Friday Miscellanea

In case there are Music Salon readers who are as entertained by language as I am, here are Eight of the world's quirkiest phrases in honor of International Translation Day.

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The very fine English conductor Neville Marriner passed away this week, at 92, just two days after conducting his last concert. The Guardian has the news.

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I'm not sure many of the readers of the Music Salon are in the right income group, but here are some houses of famous musicians for sale, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal. Here's Michael Jackson's modest Las Vegas pad:

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Here is Billy Holiday's cool townhouse on the Upper West Side in Manhattan:

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Just so you know, I'm not the only curmudgeon left, here is a review in The Spectator of a Björk concert at Royal Albert Hall. Some choice bits:

’Will you be dancing?’ the man in front asks his friend before the lights go down. ‘Most likely,’ she says. Two songs in and it’s looking less and less likely.

The world’s best-known Icelander is fronting a 27-piece chamber orchestra in a strings-only performance of songs from her last album (not her most toe-tapping collection). It feels like hard work. Lyrically, Vulnicura (Greek for ‘cure for wounds’) is a blow-by-blow account of her split with long-term partner Matthew Barney. Musically, anything resembling a good tune is hard to find.

Nice! Here is some more:

Back on stage in a new outfit that looks like a jellyfish, she sings a few older songs. Most are obscure — only ‘Joga’ might be vaguely familiar to the non-devotee — but they sound good without the usual skittering beats. In ‘Pagan Poetry’ there’s a singalong and we all contribute backing vocals in our best Icelandic accents (‘I luff him, I luff him’).

It turns out that it wasn't so bad after all, at least the reviewer, Brian Hancill, came to enjoy it. I probably would have wanted to open my veins after the first set...

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And for our light entertainment today, the string quartet MozART Group demonstrates that they can be at least as delightful as a cat video:

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Neville Marriner (with harpsichordist Thurston Dart) founded the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields in 1959 and they recorded an astonishing variety of music. The ones I have been most familiar with, due to being a guitarist, were the complete set of guitar concertos by Mauro Giuliani (think of him as a lesser Mozart with a guitar) done with guitar master Pepe Romero:

Now is the Most Exciting Time for Music! Ever!!!

Sometimes I wish I were not the kind of person who finds overly effusive promotions entertaining, but there it is. Today's delightful example is from NewMusicBox, our source for a lot of oddly uninteresting oddities. Why the 21st Century is the Most Exciting Time for Music. In terms of sheer quantity and variety, you betcha! But let's read a bit of why Frank Oteri thinks so:

For listeners, there’s more music to hear than ever before–and it’s happening all over the world. Of course, it always has, but nowadays, it’s not limited to “national” “styles.” Also, global travel has become much more convenient, relatively speaking, and so with enough time, money, and overzealousness, a fanatical fan could actually trek the globe to hear extremely exciting music every day of the year. Much easier, we now can also experience a great deal of music happening in all these places without leaving our homes. And when we do, we can keep listening on our smartphones! Since music from literally any place and time can now be equally with us in the here and now, the once seemingly impenetrable dichotomies of domestic vs. foreign, new vs. old, and us vs. them have become completely porous and ultimately meaningless. It is all equally ours to enjoy, as well as to be the source of inspiration for our own creative impulses.

Ok, let me translate that into MusicSalonSpeak: "Wow, and, wow!" He goes on:

As interpreters and creators, we can literally do anything we want. In such an environment, it is no longer possible to be out of step with the zeitgeist. We no longer should feel stifled by so many of the other binaries that used to divide us aesthetically–e.g. old-fashioned vs. out-in-left-field, traditional vs. avant-garde, non-commercial vs. popular.

Ah, now there is something we can mull over. "We can literally do anything we want." Show up on time to play the concert--or not! Practice the repertoire--or not! Work out that tricky middle bit--or not! Hmm, this doesn't sound like a very good principle to be following. But hey, anything to be able to stop worrying about being out of step with the zeitgeist! Plus, being stifle-free in re "the binaries" is just so cool. I gather that the important thing is to shuffle off everything that smacks of discipline or differences or distinctions between things. In this state of, well, extreme laxitude, we interpreters and creators no longer have any particular responsibilities so, you know, don't expect us to deliver much of actual quality at our performances.

It's probably just me, but I kind of prefer those artists who worry about impenetrable dichotomies like "good" and "bad" and strive for the former:

Musicianship and the Music Business

A lot of what you read about music in the mass media is flat-out depressing, but sometimes a ray of light shines through. This article on The Smart Set is titled Does the Music Business Need Musicianship? and it is actually pretty good. The hook is what has been happening to MTV, but the story is wider than that:

MTV is a good symbol for the larger crisis in music. That network set the tone years ago for a glamor-driven music business, built on pizzazz and personalities instead of musicianship. That paradigm is now deeply entrenched in the entire industry. And it doesn’t seem to work anymore.

MTV was always ambivalent about that M, and enamored with the TV part of its acronym. From the moment of its inception, MTV worked relentlessly to downplay the role of musicianship in music. No organization in history has done more to turn music into performance art, and put the people making the actual sounds out of sight. And not just those playing traditional instruments — tell me how often you see the programmers and beat-makers behind today’s pop hits in a video, or even given credit for their contributions.

And as I have written about many times, this shallow, glitzy approach has leached into the classical music business as well (cough*Yuja Wang*cough).

This formula of glamor-driven pop music has enjoyed an amazing run. For more than 30 years, success at the highest levels of the music business has demanded very little grasp of music. With the right look, the right camera angles, and the right booty . . . well, almost anything was possible.

The astonishing trajectory of popular music beginning with Elvis and the Beatles has led inevitably to, shudder, Nikki Minaj:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDZX4ooRsWs

(Blogger won't embed the original.) For a truly biting bit of criticism, I doubt you could do better than Ozzie Man. But, warning, the commentary is larded with strong language:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dltb5gj4HvI

After pointing out that the younger listeners basically don't pay for music any more--they would rather spend the money on shoes--the article mentions that the old guys, the Stones, Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, are still notching up pretty good sales, but their audiences are as old as they are. The article laments:

Believe it or not, there is no hot superstar guitarist under the age of 30. There is no next Hendrix. There is no next Clapton. Oh, there are plenty of fine young guitarists out there, but none of them can get the kind of media platform necessary for true superstardom in the year 2016. Mull that over, and think about the implications. The same is true for keyboards, drums, and even all those software programs that create the fabric of contemporary pop music.

I really don't know if that is true as I don't follow pop music that closely, but it certainly seems to be the case that all the young stars are singers. But, and this may speak well for the future health of the music business, there are plenty of up and coming young classical artists. I've been raving about Igor Levit lately, but he is not the only one. There are a host of young violinists like Hilary Hahn:

Other pianists like Daniil Trifonov:

Not to mention the ones that have, just a bit, edged into glamour territory like Yuja Wang:

and Khatia Buniatishvili:

So maybe the strong foundation that classical music has of actual musicianship will serve it very well in coming years.

Talent and Anti-Talent

Something a wise, old Czech violist said once keeps coming back to me: "There is talent, yes, but there is also anti-talent!" To get the full effect you have to imagine a thick Czech accent. This is something that every music teacher knows, of course. Some students just need to be handed an instrument and then you get out of their way. Others, in the evocative phrase of a pianist of my acquaintance, "couldn't play "Come to Jesus" in half-notes if you paid them in Kruggerrand!"

Yep, sad to say, Malcolm Gladwell, author of the book claiming that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice can make anyone an expert, was all wet.

What makes me think of this was putting up those pieces by Steve Reich. He is what you call a talent, a massively talented talent. Give the man two pieces of wood and a pulse and he will make a piece of music you can listen to:

You see, that's talent. But not all composers are talented. In fact, a remarkable number of them just ape the incidentals of good music, like the pulse or the percussion or whatever, but from these materials, they create, well, nothing much:

This is going to sound crazy, but I suspect that the majority of composers writing today are actually lacking in talent. What happens is that they really like music, so they attend a conservatory or university and study composition. They become both skilled and credentialed through hard work (there's those 10,000 hours) but, truth to tell, they don't really have a creative bone in their bodies. Luckily for them, neither do most of the people handing out degrees, awards and honors. Most unfortunately, these days few critics are willing to do their job and point out when someone is massively untalented. Instead, they get given Pulitzer Prizes for, again, pretty much a waste of musical time. Blogger is messing around again, so you have to follow the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGva1NVWRXk

I wish it were an easy matter to explain why that is empty noodling and this is not:

But that is very, very difficult. To a musician, it is like the difference between chalk and cheese, but hard to explain in words. I could point to, for example, how the entry of the second performer in the first clip above puts us in an interesting, syncopated rhythmic universe that causes an immediate physical response, while the entry of the other performers in the second clip just confirms the deadly dull and dreary nature of that piece. I could point out that droning on with the same notes for a very long time has already been done much better than in the third clip--in Das Rheingold for example, and tacking on some environmental boiler plate doesn't make it more interesting.

But these are suggestive rather than conclusive. The truths about music are so hard to put into words. Actually, that's why we write music!

Happy Birthday, Steve, and Happy Rosh HaShanah

Today is composer Steve Reich's 80th birthday. Born Oct. 3, 1936 in New York, since the 1970s he has been laying a new foundation for music composition that has been widely influential, not least on myself! I first heard his music in 1974 or 75. This is also the Jewish New Year, which I thought I would mention since Steve is Jewish. And by the way, listening to an interview a while back, I realized that I have been pronouncing his name wrong forever. It looks like it could be pronounced as if it were German, i.e. with a throaty "ch" like the Spanish "j", but he himself pronounces it "sh" as in "marsh". I stand corrected!

As I don't have any exotic fruit for you, as is traditional on Rosh HaShanah (plus, I'm not even Jewish) I think we should just listen to some music by Steve Reich, someone who, in the words of music critic Andrew Clements, is one of "a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history." Yep, right up there alongside Claudio Monteverdi and Joseph Haydn.

Six Pianos is the first piece I heard by Steve Reich. A music professor played part of it in a theory class as what he called "ear-training". This was in 1974 and few people had heard his music. The class was divided into two groups, one looking quizzically at one another and thinking "why isn't anything happening?" and the other smiling and thinking "listen to those cool changes." This is a live performance in Amsterdam in 1976 with the composer himself on one of the parts. He is on the right at the back:

The next time I was in the music listening library I grabbed a black box that contained the piece Drumming that I thought might be interesting and that was one of the most transformative experiences in my life as a musician. It was my habit, when I had a spare period and no immediate things that needed to be done, to hit the listening room and grab a few LPs of new music. If nothing grabbed me in the first minute or so, I would just move on. That day I had some stuff by Ligeti and Stockhausen, some pieces for three and four orchestras, as I recall. After listening to some of that extremely complex music, I put on the Reich:

That is a live recording from 1971. You probably can't imagine the impact that the extreme simplicity (at least, at the beginning) had! The idea of reducing music back to the most fundamental property of all, a simple pulse, was an idea whose radical power, it seems, only Steve Reich could imagine. He was also the one who added the eight-note pulse to Terry Riley's In C, which is probably what makes that piece.

The next piece that really caught my attention was Eight Lines, written in 1979. Here is a recent recording by Ensemble Modern with the score:

But the piece that really won the wider attention of not only classical, but pop musicians, was his Music for Eighteen Musicians (often performed by twenty or more). Here is that piece and I strongly suggest you listen to it all the way through. It is an astonishingly tightly-written, but wide-ranging piece that achieves real transcendence. It was written in 1974-76 and this is the original recording:

Since then, Steve Reich's palette has grown and grown with oratorio-like pieces like The Desert Music for voices and instruments on poetry by William Carlos Williams:

Serious music by a serious man. It is simply not an exaggeration to say that Steve Reich really has changed the course of music history.

Levit Ritornello

I've only been aware of the existence of Igor Levit for a week now. I've been doing a lot of listening. He is, without a doubt, an enormous talent. I haven't heard his Bach Partitas yet--it's on order--but his Goldbergs are very, very fine. His Rzewski is fantastic and has convinced me that the piece itself, The People United Will Never Be Defeated, is a substantial work. (Though it always makes me think of the famous challenge uttered by Isidora Dolores Ibárruri Gómez during the Siege of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War: ¡No Pasarán! ("They shall not pass!") To which Gen. Francisco Franco famously replied, after having won the war, "Pasamos." ("We passed.")

But what is most evident is that Igor Levit's Beethoven is simply astonishing. Everyone plays Beethoven and, since he is that kind of composer, it usually sounds pretty good. But it is often too polite and well-mannered. This is not the Beethoven of Igor Levit. Sure, it is beautiful, slow and contemplative when necessary, but it is also rude and violent when necessary. Most of all, Levit makes us hear it differently. Sometimes, and I really don't know how he does this, it sounds almost atonal. I think it has something to do with how he balances the chords and places the phrases. With the exception of Grigory Sokolov, I don't think there is another pianist alive who plays Beethoven so well.

Here, to whet your appetite is just the theme to the Diabelli Variations:

Here is the second movement of op. 31 no. 2:

There is not a lot of Igor Levit on YouTube, but here is a little taste of his Bach:

Judgement and Bias

One of the things about today's world that continues to puzzle me is the bias against judgement. I mean the tendency we see to denigrate all forms of genuine criticism in favor of a kind of bland approval of everything. We saw it just yesterday in Alex Ross' paean in praise of experimental music and we see it everywhere in the reluctance to offer actual criticism. If we don't like something we just toss it down the memory hole. I think I ran across where this comes from. It is a mild form of the more extreme notion that bias and bigotry are everywhere. The assumption is that everyone is a racist and sexist and we have to be condemning this with our every waking breath. Now this does not come from any actual data or statistics or analysis, it is the base assumption and cannot be either questioned or disagreed with. Why is this? As one writer said, it is not

based on any form of reasoned observation, but on pure political calculation under the self-aggrandizing and self-deluding mask of moral narcissism.

Ah, now it makes sense. Two characteristics of life in the 21st century are that cultural Marxism has seeped in everywhere and it is combined with a particularly rancid form of moral narcissism.  We believe things to be true because they reinforce our sense of moral superiority. The cultural Marxism comes from making all moral judgements on the basis of membership in a group. Your group identity is all that matters, not your actual moral acts.

So if you move into the area of aesthetic judgement, some of the same faulty and distorted principles are at work. You cannot criticise any individual composer because that indicates bias. After all, they might be a member of an officially designated oppressed group. This is why criticism of, for example, women composers is extremely inadvisable. On the other hand, membership in an officially designated oppressor group is a final judgement in itself. Music, for example, that encodes racism, colonialism or sexism is automatically bad music which is why there is always a bit of a cloud hanging over classical music. Misogynistic rappers get off scot-free though because they are members of an officially designated oppressed group which trumps everything else.

What you cannot do any more is objectively evaluate aesthetic objects without considering the identity of the creators. That would be wrong because we are all sexist and racist and infected with implicit colonialism.

Bryan, by the way, is my slave name and henceforth I wish to be called "Cthulu" and my designated personal pronoun is "Your Eminence". Thank you.

For our envoi today we have Igor Levit playing the first two movements from the Beethoven Piano Sonata op 109: