another is either putting their music on such and such a service or taking it off: Prince, Taylor Swift. All this perpetual jockeying for position makes me even more reluctant to sign up for a streaming music service: the audio quality is lower and music that you supposedly "own" can disappear at any time depending on the whim of the artists or company. So you don't actually "own" anything. So what are you paying for? The "right" to have access to millions of songs you probably couldn't care less about?

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Our envoi (follow the link for the definition of envoi) for today is a genuine piece of experimental music: the Symphony No. 1 in D major (W. 183) by C. P. E. Bach composed in 1775/76 in Hamburg. In this and other pieces, C. P. E. Bach (son of J. S. Bach) developed entirely new ways of structuring music using periodic phrases and motifs that could be modified according to their role in the structure: exposition, development or recapitulation. The development of techniques like these took music halfway from Baroque style to Classical style. Haydn took it the rest of the way. This is Ton Koopman conducting the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana:

Wittgenstein and Richard Strauss

Nothing much for you today except for this little anecdote about the musical tastes of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein:

Wittgenstein's reactions to the program are indicative of his musical tastes. Bach, Mozart, Handel, Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert and Brahms's compositions are usually received with enthusiasm, while those of Strauss usually avoided. On October the 4th, 1912, for example, Wittgenstein and Pinsent attend a concert “with Brahm's Requiem "splendidly performed--those climaxes in it are simply indescribable--W said he had never enjoyed it more--and he has heard it pretty often…..The second half of the concert began with two selections from Strauss' 'Salome': W refused to go in for them, and stayed outside till the Beethoven….The Beethoven following was the 7th symphony--gorgeous."

From here.

The Experience of Beauty

In Monroe C. Beardsley's Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism he describes aesthetic objects as "perceptual objects". He proposes, as he calls it, "a form of phenomenalism", i.e. that

critical statements about artworks might be translatable into statements about their presentations, i.e., their appearances to particular persons at particular times [op. cit. p. xxiv]

In a counter to this, Bruce Morton in a paper titled "Beardsley's Conception of the Aesthetic Object" apparently showed that this cannot actually be carried out. But I think that we might productively revisit a somewhat different version of this question. I say this because of a debate that began in the comment section yesterday.

[Note: There is a useful discussion of the question of phenomenal objectivity in the Beardsley volume starting on p. 34. It seems clear that we can logically distinguish between those aspects of the aesthetic object that cause us to experience beauty and the experience itself.]

This debate took place in the comments to the last of three posts I put up examining in some detail an interesting essay by the great Scots philosopher David Hume titled: "Of the Standard of Taste". I encourage you to go read those three posts, even though they do go on:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.mx/2012/09/aesthetics-some-hints-from-david-hume.html

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.mx/2012/09/aesthetics-hume-part-2.html

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.mx/2012/09/aesthetics-hume-part-3.html

One of the things that Hume says is this:

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others.

I elaborated on this in a later comment:

I think that it is the case that certain kinds of things in the world can cause us to perceive beauty. That is, beauty is something that is perceived, given certain sorts of stimulus. It is the reception of the stimulus rather than the origin or ground of the stimulus that is the moment of beauty. The sunset is beautiful IF there is a human being sitting in the right spot to see it with his eyes open and awake. Otherwise it is just a bunch of light and reflections, maybe some clouds. A piece of music can be beautiful if it is performed well and there are people there to hear it. The moment of performance and hearing is the moment of beauty. The printed notes on the page are not "beauty". This is how I think it works.

To which my interlocutor replied:

I think I would argue, without having the sources and authorities immediately at my fingertips, that the sunset is beautiful in itself and perceptible ('beautiful-in-itself-and-perceptible')-- although we can intellectually distinguish the beautiful thing/event from its perceptibility-- to any who look toward it willing to see, to perceive. That sunset that is happening now is beautiful whether one or one thousand pairs of eyes are following it, or none. Put in another way, this the problem of the tree falling in the woods: I think the ancients (although not all the ancients), and people up until perhaps what some call the early modern age would say, yes, of course the tree falling makes a sound. Modern people say, no, if there is nobody to hear, there's no sound.
The beautiful, I would go on to say, contrary to what looks to be your position, shares, by its nature, in the transcendental attributes of being in a way that is perceptible to the senses and intellect. 'It is the reception of the stimulus rather than the ground that is the moment of beauty'-- I think the 'reception of the stimulus' is, oh I don't know how to describe this, an epiphenomenon that is consequent (not so much in time but as an intellectual concept) to the beautiful object/event.

And I answered:

 I think that this discussion is one of the truly important ones. Certainly I have only thought about it in a fairly superficial way. But, just to take up one thread, I think that the "sound of the tree falling in the forest" as opposed to my sunset example, is a very indicative one. Yes, I would argue that the tree falling in the forest certainly makes a sound even if there is no-one there to hear it. We could find a tree about to fall and set up a recorder nearby to record the sound when it falls. Or, if it were a large tree, we might go back later and take note of the physical damage, effect on nearby trees and bushes and estimate the sound it made much as scientists have estimated the magnitude of earthquakes long after the fact from physical evidence. BUT, and here is where the rubber meets the road, I would argue that Beauty, while certainly objectively existent, is not of the same order of being as, say, the sound of a tree falling. Beauty is something that can only be experienced by a human being, much like the Good and the True. We can't make a recording of Beauty any more than we can of the Good or the True. Now, let me hasten to say, it seems as if we can. We can record a fine musical performance and, upon listening to it later, experience the beauty of it. But I still want to say that the Beauty is in the experience, not in all those little zeros and ones on the CD. What the recording does is freeze the efficient causes of Beauty so that they can be imbibed at a later date.

Hume accounts for the variation in judgement of things like beauty by the natural variation in individual persons in the operation of things like prejudice, distraction, greater or lesser "delicacy of taste" which we would probably describe as acuity of perception and observation and so on. But he grounds the possibility of objective aesthetic judgement in the aesthetic object itself and in the general uniformity of the organs of perception. I am giving a very bald summary; I strongly suggest reading all of Hume's essay, and, if you have time, my commentary.

Let me add just one caveat: discussions of aesthetics like this usually have the underlying, unstated assumption that we are talking about fine art contemplated in ideal surroundings: standing in front of a late Goya at the Prado or listening to the Vienna Philharmonic at the Musikverein Golden Hall in Vienna. But a great deal, a great deal, of music is quite different from this and that should be taken into account. Music is often context-oriented: if you are 18 and out on a Friday night, you want to be hearing hip-hop or EDM in a club with a lot of flashing lights. Disinterested aesthetic contemplation ain't in it! Similarly, jazz is ideally experienced in a club setting, though without the flashing lights and with suitable beverages. A lot of music has more of a social function than an aesthetic function. Mind you, I have a lot of fun sometimes doing an aesthetic valuation of a piece of music obviously not intended for such. But, as I say, that is just for fun.

Speaking of the Vienna Phillies, let's listen to them for our envoi today. Here is a piece by a composer I don't think I have ever mentioned here: Richard Strauss. His Alpine Symphony is conducted by Bernard Haitink:

Concerto Guide: Shostakovich, Concerto in C minor for Piano, Trumpet and String Orchestra, op. 35

This piece, usually just called his Piano Concerto No. 1, was written in 1933, just two years after the Stravinsky Violin Concerto we discussed last week. Shostakovich was quite young, twenty-seven, and he wrote this for his own use as a performer (he was an accomplished pianist). It bubbles with youthful exuberance. The Wikipedia article I linked above cites a book on Shostakovich as pianist in saying that the concerto is "an experimentation with a neo-baroque combination of instruments." I don't have the book handy, so I haven't read the argument for that, but as there is nothing exclusively Baroque about the combination of piano, trumpet and strings, I suspect that it might be because this superficially reminds one of a concerto grosso with more than one solo instrument. But the way the music unfolds is very un-Baroque. It is full of quotations and the piano completely dominates with the trumpet offering witty asides from time to time. The piece, while certainly possessing a neo-Classical flavor, is quite unique.

Unfortunately, I cannot come up with the score for this piece (though I did find that of his second piano concerto, dedicated to his son Maxim) so you won't get any music examples.

At this time in Shostakovich's career he was writing a great deal of music for film, theater and ballet and was becoming quite well-known as a result. Shortly after completing his opera Lady Macbeth and a set of preludes for piano, he began work on this concerto, his first foray into a large symphonic form since his Symphony No. 1 of several years earlier. Early comments from Shostakovich's ex-composition teacher Maximilian Steinberg referred to the piece's brash hodge-podge of styles which included quotes from Beethoven, Haydn and Mahler as well as stylistic references to music-hall and jazz styles. In the last movement, where the trumpet comes to occupy a role nearly as important as the piano, we hear fanfares that always seem to be on the verge of quoting the William Tell Overture of Rossini--a theme that recurs in his Symphony No. 15.

I think that while the Piano Concerto No. 1 is certainly not the kind of ideological "statement" that might have come from another composer of the time, it has shown itself to be a successful piece over the years, popular with both performers and audiences. It reveals a side of Shostakovich that those familiar with his symphonies and string quartets may not know: the young pianist who, to support his family, played piano in cinemas to accompany silent films (later, he was commissioned to compose scores for silent films). Shostakovich's ballets, film and theater music are very little known, but in this concerto, we get a taste of what they are like.

Again, sorry for the lack of musical examples, but I think you will enjoy this music even in their absence. Here is Khatia Buniatishvili, piano; Rainer Küblböck, trumpet with the Vienna Symphony conducted by Philippe Jordan: