When Will Mozart Get Cancelled?

By "Mozart" I mean not just W. A. Mozart, but all the great composers of classical music from Monteverdi to Stravinsky. The Washington Post just published a very "woke" opinion piece casting real doubt on whether we should maybe have to cancel Shakespeare, or Othello at least:

The great reckoning now sweeping across pop culture has been working through the stacks of literature for far longer. The effects of time are twofold: Most books have fallen into dust, along with the racist values they imbibed. And those few texts that survive have been subjected to rigorous — and ongoing — debate.

Any theater launching a production of “Othello,” for instance, must begin with a rich body of scholarship on Shakespeare’s sources and intentions. What are we to make of the Moor, the Venetian general manipulated into murderous rage by his villainous white colleague? Even before Othello comes onstage, he’s subjected to obscene racist ridicule. And later, Othello himself laments, “Haply, for I am black and have not those soft parts of conversation that chamberers have.”

As a Renaissance writer working in England 250 years before the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States, Shakespeare surely held the white supremacist values of his culture. But is “Othello” a racist play, or is it a fledgling critique of racism?

The first impression one gets from this writer, Ron Charles, is that he really hasn't read very much, odd for someone who writes professionally about books. But how else would you explain the comment "Most books have fallen into dust, along with the racist values they imbibed. And those few texts that survive have been subjected to rigorous — and ongoing — debate." Does he really believe this? Could he even begin to offer evidence for it? It looks to me more like robotic "progressive" mind-reading. Yeah, Shakespeare surely held the white supremacist values of his culture. Every single element of that phrase except the proper name is not only questionable, but most likely entirely false.

The classical music world, except for the occasional hit piece from the "new" musicologists, has been pretty free of this kind of barbarity. But for how long? Now that the whole universe of classical music performance has been cancelled (one hopes for not too much longer) will they come for the composers now? If Shakespeare was surely a racist white supremacist, why not Mozart? I hope that our escaping the "great reckoning" so far rests on more than the supposed irrelevance of classical music to mainstream culture.

Mind you, the guilt by association of classical music since WWII because some music was enjoyed by the Nazis is something we have been wrestling with. But so far at least no composer, except for Wagner in Israel, has been actually cancelled. Opera seems the most vulnerable as a number of controversies have grown up around casting in Othello and Madame Butterfly.

I'm kind of looking forward to the first serious attempt to cancel a major composer. Who might be the best candidate from a progressive point of view? We have a few anti-semites but that seems a very minor offence these days. Anyone have any ideas?

For our envoi, here is a vintage performance of the "Dissonance" Quartet by Mozart by the Emerson Quartet:

Happy 80th Birthday to Ringo

Way back when I was a teenager in high school eagerly awaiting the next Beatles album I never imagined that Ringo, for one, would be still going strong over fifty years later. But he is and unlike Keith Richards, he doesn't even look his age:

The BBC has a tribute article. I've been a fan of Ringo for a long time. He's a great and original drummer,. he's still touring and he's been married to Barbara Bach for thirty-nine years.

"Rain" is one of the best examples of Ringo's drumming:

Today's Concert: Shostakovich Quintet from Frankfurt

Introduction, mostly in German, by violist Dirk Niewöhner, though he does welcome we "international listeners" in English.

Loves and Loathes

You'd think there would be an obvious tag for this one, after all, a lot of what goes through one's mind (well, my mind) on a given day is noticing things that we like or don't like, or as my title has it, things we love as opposed to things we loathe. So here is a list of loathes:

• All of those movies where actors dress up in ridiculous costumes and engage in even more ridiculous fights while surrounded by supremely ridiculous CGI (computer-generated imagery)
• Those other supposedly more "realistic" movies where a cast of Hollywood stars demonstrate their smug entitlement while an utterly unbelievable scenario unfolds. Examples? All the Ocean movies: Ocean's Eleven, Ocean's Twelve, Ocean's Thirteen
• Most movies with these actors: Robert de Niro, Al Pacino, George Clooney, Johnny Depp
• Any sitcom with a laugh track
• Any remake of a classic movie
• The Android operating system
• Most music written by Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler
• Most pop divas: Taylor Swift, Katy Perry and Beyoncé. I'm kind of neutral about Lady Gaga and Rihanna
• U2

And a corresponding list of loves:

• Gamelan music from both Java and Bali
• Any film by Peter Weir, Clint Eastwood or Akira Kurosawa
• Most films by Luc Besson
• Most movies with these actors: Heath Ledger, Paul Bettany, Russell Crowe, Mel Gibson, Sigourney Weaver, Bill Murray, Alicia Vikander, Denzel Washington and Jean Reno
• Nearly everything written by these composers: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Shostakovich
• Most songs by Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen
• The English Beat
• Grigory Sokolov and Valery Gergiev
• Northern Italian red wines: Barolo, Dolcetto d'Alba and Amarone della Valpolicella
• Ice wine

I feel like I have left out a bunch of stuff from both categories...

Hard to pick a good envoi for this one, so I'm going with Weird Al Yankovic:

A Poetic Pause

I have a poetry tag, though it is rarely used. Poetry has been part of my life for over fifty years, but only recently have I taken notice of the social place of poetry in this changing world. My impression was that it held hardly any interest to people, especially young people, now. But some commentators have been disagreeing with that, saying that poetry, whether in the form of song lyrics, hip hop, or "slam" poetry readings is actually alive and well.

Let me share a bit of my personal history with poetry. When I was in my teens, and sporadically up to my early 30s, I wrote rather precious poetry myself, some of which was even published. I was astonished, when I was nineteen, to have a poem I submitted to an American literary magazine accepted and published. I'm still astonished. I never followed up on that because poetry for me was largely a private affair and I didn't really look for publication. At university in my early 20s I discussed my poetry with my English professor and he was reasonably encouraging. However, I was actually enrolled in the music department so didn't do anything with that. I did attend a poetry reading by Basil Bunting, who was in residence that year, and we became acquaintances, talking about poetry and music. As I recall, he was a fan of Andrés Segovia.

My tastes in poetry are pretty wide: Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and the poets I selected for my set of songs, Songs from the Poets. Those included Li Po, Aristophanes, Anna Akhmatova, Rainer Maria Rilke, Victor Hugo, Wallace Stevens, Robert Graves, Philip Larkin (setting that one caused the loss of a very old friendship!), Theodore Roethke (my encounter with him was due to the aforementioned English professor), and John Donne.

I also like Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, but for me song lyrics are a slightly different category than poetry simple. But, of course, I set to music a whole bunch of examples of pure poetry, choosing ones that seemed to trigger some sort of musical response in me.

So do people read much literary poetry these days? Just old folks like myself?

For an envoi, here is one of my songs, Nuits de Juin by Victor Hugo and the only text not in English.

Here is the text of that short poem:

L’été, lorsque le jour a fui, de fleurs couverte

La plaine verse au loin un parfum enivrant ;

Les yeux fermés, l’oreille aux rumeurs entrouverte,

On ne dort qu’à demi d’un sommeil transparent.

Les astres sont plus purs, l’ombre paraît meilleure ;

Un vague demi-jour teint le dôme éternel ;

Et l’aube douce et pâle, en attendant son heure,

Semble toute la nuit errer au bas du ciel.

Friday Miscellanea

This has been a weird time for musicians. I have been able to get in much more practicing than usual and almost am back to being reasonably in shape, technically. I am actually thinking about doing a solo recording with video. Keep your eye on this space! And I was talking to an old friend of mine who is principal flute in a Canadian orchestra and even though there are no concerts, everything is cancelled until next April, at least, he is practicing three hours a day.

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Ah, to be in Madrid, now that July is here: The Teatro Real is staging an indoor Traviata with audience--well, 50% audience!

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Here is a sad tale that might represent what a lot of orchestras in North America are going through: A CELLIST’S TALE: MY ORCHESTRA JUST CEASED TO EXIST.

So as of today the Nashville Symphony, my employers for the last 36 years, ceases to exist in the form many of you know and love. And it won’t be back, at least not in its former state, for a long time, if ever.

I'm pretty sure that classical music in Europe will recover and do so pretty soon. But in North America? Right now it is odds or evens whether it will recover at all...

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I was searching for something, anything, that was not coronavirus related and came up with this: IT’S THE NAKED PIANIST… LOOK AWAY NOW.

Mixed-race, openly gay, Stockport classical pianist Emmanuel (Manny) Vass, 31, continues to push boundaries and divide traditionalists with the release his third album, The Naked Pianist.

From stripping down to Union Jack boxers on ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent; being spotted by the pool chatting to fellow daters in his orange speedos on Channel 4’s First Dates Hotel, to featuring as a ClassicFM Young Classical Star, Manny continues to take risks shaking up the classical world.

Frankly, I'm neither shaken nor stirred.

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The New York Times confirms what I was saying above: Cultural Life Is Back in Europe. In the U.K., They Talk of Collapse.

In France, Germany, Italy or Belgium, where the arts are heavily subsidized by the state, performing companies and museums can survive with reduced ticket sales. But in Britain, where government funding is much lower and organizations rely on commercial income, most are unprepared for a future in which they can only admit a fraction of their usual audience.

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Got the virus? Why not dance it away with a Neapolitan tarantella from the 17th century:

 

Here is some dance music by Shostakovich:

And a little Indian classical dance:

Here is Rihanna's CGI-assisted dance from the movie Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets:

Of course, Russians can do incredible things without CGI:

And that it for today. Have a happy and dancey weekend!

Glissandi

Reading a book on extended violin techniques I was amused to read the following passage:

An extended five-string violin with frets (discussed in chapter 6), produces a “quantized” glissando, in which the slide is broken into discrete half steps (fig. 2.53). This is the kind of glissando produced by a guitar. 

FIGURE 2.53. Quantized glissando.

Strange, Patricia. The Contemporary Violin (The New Instrumentation Series) . Scarecrow Press. Kindle Edition.

Well, yeah, of course. With all those frets there is no possible way of doing a glissando on guitar without hearing all the semitones. Right? The only thing is, way back when I was a young guitarist I heard a Segovia recording where he did a glissando from a fairly high note on the second string to a fairly low note on the same string and it was perfectly smooth. No discrete steps. It was so expressive and impressive that I set out to learn how to do it. Turns out that if you have exactly the right amount of finger pressure, it works. Too much pressure and you hear the "steps," too little pressure and you lose the note. The next step was to figure out how to do it on the wound strings without the whisking effect like wearing corduroy pants. The trick there is to turn your finger so you are sliding on a part that is away from the callus. Then, with exactly the right amount of pressure, you can do a smooth glissando even on the bass strings. There are lots of examples in my piece Dark Dream starting from around the one minute mark:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ5u2gnUQDk&feature=youtu.be