Coincidentally I ran across two unusual performances this week, both rather, uh, up in the air. The first one is by Janice Martin, "aerial violinist". Here, have a look/listen:
That, to me, seems to be at the crossroads of all the most superficial trends in current classical music performance. Which probably means that it will be a Big Hit (though with only 9000 and change hits on YouTube it's not a big hit yet). Let's run the checklist:
Pop crossover, Kashmir, by Led Zeppelin with extra marks for pseudo-world-music status: check!
Glitzy costumes: check!
Fancy stage choreography: check!
Contemporary classical tune with folk references: check!
Vivaldi, Four Seasons: check!
Did I miss anything? Oh, right, attractive female soloist: check!
Alongside this rather tired attempt to enliven crossover with some gymnastics let's juxtapose a rather more original effort: the first music album to be, partly at least, recorded in space. Here is the article in the Globe and Mail: "About to launch album debut, Chris Hadfield talks recording music in space." You remember Christ Hadfield? He is just starting his third career. First he was a fighter pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force, then an astronaut with the Canadian Space Agency where he spent 166 days on the International Space Station. While there he did a lot of interesting things in his spare time with photography and social media. Yes, he is one of the few people to post photos to the Internet from orbit. I posted about him way back in May, 2013 when he released a cover of the David Bowie tune "Space Oddity" that he recorded on the space station. Now there's a first! Here it is:
The voice and guitar were recorded on the space station, everything else on the ground. With over 26 million hits, it rather puts Janice's acrobatics in the shade.
But, as we learn from the Globe and Mail article, that was just the beginning. Chris, a veteran of various bands over 25 years, also wrote and recorded several original songs and they will be released on Oct. 9. One interesting bit:
“It’s hard to play guitar on a spaceship, because there’s nothing to hold the guitar stable,” he pointed out. “Almost always, the guitar slips in your hands. If you’re a guitar player, I tell people to try playing while standing on your head.
“The producer who was helping me, Paul Mills, said: ‘Your guitar playing is a little messy,“’ he added with a laugh. “I said, yeah, you come up here and play guitar.”
You bet! I tried to practice guitar while on a five-day train trip across Canada and I know exactly what he means. On a train (or in a car) you are constantly being jolted in different directions so it is basically impossible to play guitar. Stability is pretty much a necessity. There is one tune from the album on YouTube. Here is "Feet Up":
Well, ok, there's your pretty good Canadian soft rock. Chris Hadfield gets full points for versatility!
I have mentioned before that one of the biggest problems confronting classical music is the decline of the audiences. Here is an interesting read on that topic titled: "Anti-Intellectualism and the 'Dumbing Down' of America." I hate to break it to the folks at Psychology Today, but it ain't just America! Sample quote:
There is a growing and disturbing trend of anti-intellectual elitism in American culture. It’s the dismissal of science, the arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment, self-righteousness, ignorance, and deliberate gullibility.
In many cultures, not just the US, there seems to be a trend away from the substantial to the trivial.
It is time for a large-scale, multidisciplinary study into the nature of creativity—one that would integrate the insights of neurobiologists, psychologists, artists, and educators.
What's wrong with this? First of all, why? What benefit could possibly come from this sort of study? I profoundly doubt that neurobiologists, psychologists or educators have any insights into creativity and I think that artists would better spend their time creating than trying to "study" creativity. The argument seems to be:
"Imagine the potential for our nation's health, education, culture, and productivity if we were able to truly understand the anatomy of our 'aha' moments, and how they can be nurtured, optimized, and deployed"
I think that you always have to deconstruct the passive constructions in statements like these. Who, for example, is going to do all this nurturing, optimising and deploying? Well, government, of course. Just between you and me I think that all too many of our current problems come from exactly that: government going around willy-nilly nurturing, optimising and deploying, or pretending to do so while in actuality simply paying off their constituencies. All that is really needed is for there be incentives for creativity and, in most areas, they are already there. Just ask Mark Zukerberg. In some areas, like music for example, there seem to be perverse incentives and we might want to look into that. Is there any way of discouraging people from creating formulaic, derivative, generic pop music?
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Here is a pretty good review of Philip Glass' recent autobiography. Sample quote:
Glass is either oblivious to conventions or fond of ignoring them. He mentions a few times that he was born with an “I-don’t-care-what-you-think” gene. There’s often reason to distrust these proclamations, but I did enjoying cataloguing his contrarianism. Other performers may look down on amplifiers, but he adapted them no less to the opera house. Other musicians may revere figures like Aaron Copland and Nadia Boulanger, but he rebelled and talked back to them. Other composers may scoff off film soundtrack commissions, but he tried them out and with success. Other music students may spend their Juilliard prize monies to practice and compose, but he bought a motorcycle so that he can ride around the country. When people made fun of him for appearing in a whiskey ad, he retorted: “It seemed to me that people who didn’t have to sell out… must have had rich parents.”
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Here is an interesting little article with photos of experimental women musicians called by Maggie Shannon, who photographed them, "Noise Girls." Somehow, I doubt you really want to live in the apartment below. Here is Camilla Padgitt-Coles:
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Here is some awfully good news: a Stradivarius violin, stolen in 1980, has been recovered and will be returned to the family of the owner. The Ames Stradivarius was recovered by the FBI in June:
Here's a tip for prospective violin thieves: don't steal famous violins. Sure, they are easy to run away with, but you won't be able to sell it. As soon as you take it to anyone with any connection to the classical music world, if there is no credible provenance, they will call the cops. These are famous instruments.
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The Guardian has a nice essay by John Eliot Gardiner on Monteverdi's Orfeo, the origin of opera (if not the very first one written, certainly the first one that remains in the repertoire).
The Orpheus legend is utterly central to how opera emerged at the close of the Italian Renaissance and to the way its first pioneers tried to justify its existence as a revival of ancient Greek sung drama (a slightly spurious claim). Orpheus, its first definitive hero, is present at every intersection in opera’s 400-year story as it continued to evolve and then, after a few wrong turnings, attempted to reform itself thanks largely to Gluck.
When Claudio Monteverdi came to compose L’Orfeo in 1607 he seems to have had a particular empathy with Orpheus. As a court musician working in claustrophobic, mosquito-ridden Mantua, Monteverdi was in effect a feudal vassal of the Gonzaga dukes. There his moods seesawed between elation and dejection: intense bouts of audacious creativity were followed by moments of self-doubt - very much like the Orpheus of Greek mythology (as transmitted by Ovid and Virgil), who suffers, loves, exults, mourns, goes on a heroic rescue mission, stumbles at the last hurdle and finally reaches a new and deeper understanding of himself.
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From Leonard Slatkin comes this list of ten forgotten American masterpieces. I would quibble with a few. Ruggles' Sun-Treader is not so forgotten and neither is Crumb's Echoes of Time and the River.
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Now here is a great idea that didn't quite come off: take details from some great paintings featuring musicians and give them funny captions. That was the idea at Sinfini Music. But whoever wrote the captions just. didn't. quite. manage. it... Could I suggest:
(I swear, next time we are going to pick a composer who knows the range of the soprano voice...)
* * *
Which brings us to our envoi for today. What else but the Possente spirto aria from Orfeo by Monteverdi. This is Anthony Rolfe Johnson singing Orfeo with John Eliot Gardiner conducting the English Baroque Soloists, Monteverdi Choir:
One of the non-musical electives I took as an undergraduate was the Philosophy of History, which has proved to be a surprisingly useful field of knowledge. I once greatly surprised a later music history professor with whom I was taking a course in Renaissance Music by mentioning that yes, of course I had read R. G. Collingwood's The Idea of History. Hasn't everyone? Turns out, no, they haven't. I mention this just because it occurs to me that lurking behind a lot of the ideologies of the day is the Whig idea of history. Let's let Wikipedia summarize that for us:
Whig history (or Whig historiography) is the approach to historiography which presents the past as an inevitable progression towards ever greater liberty and enlightenment, culminating in modern forms of liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy. In general, Whig historians emphasize the rise of constitutional government, personal freedoms, and scientific progress. The term is often applied generally (and pejoratively) to histories that present the past as the inexorable march of progress towards enlightenment. The term is also used extensively in the history of science for historiography which focuses on the successful chain of theories and experiments that led to present-day science, while ignoring failed theories and dead ends. It is claimed that Whig history has many similarities with the Marxist–Leninist theory of history, which presupposes that humanity is moving through historical stages to the classless, egalitarian society to which communism aspires.
It is astonishing to me how wedded the aesthetics of modernism are to a Whig theory of history. I once read a comment made by a professor of composition at a leading university to the effect that he condemned such and such a new composition because, harmonically, "it was no better than Brahms!" I wonder what he thinks of Philip Glass?
A lot of the ideology of music composition since, well, since the French Revolution, has loosely resembled Whig historiography. This is not surprising because ideology itself was a by-product of the French Revolution. Untangling the ideology of music composition is pretty complicated so not entirely suitable for a blog post. But we might notice a few fundamentals. A lot of the idea of progress in music is associated with technical improvements. Some of the most obvious of the last couple of hundred years are the mechanical improvements in wind instruments that led to their greater consistency in matters of tuning and timbre. This went on throughout the 19th century. A similar series of mechanical improvements were applied to the piano from Mozart's time into the 20th century when the range was augmented, the action was improved and the volume increased by the addition of a steel frame. Similar improvements were made to the guitar, beginning with Torres design in the late 19th century and extending right to the present day when builders like Greg Smallman in Australia are revolutionizing the interior design of the instrument for greater volume and sustain.
As we were talking about yesterday, other kinds of technical improvements included the replacement of older temperaments with the modern equal temperament, though here we start to run into difficulties because in some people's view, equal temperament is not an unalloyed improvement. Indeed, since roughly the early 1970s a kind of counter-reformation movement in music has gained strength and momentum by pushing back against the whole idea of progress in music, even in technical matters. This movement, known variously as the Early Music movement or the Historically-Informed Performance movement, has gained an enormous amount of popularity to the point that some of the more prominent members such as Nikolaus Harnoncourt or John Eliot Gardiner or Philippe Herreweghe have become some of the most well-known conductors of recordings of the earlier core repertoire by Bach, Mozart and even Beethoven and Schubert. There are entire divisions of record labels, such as Sony's Vivarte, that specialize in these kinds of performances of music.
The most prominent thinker to push back against this movement has been Richard Taruskin who in essays such as those found in Text and Act made some telling points against both proponents and opponents of the Early Music movement. I think he goes too far in assimilating the whole Early Music movement to the 20th century tastes of people like Stravinsky. But I have talked about that before in posts such as this one.
At the present moment in music history, with scads of performances and recordings of repertoire on original instruments with claims to follow historically-informed modes of performance, it seems harder than ever to accept a Whig historiography of music. Mind you, the ideology of composition still seems invested in it to some degree. A new significant piece for orchestra seemingly must exhibit some striking new technical innovation such as extreme numbers of percussion instruments (Thomas Adès), extreme technical difficulty to perform (Esa-Pekka Salonen), adherence to environmental fashion (John Luther Adams) or political fashion (John Adams) or some other new, unique and improved aspect.
I can see the point of that, of course, because every composer has to make a mark somehow and doing so aesthetically just seems, well, off the horizon somehow.
Let's end with an Early Music performance that even Richard Taruskin reviewed with approval. This is the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No.18 in B flat major, K. 456 by Mozart performed by Malcolm Bilson on fortepiano (after Mozart's concerto instrument) with The English Baroque Soloists conducted by John Eliot Gardiner:
A few days ago one of my commentators drew my attention to a Tom Service piece in The Guardian about the Leif Ove Andsnes complete cycle of the Beethoven piano concertos with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Andsnes not only played the piano part, he also conducted the orchestra as would have been done during Beethoven's life. Sounded like an excellent project, excellently delivered. The problem came with Tom Service's coverage of the event. He manages to get some pretty fundamental things wrong while blathering on about some more obscure things. Go read the article first: "What would Beethoven have thought of Leif Ove Andsnes's take on his piano concertos?"
I think that he goes astray in a few places. First of all, that quote from Beethoven. He says "It appears in William Kinderman’s 1814 essay on Beethoven’s piano music in the Cambridge Companion to Beethoven" which makes it sound as if Bill Kinderman wrote an essay in 1814. Not so! Bill is a musicologist working today, and probably the leading authority on Beethoven. He and I used to teach together at the University of Victoria. I also think that Tom Service's interpretation of the quote goes astray. Beethoven is likely talking about the new style of piano playing that was coming into favor around then, exemplified by figures like Hummel and Dussek. Far more about finger-virtuosity than the likely more musically profound improvisations of someone like Mozart (whom Beethoven may have had in mind) or Beethoven himself, for that matter.
The other big error is in what he says about equal temperament: "Beethoven would have heard Andsnes’s instrument as being crazily out of tune." No, he wouldn't. The big shift in temperament from Pythagorean or meantone to equal temperament, that we use today, took place in the 17th and first half of the 18th centuries. By the time of Bach, it had largely been completed. Between meantone and equal temperament were a variety of compromises, many of them the work of a theorist named Andreas Werckmeister who published some works in the 1680s and 90s in which he argued for a kind of well-tempered tuning that would do away with most of the unpleasantness of the meantone system. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier is an obvious reference to Werckmeister. This work, often cited as being the first example of equal temperament, was probably not intended to be played in our modern system, but in one of the ones worked out by Werckmeister. But it was close to our modern equal-tempered tuning because all of the keys were usable.
Beethoven, of course, coming well after this, and using all the keys with equal freedom, wrote for equal temperament. Oddly, one thing that Tom mentions completely disproves his case: "the distance between the C minor of the first movement and E major of the slow movement is a shocking shift from one world of feeling to another, which he then makes a joke of at the start of the third movement, translating G sharp to A flat." G sharp and A flat are the same note only in the equal tempered system. Tom is completely confusing the distance between C minor (three flats) and E major (four sharps) in the circle of fifths with the difference between G sharp and A flat in Pythagorean tuning: it is called the Pythagorean comma and it is why the use of remote keys like A flat is only possible in equal temperament or something close to it.
It is bad enough when writers in the mass media--or even in program notes--try to completely avoid any technical discussion of music theory, but it is even worse when they get it wrong.
Now let's listen to Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat major, op. 19, which was actually composed before the No. 1. This is Steven Lubin, fortepiano, with the Academy of Ancient Music directed by Christopher Hogwood. Brace yourself, because the instrument is one from Beethoven's time so it sounds quite different from a modern piano.
There are just a few concert works for orchestra that have an element of dramatic choreography. The most famous is Joseph Haydn's Symphony No. 45 that I have posted about here. Among many unusual musical elements in the score is the added stage direction at the end that instructs each musician, as his part ends (the last section, one by one, eliminates all the players and ends with just two violins) to blow out the candle on his music stand and steal offstage. Read my post for the details. The only other piece that I can think of that does something similar is the Violin Concerto by Berg. But this aspect is largely unknown.
Let me start at the beginning. According to Wikipedia, Berg was commissioned to write this concerto by Louis Krasner but he didn't start on it for some months because he was writing the opera Lulu. When the daughter of Alma and Walter Gropius, Manon Gropius, tragically died at age 18 of polio, he set aside the opera and began to write the Violin Concerto as a homage to her. It was completed in August 1935 and was Berg's last completed composition. He died four months later of blood poisoning.
The Violin Concerto is a very rich and complex piece that has attracted criticism for that very reason. The complexities come both from the inspiration for the piece, which led Berg to attempt to
translate the young girl’s characteristics into musical characters (Berg, from a letter to Willi Reich)
There are also several elements that are problematic for a serial composer. Here is the row of the piece:
Normally, one of the functions of a row is to avoid tonal references, but this one strongly suggests them. As Wikipedia notes:
the first three notes of the row make up a G minor triad; notes three to five are a D major triad; notes five to seven are an A minor triad; notes seven to nine are an E major triad; and the last four notes (B, C♯, E♭, F) and the first (G) together make up part of a whole tone scale.
While the piece is certainly not tonal in a very definite way, tonality seems to hover over it and there are several sections that do have the feeling of a tonal center, especially the end that has the strong feeling of a cadence in B flat:
Two other elements that appear are the interweaving of a Carinthian folk tune into the second part of the last movement:
Finally, also in the second part of the last movement, Berg quotes and does variations on the Bach chorale "Es ist genug" from Cantata 60:
The interesting thing to note here is that the first four notes of the chorale melody are a whole-tone scale, which overlaps with the last four notes of Berg's row.
So, from the point of view of serial theory, there are all sorts of problems with this piece! But for the same reasons, it is a favorite with audiences.
The music is enormously complex and in this post all I can do is give a brief introduction. But I want to go back to that dramatic element I mentioned before. Towards the end of the piece there is a climactic passage in which the solo violin begins a plaint (Klagegesang) in which it is joined by another violin, then the rest, then the violas and so on until all the strings are united in this melody before separating into their individual parts. Here is how the beginning of that section looks in the score:
Click to enlarge
This section has been described (in the liner notes to the Pinchas Zukerman recording conducted by Pierre Boulez) as follows:
Employing quasi- dramatic elements, Berg in the score instructs the soloist to take over the leadership of the violins and violas “audibly and visibly.” These are to join him gradually, only to break away from him again “in just a demonstrative a manner.”
I wrote a paper on this in graduate school that, alas, I no longer have. But my recollection was that a better interpretation of Berg's instructions are that the solo violinist enjoins the other strings to join in with him by gesturing for them to stand up as they play the plaint (with the exception of the cellos, of course. Here is the instruction from the score blown up:
Click to enlarge
Unfortunately, I can't make out exactly what the German says, so I am relying on my memory of the research I did for the paper. In the clip I am going to put up of a performance of the work, the soloist steps back, aligning himself with the section violins, which is, I think, the opposite of what Berg is asking for: they are to join him "audibly and visibly". That is, they join in with what he is playing and they stand up with him. This is never done, at least not that I have seen when I have seen this piece performed live. Here is a performance from the 2012 Proms with Frank-Peter Zimmerman, violin and the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, Daniele Gatti, conductor:
The section that I have been talking about, with the instruction from Berg about the strings joining together in the plaint, comes at the 20:24 mark in the clip. As you can see, the soloist steps back and the concertmaster joins him in the melody followed by the other strings.
There are yet more complexities suggested by this section that I also explored in my (lost) paper. Adolf Hitler had come to power in 1933 and the Anschluss or annexation of Austria was looming (it took place in March 1938). Berg's teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, a Jew, had already emigrated to the US and had just won a teaching position in California. In correspondence with him Berg referred to people of like mind joining together to resist the Nazi takeover. Perhaps at that moment in time, that seemed like a possibility. In any case, I'm afraid I can't substantiate any of this as I no longer have my research materials. So feel free to ignore the suggestion!
In 1620 Sir Francis Bacon published his Novum Organum, one of the earliest descriptions of what would become scientific method. Bacon saw many kinds of errors that needed to be corrected in the way we look at the world and in his book he cites four, one of which I chose for my title: the Idola theatri or idols of the theatre. These are not innate in the mind, but the kinds of errors that are constructed by thinkers. Wikipedia quotes Bacon thus:
"Idols which have immigrated into men's minds from the various dogmas of philosophies, and also from wrong laws of demonstration." He named them Idols of the Theater "because in my judgment all the received systems are but so many stage plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion."
In other words, idola theatri are the kind of errors and misunderstandings that are sometimes called "received" or "conventional" wisdom; those kinds of things that we generally believe to be true but that are simply false. Some examples? The link between cholesterol or saturated fat and cardiovascular disease. Ever since the 1950s this was thought to be uncontroversial. But now:
In 2014, a systematic review and meta-analysis in the Annals of Internal Medicine, of 72 published studies totalling 530,525 participants, looked at observational studies of dietary intake of fatty acids, observational studies of measured fatty acid levels in the blood, and intervention studies of polyunsaturated fat supplementation. The authors of the review concluded that, ″Current evidence does not clearly support cardiovascular guidelines that encourage high consumption of polyunsaturated fatty acids and low consumption of total saturated fats.″ (from this Wikipedia article)
There are a whole lot of other areas in which the conventional wisdom is obviously incorrect, but many of these are so controversial that I don't even want to mention them! Suffice it to say that it is taboo to even discuss some of the most egregious examples. Bacon's reference to stage plays is very apt because a lot of these form integral parts of an overarching narrative that is intended by the powers that be to govern our thinking on all sorts of questions.
This narrative also governs thinking about the arts and a tiny part of it is also intended to govern our thinking about music. I am stimulated to write about this because I just ran across a near-perfect example of the narrative in action. Here is an article in The Guardian titled: "Access all arias: how a 16th century choral work is reaching new audiences." But the most blatant propagandizing comes in the sub-head:
Classical music will only survive if it persuades younger audiences to give great music a chance. In Bristol and across Britain, programmers are reaching out to new listeners in exciting and imaginative ways
The thing about expressions of conventional wisdom as The Narrative is that they must not seem controversial in any way. This is, of course, how errors continue and propagate: they don't seem like errors. And how could anyone (except a reprobate like myself) have any disagreement with that sub-head? Well, let's look at the first paragraph of the article:
Unless the classical music world finds ways to attract new audiences, it risks losing not just the baby and bathwater, but the whole bathtub. As I wrote last year, musicians and audiences are hungry for change. Here in Bristol at the Old Vic’s summer Proms week – now in our third year – our mission is to feed them with as much of it as we can dream up. Our concerts have included such innovations as big-screen live relays, digital imagery, lasers, robotics, and Google Glasses, all designed to bring audiences as close to the heart of the listening experience as they can conceivably get. We’re not the only ones heeding the call: the Hallé has just created a brilliant pay-what-you-like scheme for an informal concert later this year, and around the country there are concerts in pubs, in nightclubs, opera in the open air, and orchestras in car parks. But before traditionalists begin spluttering, I want to stress that this isn’t gimmickry. It’s about concentrating on the music, presenting it simply and directly, and breaking down the very real barriers that keep people from experiencing it.
Notice that this opening is very similar to the one I was critiquing in my Thursday post: "Holy Hokum, Batman!" Same error of attributing agency to a Passive Collective. "Classical music" is not an entity and has no agency. Classical musicians, in order to attract audiences, are always seeking ways to do so. But this, of course, is not dramatic enough for The Narrative. "Musicians and audiences are hungry for change"? This is a key part of The Narrative because the particular narrative that we are dealing with here is the Progressive Narrative where we are all marching into the Brave New Future guaranteed us by our masters. Don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to Better, but Newer is not always better, though pointing that out is excluded from The Narrative.
Classical music is a particularly tough nut for the Progressive Warriors to crack because the very nature of classical music, its links to tradition and aesthetic quality, its core repertoire coming from a small group of Dead White Males and its lack of the usual visual distractions all tend to insulate it from the typical entertainments of our day: pop music, electronic dance music, hip-hop and so on. So the first thing you will do, in order to, as I say, crush this tough nut, is to bring in
such innovations as big-screen live relays, digital imagery, lasers, robotics, and Google Glasses
But of course these things instead of "bring[ing] audiences as close to the heart of the listening experience as they can conceivably get" only distract from the music itself. Classical music is an auditory experience and all those things are visual! Believe me when I say that the more visual gimmickry you insert into the experience the less aware of the music you will be. I'm not sure audiences are really noticing, but they are more and more being distracted from the music itself by peripheral things.
These aren't just visual gimmickry, but extend to the program notes. You would think that the basic function of program notes was to tell you something about the music, to aid your reception of the music. But this seems to be less and less the case. I recently attended a concert in which I learned from the program notes where Beethoven was born, the weight of an early patron, the Elector of Bonn, Maximilian Franz (480 lbs), his nickname (the patron's), Beethoven's meeting with Mozart, how long it took Beethoven to write his first set of string quartets, when they were published, and which Mozart quartet inspired op 18, no. 3. It was K. 575. Of the quartet itself, about to be played in the concert there was exactly one word of description: the finale is described as "effervescent."
You think this was just an anomaly? Go ahead, dig out some programs of concerts you have attended recently and tell me how much of the notes actually talk about the music and how much talk about everything BUT the music.
So much of what is going on recently in classical music seems so outright opposed to a suitable listening experience that I wonder if the intention is in fact to crush classical music. After all, if that was indeed your intention, to destroy the classical music listening experience, wouldn't you do just these things? Replace a quiet, distraction-free environment (the traditional concert hall) with one filled with big-screen digital imagery, lasers, robotics and Google Glasses, put on concerts in uncongenial places like pubs, nightclubs and car parks, replace informative program notes with trivial citations of irrelevant biographical details, and constantly dilute and distort the core repertoire by adding in as much non-core as you can: pieces by rock guitarists, pieces with added choreography, collaborations with pop musicians, quotas of people that are not Dead White Males and so on.
It all reminds me of something I read a while ago to the effect that you can best understand the behavior of a bureaucratic institution by assuming that it is secretly controlled by a cabal of its enemies. Now doesn't that make things a lot clearer?
How can classical music thrive? It is pretty simple. Make available, even to children whose parents lack the funds, good music instruction. In Canada, for example, the Province of Quebec has an extensive network of conservatories all over the province that do this. Of course, there is constant political pressure to shut them down. But the system works very well despite that. Let musicians work out their own ways of reaching audiences. Some subsidized performance spaces--real concert halls with proper backstage facilities, good acoustics and suitable lighting--would help a lot. I hesitate to suggest anything else because I think a lot of government programs to aid the arts tend to go astray. The basic principle is let creative people be creative and let audiences support them. How to best do that is sometimes a puzzle, but the solutions will usually be specific to the context and locale so there probably aren't too many general rules.
Ironically, if you read the rest of the essay I quoted you will se that they are doing lots of great things:
this year we’ve programmed an evening with no less than nine 40-part choral motets, seven of which are world premieres. One of them is nearly 450 years old and also shot to the top of the charts after it was featured in the novel Fifty Shades of Grey. Thomas Tallis’s Spem in Alium – composed in the 1570s - will be performed with eight other new works written for the same mind and ear-boggling choral forces.
That sounds like it will be a great concert. So don't mistake my thinking here: I am not at all attacking the great things these musicians are doing. More power to them. I am just noticing that they feel they have to genuflect to The Narrative and I am critiquing that Narrative. 40-part choral motets? Yahoo, bring 'em on!
So let's end with a clip of that piece by Thomas Tallis, the motet in 40 parts, Spem in Alium. This is The Sixteen directed by Harry Christophers, with the Laurenscantorij and guest singers, directed by Wiecher Mandemaker:
(Wait, are we sure there are 40 separate parts? I think I only heard 38.)
I'm just reading a fascinating article in Forbes about how really useful a good liberal arts degree can be: in the world of high tech! Surprising I know, but have a look. The article is titled "That 'Useless' Liberal Arts Degree Has Become Tech's Hottest Ticket". What really caught my attention was the founder of a particularly interesting high-tech company, Slack Technologies, who got started as a graduate of the University of Victoria in philosophy. I came very close to switching from music to philosophy in that very same university--they had some excellent philosophy professors. Here is a sample of the article:
Stewart Butterfield [is] Slack’s 42-year-old cofounder and CEO, whose estimated double-digit stake in the company could be worth $300 million or more. He’s the proud holder of an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Canada’s University of Victoria and a master’s degree from Cambridge in philosophy and the history of science.
“Studying philosophy taught me two things,” says Butterfield, sitting in his office in San Francisco’s South of Market district, a neighborhood almost entirely dedicated to the cult of coding. “I learned how to write really clearly. I learned how to follow an argument all the way down, which is invaluable in running meetings. And when I studied the history of science, I learned about the ways that everyone believes something is true–like the old notion of some kind of ether in the air propagating gravitational forces–until they realized that it wasn’t true.”
I realize over and over, writing this blog, how much I owe to my three philosophy professors at the University of Victoria who seem, these many years later, to have had a real influence on how I think. Here is more from the article:
Slack’s core business benefits from the philosopher’s touch. Hard-core engineers have been trying to build knowledge-management software for at least 15 years. Most of their approaches are so cumbersome that corporate users can’t wait to quit. Slack makes everything simple. It bridges everything from Dropbox to Twitter, helping users organize documents, photos and data files into streamlined channels for easy browsing. Considering that Butterfield spent his early 20s trying to make sense of Wittgenstein’s writings, sorting out corporate knowledge might seem simple.
Oh, you bet. Anyone who has made a serious attempt to understand Wittgenstein is going to find most other intellectual challenges rather easier in comparison. Based on what you read in the mass media it is easy to get the idea that an artist and anyone else coming out of the humanities is a haphazard, irrational thinker at best. So much of the humanities these days are dominated by second-rate French post-modernist influenced Marxism that it is easy to forget that other approaches exist. Philosophy and classical studies are probably the most free of that influence and, when taught well, they can impart a really rigorous kind of critical thinking--the kind that hardly exists these days. You can also find some of this still floating around in some corners of the literary and musical worlds as well. This kind of creative, yet disciplined, thought I suspect is not found in the so-called STEM fields: science, technology, engineering and math. They have their own discipline, but it is of a different kind.
I think the great strength of a traditional education in the humanities is twofold: first of all there is the exposure to the great works of art in the western tradition. From Homer to Dante to Shakespeare to Joyce in literature and from Pérotin to DuFay to Bach to Stravinsky in music, there is really no substitute for an understanding of great works of art and their place in history. Indeed, one often suspects that it is the near-total ignorance of history that underlies so much of the absurdity we see in 21st century politics and social trends. The study of science and technology does not foster a sense of history.
Second, the humanities and the arts in particular have unique disciplines that do not have counterparts in other fields. I mentioned a sense of history, but there has been a lot of research showing that the study of music at an early age can help shape mental discipline later in life. Not surprising as training in music demands very special kinds of alertness and focus that unite various bodily senses and thought patterns.
Going back to philosophy, I believe that I have derived an ability to dig into what is being said in an essay or argument because of what I have learned from philosophy. It is no exaggeration to state that the majority of what we read and are told in the mass media and elsewhere is based on fuzzy concepts and false logic. There is a class in society that is very adept at shaping public understanding and unfortunately, they have been getting away with intellectual travesties for quite some time, largely because most members of the public have a poor foundation in the humanities.
The critique I posted on Thursday where I talked about the Passive Collective and false dilemmas is an example of things that I was only aware of because of philosophy. It is astonishing how often writers rely on attributing agency to imaginary entities and then use this to scaffold a weak argument. If everyone read a few dialogues by Plato, this tactic wouldn't go very far!
But enough, my point is made, I think, and time to find a piece of music that can top this off. Wait, I know, the Symphony No. 22 in E flat major by Joseph Haydn, nicknamed The Philosopher. This is the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra conducted by Adam Fischer:
