Friday Miscellanea

 The Marketwatch section of the Wall Street Journal weighs in on the economics of musicians selling their catalogues:

And while Levine noted that he can’t speak to what’s actually going on in Dylan’s head, the legendary artist is 79 years old. And selling your entire catalog, or deciding whom to leave it to, is a complicated transaction at any age, at any time. “It’s not the kind of thing you want to wait to do when you are not in good shape,” Levine said.

As noted, Dylan is in a league of his own when it comes to his catalog sale — except for the Beatles, of course. But the Beatles’ situation was also more complicated because one person didn’t own the rights to all of the songs, the way Dylan owned the rights to most of his work.

“A lot of creators are known for two big songs or three big songs … with Dylan, there’s ‘The Times They Are A-Changin,’ ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,’ ‘Forever Young,’ ” Levine observed. “Universal bought everything, all the rights, all the songs — it’s incredible.”

“It’s a win for Universal, and I think it’s a win for Dylan, too,” he added. “I can’t imagine he needed to sell this; I think he wanted to sell it, and he wanted his songs owned by somebody who would take care of them.”

Read the whole thing.

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This was inevitable, I suppose. Beside the Pointe: Diversity and bias obsessions come for Swan Lake.

Classical ballet has largely escaped the revisionist destruction that hit the opera and theater stages years ago. Amazingly, audiences could still see Swan Lake and La Bayadere as their choreographers and composers intended them, with all the conventions and costumes of nineteenth-century fairytale intact. To be sure, feminists have been agitating against the ethereal body type championed by choreographer George Balanchine, sadly to intermittent success. But the adolescent politicizing that has been inflicted on defenseless operas has been absent from the ballet stage. That immunity has undoubtedly now ended. Expect to see classical ballets wrenched awkwardly into dumbshows about social justice.

It is worth having a look at the whole article for some interesting points about classical dance traditions.

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Sometimes one gets the feeling that knowledge and learning itself has become not only dispensable, but entirely unfashionable. So it is reassuring to read that the modern growth of the fantasy genre was founded by two quite knowledgeable and scholarly people:

The heart of fantasy literature grows out of the fiction and scholarly legacy of two University of Oxford medievalists: J R R Tolkien and C S Lewis. It is well known that Tolkien and Lewis were friends and colleagues who belonged to a writing group called the Inklings where they shared drafts of their poetry and fiction at Oxford. There they workshopped what would become Tolkien’s Middle-earth books, beginning with the children’s novel The Hobbit (1937), and followed in the 1950s with The Lord of the Rings and Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series, which was explicitly aimed at children. Tolkien’s influence on fantasy is so important that in the 1990s the American scholar Brian Attebery defined the genre ‘not by boundaries but by a centre’: Tolkien’s Middle-earth. ‘Tolkien’s form of fantasy, for readers in English, is our mental template’ for all fantasy, he suggests in Strategies of Fantasy (1992). Lewis’s books, meanwhile, are iconic as both children’s literature and fantasy. Their recurring plot structure of modern-day children slipping out of this world to save a magical, medieval otherworld has become one of the most common approaches to the genre, identified in Farah Mendlesohn’s taxonomy of fantasy as the ‘portal-quest’.

What is less known is that Tolkien and Lewis also designed and established the curriculum for Oxford’s developing English School, and through it educated a second generation of important children’s fantasy authors in their own intellectual image. Put in place in 1931, this curriculum focused on the medieval period to the near-exclusion of other eras

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Do they never tire of beating this dead horse: The Stubborn Classism of Classical Music. Yes, classical music is patronized by, largely enjoyed by and created by a rather select group of people. That's because it is emphatically not popular music. But there are always those who want to spin a more morally fraught narrative:

Few art forms on earth are more indebted to class privilege than Western classical music. For most of its history, it has relied on monarchs, aristocrats, and wealthy patrons even to exist. We have Haydn because of a prince, Mozart and Beethoven because of a baron, Stravinsky and Copland because of an heiress, and Wagner because of a king. We have an entire genre largely because, at Versailles in the seventeenth century, the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully was willing to indulge his employer, Louis XIV, by writing operas that glorified the splendors of the throne. Philanthropists, corporations, and trusts have displaced the kings and barons of yore, but as givers of grants and commissions, they might as well wear a crown.

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2020: The year the music died.

“It’s always a hard way to make a living, and now it seems almost impossible,” said singer-songwriter Inara George.

The costs of this year in music have been both systemic and intimate. Artists such as singer-songwriter John Prine, Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger, Afropop titan Manu Dibango, jazz paterfamilias Ellis Marsalis and composer Harold Budd succumbed to COVID-19. Countless others have quietly struggled with addiction, mental health, isolation and financial ruin. Independent L.A. venues such as the Satellite have closed for good, and others — including the Troubadour, Bootleg Theater and Zebulon — say it’s a matter of time, depending on whether federal help ever arrives.

Meanwhile, talent agencies and booking firms like Paradigm slashed staff, and even global companies such as Coachella promoter AEG cut salaries and laid off employees. “We’ve simply never experienced times like these, in which our operations have come to a complete stop due to a force beyond our control,” AEG’s chief executive Dan Beckerman said in June. Live Nation, America’s largest concert promoter, saw its quarterly revenues annihilated by 98% over the summer and 95% in the fall.

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Here is a piece of unquestionable good news: DUBAI SIGNS ON WITH JERUSALEM ACADEMY OF MUSIC AND DANCE.

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More good news: WIGMORE HALL STAGES 36 CONCERTS IN JANUARY.

On January 8 the hall will launch its self-funded ‘Wigmore Soloists’ led by the British clarinettist Michael Collins and Dutch violinist Isabelle van Keulen. The ensemble will announce itself with Schubert’s Octet for clarinet, bassoon, horn, double bass and string quartet.

On January 9, new music group Apartment House will stage a day-long celebration of the music of Morton Feldman (1926–1987).

On January 29, British tenor David Webb will join a Schubert marathon, having just arrived from a 300mile cycle ride from Cornwall on a ‘Winter Journey’ to raise funds for mental health charities MIND and Music Minds Matter.

And much more.

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Let's give that Schubert Octet a listen, shall we? It is not a brief work!

Music and Moral Agency

Richard Strauss

Arnold Schoenberg

When I was reviewing the Salzburg festival programs this week to pick out concerts I particularly wanted to attend I noticed a reluctance to attend certain kinds of programs. Now this is not necessarily an entirely new trend as I do have long-standing preferences. But I try to always be aware of my aesthetic decision process to see if it is trying to tell me something. There is quite a lot of Richard Strauss in the orchestra concerts this year, plus a couple of Mahler symphonies and some Brahms and Wagner. I tend these days to want to avoid all these composers. I want to see if I can explain why and also ask some questions about music and moral agency.

I think it is undeniable that there was a fundamental shift in the aesthetic and moral foundations of German music between, say, 1700 and 1900. This whole period we term the "common practice" era as if it were all of a piece, somehow. But that is not true, even in purely theoretical terms.

Let me try and head off some criticism in advance: I am not particularly interested in the biographies of any of these composers, whether they were anti-semites or critics of anti-semitism, for example. Whether they were morally fine people in their private lives or not. The only thing that I am going to look at--and that is going to be very brief given the limits of a blog post--is the moral content of the music, if we can even figure out what that might be!

The undeniable fact is that the history of Germany in the 20th century is stained by two horrific acts: first, the destruction of the First World War insofar as the cause of that conflict was at least partly the responsibility of Germany (its political leadership, at least) and the second, the Holocaust, where millions upon millions of Jews and other "undesirable" persons were simply murdered, en masse.

In the past I have presented arguments for the aesthetic autonomy of music and I still believe these have validity. But it is also a fact that music is just one thread in a socio-cultural context and one that is not entirely separable from the rest.

Where I think it is crude and simplistic to make claims about how Wagner led to Nazism or how the fact that such and such a conductor was popular in Nazi Germany is a moral stain, it is also crude and simplistic, as Richard Taruskin has pointed out on a number of occasions, to claim that the love and appreciation of classical music somehow gives one a special moral luster. Nope, none of that is true.

So what is true? Well, it's subtle, I think.

If we look at the music of, for example, J. S. Bach, we find music of sublime moral strength, I think. This shows itself in multiple ways: it is music devoted to the worship of God which, while there may be a lot of historical and moral complexity to that, especially given all the religious wars Europe suffered, I think there is little if anything morally blameworthy in the music of Bach. It elevates and educates the listener. Bach was no religious zealot in the sense of being fanatical about only one mode of worship. Recall that he wrote an enormous amount of secular music as well as a Catholic Mass, something rather unusual for a Lutheran composer!

Bach's music is impressive, not only for its aesthetic power, but also for its fundamental humility. It does not seek to elevate the individual, nor the German race, over any other.*

Over time, though, I think we see a shift, incrementally, from Bach's aesthetic stance, which was largely followed by composers like Joseph Haydn who, while still writing music to worship the divine, also did a little gilding of the aristocratic lily. Mozart continued this process with music that was humble and reverent, but also could be cynical and playful.

Recognize that I am leaping around in music history here simply because a full argument would run to tens of thousands of words and take me a great deal of time! With Beethoven we reach a kind of crux: his music is morally and aesthetically powerful (just look at the late A minor quartet for an example of genuine moral gratitude) while also extending, just a bit, into political territory. We need not take Beethoven's political ideals and opinions too seriously, but he certainly had them. With Schubert we take a great stride into the psychology of the individual and hence into the Romantic stance and attitudes. This establishes a trend toward greatly heightened intensity of musical expression at the service of a greatly heightened individuality that later shaded into a heightened collective identity.

And so we end up with the music of Brahms, who tried to re-establish the fundamental values of German music and that of Richard Strauss (the glorification of the individual in pieces like Ein Heldenleben), Richard Wagner (the supreme expression of individual passion and racial collectivity), and Gustav Mahler who was the culmination of these trends.

What does all this have to do with the fatal sickening of German culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? Nothing? Something? Well, not nothing, certainly. I don't see how you can listen to the progression of late 19th century German music and not hear the arrogance, the complacency, not to mention the distant sound of artillery and perhaps, just a hint of the smoke from the chimneys of Auschwitz.

Is this unfair? Is it entirely unfair? Well, maybe, because looked at from one angle, these composers were just writing music. But there is little real humility in the music and there is certainly a cultural arrogance that is hard to deny.

Music itself has no moral agency, or not much direct moral agency. You might argue that La Marseillaise led to soldiers marching into battle with renewed energy, but I doubt you can argue that Tristan led to the death camps. So if the music itself has no real moral agency, does the composer? Well that is the question. Unfortunately, it lead us into the knotty issues of intentionality, which are very hard to sort out.

Perhaps it is not a bad idea to fall back on the notion of art as being a mirror of its society. If that is the case, then the mirror held up to German society in late 19th century music is certainly one of hubris and arrogance. What is interesting is that this mirror quickly turned into a darker reflection with pieces by people like Arnold Schoenberg. If you listen to Pierrot Lunaire, premiered in 1912, you can certainly see that the culture is going in a fearful direction indeed. But hardly anyone was listening...

Artists perform a valuable function in society, but only if they are working freely, not in the service of some popular ideology. Mind you, if you know how to read the signs, that in itself is an indicator.

I will be hoping to attend a performance of Pierrot Lunaire this coming summer, but I likely will not attend the performance of Ein Heldenleben.

So, readers, did I make some valid points, or am I completely off-base?

UPDATE: Regarding Bach, there are passages, especially in the St. John Passion, that are undeniably anti-semitic, blaming the Jews for killing Jesus. While reprehensible, I think that this is a general moral failing of the Christianity of the time, not of Bach in particular. Still...

Salzburg 2021, part 3

As I optimistically believe that I am going to get to Salzburg for the festival next summer, I have been doing a lot of planning since the program became available online: 

https://www.salzburgerfestspiele.at/en/tickets/programme?season=136

Most of the really important concerts are clustered in the first three weeks of August which means that some really interesting programs like the one with the Stravinsky Symphony of Psalms and the one combining Steve Reich and Olivier Messiaen, both in the third week of July, look to be out of contention unless you can plan a visit of four or five weeks. In my case this just isn't possible so it looks as if I will need to schedule my stay for the first three weeks of August. But after going through all the programs I find that I have only selected nine concerts falling in those three weeks. So now I need to go back and pick several more as I was envisioning attending fifteen concerts over a three-week span. I left out most of the orchestra concerts and things like the Mozart Matinees so let's have a look at them:

Teodor Currentzis with his orchestra and choir are doing an entire program of Rameau on Aug. 14 so that looks pretty interesting. Currentzis is one of the most innovative conductors on the scene these days. On Aug 27 the Chicago Symphony under Riccardo Muti will be doing the Firebird Suite which might be worth attending. On the 13th, 15th and 16th of August Muti will conduct the Vienna Philharmonic in a performance of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis. Aug 14 and 15 will see a Mozart Matinee of two symphonies and two violin concertos with Isabelle Faust and the Mozarteum Orchestra. So there is certainly good music to hear.

Of course, after I pick out all the concerts I want tickets for, I have to apply for them to the Festival and hope to be "alloted" all the ones I have chosen.

Here is a little sample of Currentzis conducting Rameau:

Salzburg 2021, part 2

Skipping over the drama section and the Young Singers Project, the next category is Special Concerts which I can't access as I don't have the password. Wonder what that is about? The next section is a series of twelve themed concerts: Ouverture spirituelle · Pax from the 18th to the 26th of July. I haven't decided what weeks I want to attend so part of this exercise is simply seeing when the unmissable concerts will be.

Ok, this series is pretty varied and contains, among other things, performances of the Britten War Requiem, some L'homme Arme settings mixed up with George Crumb, an interesting pairing of Steve Reich Different Trains and Messiaen Quartet for the End of Time, various other interesting combinations from Medieval to Contemporary, but the one that caught my eye was this program conducted by Philipe Herreweghe:

GABRIEL FAURÉ

Requiem for soprano, baritone, chorus and orchestra op. 48

(original 1893 version)

JOHANNES BRAHMS

Begräbnisgesang for chorus and woodwind op. 13

IGOR STRAVINSKY

Symphonie de Psaumes

for chorus and orchestra

You almost never get to hear the Stravinsky in concert and it is one of my favorite pieces.

* * *

Composers that are receiving a lot of attention this year include the Italians Luigi Nono and GIACINTO SCELSI, both highly regarded in some circles. Steve Reich is also getting some performances, but a particular focus is on Morton Feldman with the opera performance plus a series of three chamber concerts titled "Still life — Time with Feldman." There will be seven chamber works altogether ending with a performance of Rothko Chapel. All these concerts are by extremely fine performers and the tickets are very cheap. So I will plan to attend at least one of the chamber concerts in addition to the opera.

* * *

One of the great things about the Salzburg Festival is that they manage to deliver a hearty dose of the most central staples of the repertoire as well as those works way out on the fringe. Another mini-series of concerts is devoted to Bach and titled: "Himmelwärts — Time with BACH." "Himmelwärts" just means "heavenwards" which is where your attention is usually drawn when listening to Bach. The series includes the solo violin sonatas and partitas played by Thomas Zehetmair. Another program is a selection of various works from solo lute music to cantatas. András Schiff will give a keyboard recital. The Freiburger Barockorchester will play all the Brandenburg Concertos. All the Cello Suites will be given in a performance choreographed by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. And finally Daniil Trifonov will give a recital that will include the Art of Fugue. Oh, and most of these tickets are also very reasonable.

* * *

Right about now is when I start twitching and moaning because, really, how many of these concerts can you miss? Even the ones of standard Bach repertoire are offered with a creative flair that is hard to resist. I was hoping to fit everything really good into two weeks, but that may not be possible. I may need three weeks. I guess I just have to look for a really reasonable AirBnB which I did find last year.

I have a lot more to review as there are recital series, lieder series, guest orchestra series and on and on.

Let's have a little Bach, shall we? This is Sviatoslav Richter playing the Bach Prelude and Fugue in E flat from the Well-Tempered Clavier Bk 1 in a 1970 performance.

Salzburg 2021

 I'm in rather a good mood today after a few weeks of feeling pretty bad from COVID. But Thursday my doctor gave me a clean bill of health so I am getting back to my usual activities with a spring in my step, a twinkle in my eye and just a bit of a lilt in my inégales!

Here is a quote from a new collection of such: "Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation" —W. H. Auden. I would add to that, since books are often dull, "thank God for music as an alternative to both books and conversation."

The program for the Salzburg 2021 summer festival is out, so let's have a look.

It bears a lot of similarities to the unfulfilled 2020 festival which is not surprising. There are eight opera productions including two from Mozart (Don Giovanni and Così Fan Tutte). I don't know if these are new productions or co-productions. All the rest, I suspect, will be new productions originally created for last summer. They include Richard Strauss, Elektra, an oratorio, IL TRIONFO DEL TEMPO E DEL DISINGANNO by Handel, Tosca by Puccini, La Damnation de Faust by Berlioz and two modernist operas, Neither by Morton Feldman with text by Samuel Beckett and INTOLLERANZA 1960 by Luigi Nono.

Operas are the most expensive tickets at Salzburg so I will obviously have to pick and choose. But one thing I came away from with from the last festival is that opera is a huge strength of the festival, so see all you can! Except for the Feldman and the Berlioz, there are multiple performances of all the operas and tickets run from a very modest €15 to €80 for Feldman to €25 to €330 for Berlioz. The top tickets for the big operas will run you €445.

I am mostly familiar with the well-known Mozart operas and in fact have a  lovely box of all his operas from the 2006 Salzburg Festival on excellent DVDs so I strike them from my list. I have never seen a Strauss opera live, so I will request a ticket to Elektra. Same for Berlioz, whom I rather like as a composer. I simply have to see the Feldman as it will likely be my only chance in this life and I am growing more and more conscious of Feldman as an important composer. So I am intensely curious to see what he was up to with this. I will also request a ticket to the Nono as  he is interesting as a composer and 1960 was an odd moment in the history of opera. That leaves Handel who has always been rather dispensable in my book. So, four operas! And all of them interesting. Apart from Vienna, where else on earth could you see four different operas as interesting as this and in this quality of production over a couple of weeks?

Obviously going over the whole program is going to take several posts, but I want to just mention one concert you might miss, but that commentator Marc has already noticed. On July 28 as part of a brief three-concert series titled Church Concerts an extremely interesting program of works by a very odd assortment of composers is offered:

GIACINTO SCELSI

Okanagon for harp, double bass and tam-tam

HEINRICH IGNAZ FRANZ BIBER

Battalia à 10 for strings and basso continuo

GEORGE CRUMB

Black Angels – Thirteen Images from the Dark Land

for electric string quartet

(selected movements)

ANTONIO LOTTI

Crucifixus à 10

JOHN DOWLAND

‘Lachrimae antiquae novae’ from Lachrimae, or Seaven Teares

GALINA USTWOLSKAJA

Composition No. 2 ‘Dies irae’

for eight double basses, woodblock and piano

GREGORIANISCHER HYMNUS

Dies irae

This astonishing program is the concept of conductor and violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and is the kind of thing you can find at the Salzburg Festival and few other places on earth. The other two concerts are of music by Bruckner, Schubert and Mozart, performed by spectacularly gifted artists, of course.

Friday Miscellanea

Bob Dylan Takes the Boeing: Way back in the early days of blogging when it was hoped that some bloggers at least would become rich, the phrase arose "he took the Boeing" meaning that some very lucky blogger was bought out by some internet behemoth to the extent that he now had his own private Boeing. Ah, those hazy days of yore! Well, it worked out for Bob Dylan at least. This week comes the story Bob Dylan Sells Entire Songwriting Catalog to Universal Music.

The 79-year-old legendary pioneer of modern rock music, and the only songwriter to win a Nobel Prize for Literature, has sold his entire publishing catalog—more than 600 copyrights spanning 60 years—to Universal Music Publishing Group, according to the company.

While terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, the catalog is likely worth hundreds of millions of dollars—rivaled in value and influence only by the Beatles.

I'm not sure what I think of this exactly. I have a profound respect for Bob Dylan, formed over decades of enjoying his music--not least for its non-commercial aesthetic. I love that he wrote a twelve minute epic song "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands," that never had any hope of commercial success. I've always been puzzled at the commercial success of "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35," surely one of his worst songs. "Desolation Row" is a transcendent marvel of a song and "All Along the Watchtower" is pretty good. Over the years his catalog is amazingly various and inspired. And now it is "worth" a few hundred million dollars. I'm just not sure what the words "worth" or "value" mean in relationship to music any more?

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This doesn't surprise me: Music education in UK schools devastated by pandemic, survey finds

Extracurricular musical activities have been discontinued in nearly three-quarters (72%) of UK primaries and two-thirds (66%) of secondaries. Schools in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have been hit harder than those in England.

In addition, more than half (53%) of primaries and almost two-thirds (63%) of secondaries that normally hold a festive concert at the end of the first term of the academic year will not do so this year.

“We cannot sing, and the children are hugely disappointed when they ask to sing and we tell them no,” one primary teacher told the ISM. Another said: “Due to staggered breaks/lunch and the need to constantly wash hands, the amount of time spent on music has been reduced.”

A secondary teacher said: “Honestly, it’s impossible to state how devastating this will be in the long run for music as a subject. There is no provision at all for instrumental lessons, ensemble projects, bigger inclusive performances or even classroom ensemble work. This will, of course, harm students emotionally and academically.”

* * *

Over at Slipped Disc, Ivor Bolton relates how he has been able to keep the Teatro Real in Madrid open and giving opera performances.

The Spanish National Government and above all the Government of Madrid have supported us in this. Our safety concept for Teatro Real, including twice weekly testing of all performers, temperature testing of performers and audience and well-controlled entry/exit corridors for the public has cost over one million euros so far, and thankfully some of this cost has been met by the Government. We have just finished 10 performances (and a TV recorded DVD to follow, of Christof Loy’s brilliant new production of Dvorak’s masterwork ’Rusalka’. Seven weeks of intensive rehearsals and two weeks of performances have had their dramas! All 80 people involved in the actual production (soloists, directorial team, conductor, assistants and musical team, dressers, make-up artists, stage-management and technical staff) were tested for CoVid twice weekly.

* * *

SALZBURG FESTIVAL ISSUES 70,000 INVITATIONS

Good news in challenging times: Our new programme is currently being printed. 70,000 copies should be delivered to you, our faithful customers all over the world before the holidays and the New Year.

And starting on 10 December, you will find the 2021 programme online at www.salzburgfestival.at.

As promised, this coming summer we will present important productions in the opera, drama and concert departments which were postponed from the summer of 2020, extending the centenary celebrations of the Salzburg Festival into the autumn of 2021…

* * *

Christopher Russell is about to perform the scarcely-heard fifth symphony by the intriguing Leningrad hermit, Galina Ustvolskaya

Ustvolskaya wrote five symphonies ranging from about eight to 25 minutes. They can all be heard in about 75 minutes. All five have some sort of spoken or sung text with Nos. 2-5 based on religious themes. Ustvolskaya’s music often explored Christianity and she talked about its importance in her life although, by her own admission, she pretty much never set foot inside of a church.

She once said “There is no link whatsoever between my music and that of any other composer whatsoever, living or dead”. At first, I thought this was a fairly arrogant thing to say but the more I explored her music, the more I came to realize that this was an accurate statement. Her unique instrumental combinations, strange harmonies, and repeated blocks of sound make for a unique listening experience. It quickly drew me in.

* * *

Musicians often have to struggle to find a good place to practice, away from distracting noises and other music. But organists have special problems in that they need an actual, designated building to put their instrument in--often called a "church." Traditionally the problem has been solved by getting a job as the church organist, but this performer has found a different solution: World-renowned organist buys a Nova Scotia church, pumps out Bach in his pyjamas.

"In my childhood, it was quite difficult to go practice in some churches in Europe because we always have to [get] dressed up to go to the church, ask for the key from the priest or the minister, or we have to argue with some old Catholic nuns who were responsible for the church. They always said, 'Oh you play the organ so loud, we can't live here.'

"So now I'm alone and I can play as loud as I like.... Sometimes I play in pyjamas, of course. But there isn't any rule that we have to play only in tuxedos. So, fortunately, I can be dressed like that."

* * *

 How could we not give a listen to the Symphony No. 5 by Galina Ustvolskaya:

Friday Miscellanea

 This week I got laid low by the COVID! It rather snuck up on me and took me by surprise. It started with a loss of appetite followed by an inability to sleep. After five or six days of this I was in rough shape. There weren't many other symptoms. No sniffles and apart from a dry throat, no other symptoms. Except for just feeling like crap. I went to my doctor and after reviewing all the symptoms she said, sure looks like COVID and put me on several pills. As of today, my sleeping is pretty much back to normal and I actually ate most of a meal yesterday--the first one in a week. So looks like I'm on the mend.

* * *

I mentioned the Berlin Philharmonic performance of John Cage's 4'33 the other day, but one critic has found ways to wax eloquent about it: Found Eloquence: 4’33” Of A Thing In Overabundance

Petrenko defined each of the three movements in 4’33” with a particular affect. In the first movement, he seemed to be conducting a conventional piece that wasn’t there. In the second movement, his hands were positioned near his face, as if asking for quiet or like a priest pronouncing a benediction. In the third movement, his hands stretched toward the orchestra, fingers splayed in one hand, with a searching facial expression.

He was near tears with sorrow and grief. “What is this? What is happening?” he seemed to ask. “I don’t understand!” The veins on his forehead stood out. His arms slowly moved across the orchestra. In the background, musicians could be seen communing with him intently or meditating with eyes closed. Then his arms came down in apparent resignation. The end.

* * *

The New York Times has a lengthy piece on John Luther Adams "Become" trilogy: Musical Travel Companions for a Year of Going Nowhere.

Their underlying logic follows nature. In the memoir, Mr. Adams relates his fascination with fractals — complexly involuted forms that we find buried in the shape of things like trees, coastlines and lightning bolts. Flying from Fairbanks to Anchorage one day, he looked down at Denali and Mount Foraker and devised what would become the compositional structure for several pieces, including “Become Ocean.” He sketched four undulating lines on top of each other, the first with seven waves, the next five, then three, then a single large wave. In practice, this concept resulted in sonic worlds of engulfing, constantly shifting movement.

* * *

Here is Become Desert from the trilogy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VN9TBfWAEo

And finally some psaltery music from Provence: