Was this the result of practicing the Precipitato to the Piano Sonata No. 7 by Prokofiev without warming up properly?
And we may never know what happened to this 300-year-old viola da gamba in the hold of an Alitalia flight:
This is what happens when you don't purchase a seat in the cabin for your cello:
I'm not sure what happened here: a group improvisation just got completely out of hand? The aftermath of a rehearsal of The Who, circa 1970? A really extreme case of bad karma?
Another instrument destroyed by an airline, but I knew a lutenist who had the pegbox of his lute snapped off by an elevator door closing. Never, ever carry your lute around in a soft case!
Why yes, I was stuck for a good theme for a post this morning, why do you ask?
Let's end with some soothing lute music. This is the fantasia Semper Dowland Semper Dolens ("Always Dowland, Always Sad") by John Dowland, played by Julian Bream.
Let's have another look at Tom Service's comments on Debussy that we quoted yesterday:
The centenary is being well marked by BBC Radio 3, launched with a typically provocative edition of The Listening Service from Tom Service, hailing Debussy for his “visceral violence” as a “creator of nightmares” who was “more radical than Stravinsky”, while over recent days Donald Macleod has explored him in Composer of the Week (all available as podcasts and on iPlayer).
What is interesting here is the journalistic need to insist that in order for us to fully appreciate Debussy he has to be reconfigured as a "creator of nightmares" using "visceral violence." Tom is using a certain paradigm of progressive composition as a base assumption: progressive music must be avant-garde, it must be radical, violent and nightmarish. Now this certainly describes a number of 20th century composers such as Edgar Varèse, some of Stravinsky, perhaps even some Messiaen and certainly some Schoenberg and Berg. But Debussy? Good grief!
I think the best way to characterize Debussy is that he was astonishingly innovative in a lot of areas such as extensive use of pedals in all voices, parallel harmonies that are more chordal melodies, use of the whole-tone scale, bitonality, echoes of archaic musical techniques such as parallel fifths and plagal cadences, unprepared modulations and so on. But this is all cloaked in an extreme sensitivity to timbre and texture so that what strikes most listeners, even in the early reception of Debussy's music, is the great beauty of the music. You really have to deny your own ears to claim it is nightmarish or violent!
Here is one comment on the premiere of La Mer:
The piece was initially not well received. Pierre Lalo, critic of Le Temps, wrote: "I see no sea, I hear no sea, I feel no sea." The reason for negative reception was partly because of inadequate rehearsal and partly because of Parisian outrage over Debussy's having recently left his first wife for the singer Emma Bardac. But it soon became one of Debussy's most admired and frequently performed orchestral works, and became more so in the ensuing century.
Indeed, what separates Debussy from a lot of early 20th century composers is that he was welcomed by audiences almost from the beginning. Even though his diaphanous colors and textures took some getting used to, audiences responded with enjoyment.
So why does Tom Service struggle to make Debussy into some kind of fire-breathing radical? Because that is the only model for a great composer in the 20th century that he has. When we eliminated aesthetic judgement and therefore aesthetic quality from our critical vocabulary, we also eliminated anything other than sociology from our evaluations. If a composer outrages nice bourgeois audiences, then he must be good.
Let's listen to a fairly early piece by Debussy. This is his Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune which dates from 1894 so it isn't even 20th century yet. The performers are L'Orchestre symphonique de Montréal conducted by Charles Dutoit:
I was astonished to read this article on Jimi Hendrix's record collection and discover that he owned, not one, but two copies of Handel's Messiah. Does that explain the bridge in "Spanish Castle Magic"?
Handel – ‘Great Choruses from Handel’s Messiah’
Hendrix owned two copies of Handel’s ‘Messiah’, both of which show signs of wear and tear. This rendition by the English Chamber Orchestra promised period sounds which would have been uncanny listening so near to where it was composed.
Hendrix and Handel both lived in Brook Street in London. Also in Jimi's collection was an LP of Bach on pedal harpsichord and Ravi Shankar.
This may be a very brief offering today as I have just been swamped with non-music-related tasks this week!
Slate has a go at re-evaluating the oeuvre of Andrew Lloyd Weber:
For years, the Lloyd Webber canon has been a bit of a cultural punching bag. It’s not hard to see why: His two most popular musicals are, respectively, a nearly plotless anthology sung by performers in spandex and fur and a faux opera about a disfigured stalker in pop culture’s most iconic mask (sincerest apologies to Ghostface and Jim Carrey). Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, and their ilk are the epitome of ’80s bombast: rock-tinged scores with daunting vocal ranges, mostly uncomplicated storytelling, and production values through the roof, all of which have allowed him to become a byword for over-the-top mediocrity that people can snub to feel cultured.
Or because they are cultured?
* * *
Tom Service, who did a couple of excellent series at The Guardian a few years back (one on the symphony and the other on 20th century composers), is back with a program on Debussy on BBC Radio 3. The clickbait come-on in the headline is that Debussy is "more radical than Stravinsky." Well, ok, maybe.
The centenary is being well marked by BBC Radio 3, launched with a typically provocative edition of The Listening Service from Tom Service, hailing Debussy for his “visceral violence” as a “creator of nightmares” who was “more radical than Stravinsky”, while over recent days Donald Macleod has explored him in Composer of the Week (all available as podcasts and on iPlayer).
* * *
There is an interesting apologia over at NewMusicBox on the issue of "equity" programming. I encourage you to read the whole thing, but the editorial note sums up the issues nicely:
[Ed. Note: When the American Composers Orchestra (ACO) announced its 2018-19 season last month, music critic Alex Ross immediately noticed that the repertoire for the orchestra’s concerts at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall was written exclusively by living female composers except for one lone piece by the late Morton Feldman. Since then, Ross’s tweet about it was retweeted 40 times. Granted it is only two concerts, but it was a welcome piece of news, especially after several major American orchestras had announced 2018-19 seasons that did not include a single work by a female composer. Thankfully, the season announcements by the Seattle Symphony and the Los Angeles and New York philharmonics that soon followed proved to be more equitable. Still, all these announcements drove home the message that the orchestra world has a long way to go to achieve real diversity, not just in terms of having a better gender balance, but also in terms of racial, generational, geographic, and stylistic equity. Composer Derek Bermel, who is currently ACO’s artistic director, has long been an articulate advocate for more pluralistic musical aesthetics and the ACO has a 40+ year track record for advocating for offering performance opportunities to an extremely broad range of composers. Given his stance and his position, we thought that Bermel would have some interesting insights into how orchestras could make their programming more diverse.—FJO]
I think the key phrase there is "the orchestra world has a long way to go to achieve real diversity, not just in terms of having a better gender balance, but also in terms of racial, generational, geographic, and stylistic equity." Have they really thought this through, or are they just responding to fashionable progressive trends? What could they mean by "stylistic equity"? Equal parts serial, tonal, modal, minimal and post-modern styles in every concert? The word "equitable" desperately needs to be unpacked, and when you do, I think that the awkward inappropriateness of it would become evident.
* * *
I have to say that I rather admire the audience at this concert of a 1973 Carnegie Hall performance that included Four Organs by Steve Reich:
Four Organs begins with a pattern of eighth notes played by the maracas—a steady, unyielding rattling that’s sustained for the duration of the piece. When the organs come in, they too play repeated figures of eighth notes, and although Reich manipulates both the lengths of the notes (augmenting them steadily) and the notes themselves (which, taken together, make up a dominant eleventh chord), the piece can sound repetitive at first, monotonous, bewildering. That night, it didn’t take long for some rather prominent coughing to break out, before the crowd let loose with less subtle forms of protest: boos and catcalls, the agitation growing over the course of the piece’s 15-plus minutes. At one point, an older woman approached the stage, took off a shoe, and banged it on the stage, imploring the ensemble—which included Reich and Tilson Thomas—to stop. Someone else sprinted down an aisle, yelling, “All right! I confess!” Other aggrieved patrons simply left.
The best kind of audience reaction for a living composer is enthusiastic enjoyment, of course. But I suspect a lot of composers would say that the second best is this kind of audience rebellion--because you can be sure of one thing, that they were reacting to what you wrote. The worst response is when they just sit there and politely clap with no real enthusiasm one way or another. That probably means you failed to really do something with the piece.
* * *
Young artists have to beware of unscrupulous people pretending to "help" them with their careers. Case in point, an unsavory London management agency:
In an apparent fraud, management firm Band Management Universal (BMU) charged up to £4,000 for services and continued to sign clients despite having numerous complaints about not meeting promises.
Head of the Musicians' Union Horace Trubridge called it the worst scam he had seen in the past 20 years.
BMU could not be reached for comment.
The company, registered in Farringdon, London, has shut its website and email accounts and cancelled its phones.
Singer Sarah Kaloczi said she paid £2,000 to BMU for a contract that was supposed to include music production, marketing, gigs and tours, as well as help to secure a recording contract.
The company failed to deliver these services or refund her money and she now faces being evicted from her flat.
"They took everything I had put my heart and soul into and just shattered it into pieces," she said.
My feeling is that if the management are not willing to invest their own resources in your career, then you should look elsewhere.
* * *
And that brings us to our envoi for today which will be Four Organs by Steve Reich. And for those who simply can't stand the piece (and they are not few!), some music by that radical, Claude Debussy. These are the Six épigraphes antiques for piano four hands.
This is way out on the extreme end of singing, but have a listen. I found the comments to be somewhat more entertaining than the performance itself. Does show that not all Canadians are boring, though...
And for something else in a similar vein or chord, here is Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate performed by Michael Schmid:
One of the movies in the running for Best Picture this year at the Academy Awards was Darkest Hour, a tribute to Winston Churchill, whose leadership of the United Kingdom during World War II has long been hailed as an example of true political leadership. Recently however, there are those who disagree. In the Washington Post we find an article titled: In Winston Churchill, Hollywood Rewards a Mass Murderer. Hmm, quite a difference! There is something of an ideological background to these attacks as we can see in this article, Reminder: The Left Hates Our Civilization where you will find links both to the articles attacking and to some counterarguments. The writer refers to a "Churchill Test," described by historian Sir Geoffrey Elton as:
“There are times when I incline to judge all historians by their opinion of Winston Churchill: whether they can see that, no matter how much better the details, often damaging, of man and career become known, he still remains, quite simply, a great man.”
I think we could have something similar in music that we could call "The Bach Test." You can tell quite a lot about music scholars by their attitude towards Bach. In his case, of course, there are no unpleasant details to reveal as he conducted no mass-bombing campaigns, though he did recruit his children as copyists. Even according to the New York Times, Bach stands at the head of the Western Classical Music Tradition, so how musicologists regard him might reveal something. As a proxy for surveying them directly, let's have a look at the postings over at Musicology Now for an indicator. There should be a caveat, though, as these posts are quite different from articles published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. Here is a link to the contents of the current issue. Nothing on Bach, but serious articles on several subjects nonetheless. What do we find over at Musicology Now? Here is a list of the subjects of the most recent posts in reverse chronological order:
urban busking
Estonian composer Helena Tulve
student gun protests (voice and silence)
Cui Jian and Chinese rock music
Japanese composer Akemi Naito
Philippine vaudeville and "oriental syncopation"
recording industry 1905 - 1926
interpretive labor in experimental music
mechanical instruments
musical labor
Parisian music journalism
Justin Timberlake at the Superbowl
music in Star Wars
And, believe it or not, this is a considerable improvement as for a long time it seemed that all they could find to write about was movie and videogame soundtracks. What we have lately is a couple of articles on composers from eastern Europe and Japan, both women, by the way. Then we have a number of posts that I would term sociological on things like busking, protests, musical labor and the recording industry. That leaves a couple of posts on pop music both current and historical. Not a horrible mix, but one wonders if the bias against white male composers will continue indefinitely. No, nothing on Bach.
So, despite the fact that Bach is possibly the greatest composer in the Western European tradition, he is resolutely ignored by current musicology. Mind you, if they could find some dirt on him, that would lead to a spate of articles on that. There is one legitimate reason to ignore Bach and people like him and one illegitimate reason. The legitimate one is that it is thought that everything worth saying about Bach has been said. Well, perhaps. I can certainly see a graduate student having a very difficult time pitching a thesis on Bach to his advisor! But two recent biographies on Bach, one by John Eliot Gardiner and the other by Christoff Wolff, both show that there is more to be said even about Bach. Taruskin's discussion of his music in the Oxford History also had quite a bit to chew on.
The illegitimate reason to ignore Bach is that he simply contradicts your narrative that there are no "great men" in history or in music and that behind the public image of every great man lies a sordid tale of oppression and murder. That's a pretty hard sell with Bach, but the strategy has proved fruitful with a long list of historical figures including, yes, Winston Churchill. At the end of the day, though, it is rooted in nothing more than nihilism and resentment.
Let's listen to some Bach. This is the Art of Fugue in two performances. The first by Grigory Sokolov in Leningrad in the late 70s early 80s:
The other is by the Emerson String Quartet:
Honestly, did you have something better to do this morning?
I was visiting my dynamic half-sister last week, who is ninety-five years old and still drives her own car. She has indicated interest in my musical activities on several occasions so I have brought some CDs for her in previous visits. One of them contained some of my orchestral music (in software synthesized performances, let me hasten to say) and I was surprised to hear it wafting in from the other room one morning this week. I had forgotten she had that one. I went out to see what was up and found that she likes to listen to it while she is ironing. Sigh.
Well, to be fair, it is not terribly good music, just barely listenable. I was going through a lot of experimentation when I wrote it and I suppose I would describe it as being influenced by Steve Reich, Debussy and Prokofiev in equal parts without being very interesting or memorable. Here, as an example is my Tres Imágenes:
I have to say that, if I had known that its final function was to be mildly diverting background music to the mundane task of ironing, I would probably have written something rather different! These days I don't see my task of composing music as excluding music with this kind of function. Though I am a bit puzzled as to what to write, exactly. People like Haydn and Mozart wrote a great deal of music for dancing, processions, diversion and so on. The music was still elegant and aesthetically pleasing.
But these days we do seem to have a different task before us. If I could write charming, inoffensive music in the style of earlier times, I might well do so. But I find that I can't. At some point I write something so offensively trite to my ear that I have to erase it and that leads to deleting the whole thing as it is all of a piece. Then I go back to trying to find something that is not trite and clichéd. When I do, as I hope I did in my recent piece for violin and guitar titled "Dark Dream," it will not be the kind of thing that my sister would put on as background music to the task of ironing. She would not like it at all, I'm afraid.
I think I can relate one aspect of my character when it comes to aesthetics to something that happened in Grade 10. This is when adolescents are at their most intolerant and annoying. I had newly moved from the Interior to Vancouver Island so I was the new guy and painfully lacking in social abilities. I ended up being a kind of appendage on the edge of the nerd and geek squad in my school. Let me just outline the basic social groups there as they may be a bit different from your experience. In descending order of coolness from high to low there were the jocks of course, tall, physically adroit and popular. Then there were the hard rockers, the tough guys. This was just before the hippy sixties hit in my area so they wore black leather, had blakies on their boots or shoes (these were little metal plates that made metallic clicking sounds when you walked--it seems to be a local term) and practiced kicking one another. Below these were the dorks, nerds and geeks: the pseudo-intellectuals who dressed funny and were probably headed for a career in accounting. Anyone left over was simply an unclassifiable remainder. I was a probationary member of the geek squad until one day the others decided, purely as a psychological experiment, to ostracize me. One morning I went to school and all my supposed friends were no longer speaking to me. That pushed me into the unclassifiable remainder group.
The interesting thing is that the very next year the 60s washed through our school (even though chronologically it was actually 1967) and some of us started growing our hair long and smoking marijuana. I also was in a band by then so the whole social order was turned upside down. Or so we thought. We passed our time at school assemblies and award ceremonies sitting in the very back and booing everyone who received any sort of prize. We were now at the top of the coolness pyramid, even if only in our own minds.
I think that this whole series of events caused me to be sufficiently alienated that I really don't care too much what music I am supposed to be writing or who for. Yes, you can accuse me of being narcissistic or whatever, but I don't think that is the case. I ran across a clip of Jordan Peterson a while ago that provided me an interesting perspective on the role of artists. It is the job of craftsmen to provide those things that people need in their daily lives. Musically, that would be a lot of pop music and things like pleasant music to provide diversion while you are ironing. But it is the job of an artist to take things a few steps further, to leave the campfire of social acceptance and wander out in the wilds a bit and to come back with some idea, or bit of something that you can add to the art form to make it just a bit different (and therefore less immediately acceptable). You have to be creative in a true sense, in other words. This is why, as Jordan Peterson also points out, creative people usually find it almost impossible to monetize their creativity. The corollary to that is that if something is really successful it is most likely not that creative.
Of course there are some puzzling exceptions that would include people like Bob Dylan and Tom Waits. Both successful and both also pretty creative, though they certainly don't rack up the enormous sales of the true pop stars. Let's hear a little Tom Waits in case you are not familiar with his oeuvre. This is "Step Right Up" from the album Small Change (though in Canada it was on an album with a somewhat different track list titled Pasties and a G-String):
