I'm not afraid to acknowledge that this is not the most popular blog on the Internet. Just one of the best! Heh! I have over 1.7 million accumulated page views, but this year will be the 10th anniversary of the blog, so that is no big deal. Some of the more popular blogs get that many in a couple of days. And don't even mention Twitter (please!). I usually get between 15,000 and 20,000 page views a month, which I regard as really pretty good for a very specialized site.
But in the last few days I have seen a huge leap in traffic: yesterday over 4,000 page views and already today, over 2,000 and it's not even 9 am yet where I am. So I had a look at my Stats and here is what I found, over the last 30 days, this is how my traffic breaks down:
Usually my largest volume is from the US, the UK, Russia, Germany, then it varies, perhaps Canada and some other European nations. It is not surprising that so much traffic comes from non-English speaking countries as there is a little widget on the right hand side that will translate the blog into many languages. And countries like Russia and Germany are music superpowers so I talk a lot about music in and from those places. I even talk a lot about music from Sweden sometimes. But I can't quite see why nearly 50% of my traffic recently has been from there. Anyone have any ideas? Should I start looking for commissions from Swedish orchestras? (Yes, yes!)
In any case, in honor of my Swedish visitors here is Esa-Pekka Salonen with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in a performance of the Symphony No. 4 of Jean Sibelius (and one of my favorite filmed performances of a Sibelius symphony):
The Guardian has a review of a new lockdown album release by Igor Levit--does this guy never sleep? It includes Palais de Mari, the piano piece by Morton Feldman we were just discussing the other day:
Levit’s latest release, recorded in lockdown in May 2020, is Encounter (Sony), a double album of Chorale Preludes by Bach and Brahms in the versions by Busoni, together with shorter works by Brahms (arr. Reger) and Reger (arr. Julian Becker) – you get the idea – and a work by one composer pure and simple: Palais de Mari by Morton Feldman.
This is a collection of music rarely performed in the concert hall, and even less often heard together. The entirety, nearly two hours of intense listening, begins quietly and ends, pared back to nothing in Feldman’s half-hour meditation, in near silence.
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The most dangerous language to sing in? German! Slipped Disc has the story:
Research by the Japan Association of Classical Music Presenters has revealed that two languages spread more Covid infection than any other.
Guess which?
German.
And?
Italian.
Both emit twice as many aerosols as, for instance, Japanese. French is also pretty bad.
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We mentioned before that dustup between a Schenkerian scholar and some who wanted to cancel him. Norman Lebrecht has an update: THE FIGHTBACK BEGINS AGAINST CRITICAL RACE THEORY.
Professor Timothy Jackson’s lawsuit against the University of North Texas is more than just a bid to clear his name of slurs that were spouted by a howling mob of musicologists who sought to cancel his career.
According to the National Association of Scholars,
Jackson’s lawsuit also illustrates the damage that Critical Race Theory (CRT)—the intellectual background for radical academic social media campaigns—has done to scholarship. CRT seeks and succeeds in annihilating scholarship that analyzes the actual substance of any domain of inquiry. In this case, CRT scholars seek to replace actual Schenkerian musical analysis with ritual condemnations of that analysis. Western music theory is taken to be prima facie invalid on the grounds that Schenker allegedly said something unpleasant about blacks in the course of his lifetime. The very premise must be rejected if scholarship is to survive.
As always at Slipped Disc, the comments are interesting.
Last September, the National Association of Scholars (NAS) published an account of how a large number of faculty and graduate students initiated a social media campaign against Professor Timothy Jackson of the University of North Texas (UNT), demanding sanctions against him up to and including that he be removed from his tenured position at UNT. The participants in this campaign included music theorists nationwide, as well as faculty and graduate students at UNT. His colleagues’ grievances were based on his defense of the music theorist Heinrich Schenker, and by extension modern music theory as a whole, from the spurious charge of “systemic racism.” They sought to punish Jackson harshly for exercising his right to free speech on an academic subject matter within his professional competence—and they sought to punish him for saying what any fair-minded, amateur observer would take to be the common-sense truth.
When it began live streaming chamber music concerts in June last year, London’s Wigmore Hall was hailed as a beacon of hope for players and audiences alike.
In an interview with the Financial Times, the venue’s chief executive and artistic director John Gilhooly has now laid bare the cost of the initiative, which has included performances by the likes of Steven Isserlis, Mitsuko Uchida and the Heath Quartet, and which continues into 2021.
He explains that staff costs and copyright charges for each performance come to around £3,000, plus artists’ fees. While the concerts are free to view, audiences have donated some £750,000 via the hall’s digital broadcast fund and the number joining its membership scheme has increased by a quarter.
‘All that we have received has been ploughed back into paying artists their full fee and investing in programming,’ Gillhooly told the newspaper, adding that the hall aims to have raised £1 million by the time of the scheme’s anniversary later this year.
Although a significant amount of money, this would represent only around one-seventh of the hall’s usual income over the period. A quarter of the Wigmore Hall’s staff have been made redundant since the start of the pandemic, which has seen venues across the UK closed to audiences for much of the past year.
The main advantage of live streaming, according to Gilhooly, it its ability to reach wider audiences. He is downbeat, however, about its prospects as a financial saviour: ‘Apart from the deluded, no one can say streaming concerts pays.’
I'm going to make a donation.
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Michael Andor Brodeur is the new classical music critic for the Washington Post, replacing Anne Midgette. Here he alerts us to twenty-one up and coming composers: 21 for ’21: Composers and performers who sound like tomorrow. Here is a sample:
Originally from Washington and now based in New York City, Figgis-Vizueta, 27, knocked my comfiest socks off during the quarantine with “Music for Transitions,” a raw, scraping yet soaring solo piece commissioned and premiered by cellist Andrew Yee. Since then, I’ve been hooked: The Julius Eastman-inspired “Openwork, Knotted Object”; the haunting “No Words” for clarinet and electronics; the “reaching sap-slow toward sky” thriller of “Placemaking” — her music feels sprouted between structures, liberated from certainty and wrought from a language we’d do well to learn. Coming in 2021 are commissions for the JACK quartet and North Carolina-based ensemble earspace. inticomposes.com.
I left it in the original formatting so you could follow all the links.
Russia for me has been a perplexing mixture of astonishingly rich culture and astonishingly bad government. Over at New Left Review, Sophie Pinkham weighs in with NIHILISM FOR OLIGARCHS.
For a century, Russian and then Soviet culture electrified the world. From Tolstoy to Tarkovsky, by way of the Ballets Russes, the Constructivists, Eisenstein and Babel, Russia and its successor reworked and destabilized poetry, the realist novel and the short story, post-figurative art, orchestral music, dance, cinema, theatre, science fiction. During the Cold War, writers like Pasternak, Shalamov, Brodsky and Sinyavsky/Tertz reminded foreign readers that Russian literature had not lost its vitality, even as tamizdat—dissident Soviet works published abroad—was wielded as an anti-communist cudgel. What is the position of Russian culture today? In quantitative terms, Russian cinema still produces some two dozen ‘international festival’ films a year; comparable numbers of contemporary Russian novelists and poets appear in translation. Russian musicians, dancers, and choreographers headline the world’s elite concert halls and ballet theatres.
In the 1990s, the old landscape of cultural trade unions and government commissions was subjected to brutal shock therapy. The cultural infrastructure of the Soviet period—universities, orchestras, theatres, museums, film schools, fine-arts academies, research institutes, publishing houses—survived in skeletal form, unevenly supported by private funding, to produce new generations of the artistic, literary and cinematic intelligentsia.footnote1 Russian cultural producers desirous of money and prestige scrambled to reinvent themselves. Now one had to cater to the market, play up to the new private cultural prizes, cultivate an online following, find a patron—or resign oneself to scraping by in what was left of the old system.footnote2 Meanwhile the Russian Ministry of Culture remained a crucial funder for the arts, with the attendant problems of political pressure.
I don't want to summarize her complex evaluation of the current situation, so if you are interested, follow the link.
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After all that we need some charming and diverting music, do we not? Here is Hilary Hahn with the Prokofiev Violin Concerto No. 1:
And for something completely different, here is a production from Opéra Nice of Philip Glass' opera Akhnaten. I warn you, though, if you listen to much of this you will have a bunch of stubborn earworms!
In case you were wondering what Grigory Sokolov has been up to with so many concerts cancelled. I know I was worried that he had moved to the Bahamas and grown a beard, but no. He actually played a special concert in December in Geneva to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the United Nations. It looks like the audience was just a few UN functionaries. But never mind! We can listen to it.
Amazing program: all Schumann in the first half and pieces I don't know. Four fugues? A lot of short pieces. Second half: four polonaises by Chopin. Unique program. His practice in the last few years is to devote one half of each program to a single composer. I haven't gotten to the end of the concert yet, but it looks as if he didn't play any encores.
UPDATE: As I listen to the program and notice there are something like eight people in the audience I wonder about the economics of it. Lemmesee, I once calculated that Sokolov's fee for a recital is perhaps €50,000 (in Euros because he only performs on the European continent). Divided by eight auditors that comes to €6,250 per person. That's a pricey ticket! Usually he plays 2,000 seat halls and fills them.
I'm so happy to be contradicted so quickly! Right after my post about Víkingur Ólafsson, the brilliant Icelandic pianist, in which I complained about how places like Finland and Iceland seem to produce so many more great musicians than Canada despite having a fraction of the population. And right away a Canadian commentator recommends the young Canadian pianist from Calgary, Jan Lisiecki, who also has seven recordings with Deutsche Grammophon. That'll teach me!
Actually, what I think it really shows is how great a medium the Internet can be when free comments are allowed. You learn stuff.
So here is the Wikipedia page on Jan Lisiecki and let's listen to some of his clips. First a Chopin ballade:
Then a Mozart piano concerto:
Finally, a Beethoven piano concerto:
He has recorded all the Beethoven piano concertos for Deutsche Grammophon.
Now here is the funny thing: I read the Toronto Globe and Mail and some other Canadian newspapers every morning. But I have never seen the name of Jan Lisiecki! Why is that? And if you look at his bio, you see that, apart from one program on the CBC in 2009, almost the entirety of his career has been in Europe where they seem to really appreciate him. And why wouldn't they? The question that comes to mind is why is he so little heard in Canada?
What really astonishes me about this pianist is not so much that he is a fine pianist, he certainly is, but that he, along with, it seems, innumerable other fine musicians, comes from Iceland. Iceland! Let me remind you that Iceland has the population of a modest, medium-sized city like Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, where I lived for quite a few years. That is, a bit over 300,000 souls.
Now the very existence of Finland is, or ought to be, deeply embarrassing to Canadians as, like us, it is a fairly small nation, wedged in beside a large and powerful nation, but at the same time manages to be a musical superpower. The number of world-class orchestras, such as the San Francisco Symphony with Esa-Pekka Salonen (who was also music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic), that have Finnish musical directors is astonishing. And then there is the host of instrumentalists and soloists. And Sibelius! Finland has a population of only 5.5 million people. Where do they get all these musical talents from?
So given that Finland alone ought to give we Canadians cultural conniptions, as it achieves so much more in the world of music than we do with a population one-seventh of Canada's thirty-eight million, what can we make of Iceland? Good grief, with the population about the same as Victoria, Iceland just keeps turning out musical superstars in both the pop and classical fields.
One of the latest is someone they are calling Finland's Glenn Gould: Víkingur Ólafsson. Now that really does add insult to injury. We in Canada don't have anyone in Glenn Gould's class any more. Not just in Victoria--anywhere in Canada. True, we do have one world-class conductor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, music director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York and conductor in several other places, but name for me three great Canadian composers. Ok, one?
Mr. Ólafsson has seven or so albums released by Deutsche Grammophon. Not only are no Canadian pianists (or players of any other instrument) so blessed, it is pretty hard to think of a young pianist (he is thirty-six) from anywhere that has achieved so much. All right, Igor Levit, age thirty-three, is in this league, but darn few others.
And Ólafsson comes from Iceland where there are only 334,000 people! However do they do it?
Here he is with the Etude No. 5 of Philip Glass:
And a Bach Prelude:
A Debussy Prelude:
And finally, part of the Rachmaninoff Third Concerto:
Back in the Middle Ages there was black notation, white notation and colored notation, all of which you can see in the Music Salon logo/illustration at the head of the page. Sadly, what we seem to have now is black music theory and white music theory: Music professor sues university for punishing him over defense of ‘racist’ composer. We have mentioned this case before, but here is a refresher:
Timothy Jackson followed through on his threat to sue the University of Northern Texas for investigating him in response to his defense of a 19th century composer.
The “distinguished university research professor” accused the Board of Regents of First Amendment retaliation in response to Jackson’s criticism of a black peer who called Heinrich Schenker (above) “an ardent racist and German nationalist.”
He’s also claiming defamation by a graduate student and 17 colleagues in the Division of Music History, Theory, and Ethnomusicology. They promoted claims that he engaged in “particularly racist” actions and “platform[ed] … racist sentiments” in the Journal of Schenkerian Studies, a UNT-produced publication that Jackson co-founded.
The journal published a “symposium” issue in response to work by Hunter College Prof. Philip Ewell that claimed Schenker’s ideas exist “to benefit members of the dominant white race of music theory.” Most of it criticized Ewell’s arguments, with Jackson saying his black peer’s claims were part of a “much broader current of Black anti-semitism.” (Schenker was Jewish.)
The journal’s ordinary academic actions “incited an academic mob” that is demanding Jackson’s firing and the shuttering of his journal and associated Center for Schenkerian Studies. They accuse Jackson of racism simply for defending a composer and criticizing a black peer, the suit claims.
You should probably read the whole thing to get the complete story. I can see similar conflicts happening across academia if more traditional scholars refuse to knuckle under to the wholesale transformation of their fields by the progressive agendas. Honestly, I can't see how scholars in the humanities can do the most important part of their job, transmitting the cultural heritage of Western Civilization to new generations of students, while being forced to conform to these agendas. Cancelling Beethoven, Bach and Mozart because they are dead white males in favor of almost any living black or woman composer is where the battle lines will be drawn, I imagine. The current case is like an opening salvo, just to range in on the opponents. Well, should be interesting at least.
Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 would seem to be an appropriate envoi, though in a few years it might be Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 that we are turning to!
We do have some reading today starting with this fascinating piece of sociological research: The New National American Elite. It is worth reading the whole thing, but here is the meat of it:
The Anglo American Protestant patricians in every region and state shared a common Anglo American and Trans-Atlantic culture—but not a common national culture. Instead, they had regional cultures separately based on a common British and European heritage. This is so peculiar that it needs to be explained.
Let us begin with what they shared: Trans-Atlantic culture. From the earliest days of the republic, the wealthy elites of even the most remote and Godforsaken parts of the South and West could afford to vacation in Europe. They would bring back the latest French and British fashions to rural Mississippi or Wyoming. Before the self-consciously regional Prairie Style of Frank Lloyd Wright, there was never any indigenous American architecture, just wave after wave of faddish European styles: Palladianism, Greek Revival, Gothic, Romanesque.
I think this is of some relevance to the changing fortunes of classical music, the basic canon of which was, like fashion or architecture, brought from Europe by the regional elites. The situation now is different:
Membership in the multiracial, post-ethnic national overclass depends chiefly on graduation with a diploma—preferably a graduate or professional degree—from an Ivy League school or a selective state university, which makes the Ivy League the new social register. But a diploma from the Ivy League or a top-ranked state university by itself is not sufficient for admission to the new national overclass. Like all ruling classes, the new American overclass uses cues like dialect, religion, and values to distinguish insiders from outsiders.
More and more Americans are figuring out that “wokeness” functions in the new, centralized American elite as a device to exclude working-class Americans of all races, along with backward remnants of the old regional elites. In effect, the new national oligarchy changes the codes and the passwords every six months or so, and notifies its members through the universities and the prestige media and Twitter.
Constantly replacing old terms with new terms known only to the oligarchs is a brilliant strategy of social exclusion. Woke speech is simply a ruling-class dialect, which must be updated frequently to keep the lower orders from breaking the code and successfully imitating their betters.
What stands out in all this is the exclusion, not only of the "lower orders" but of tradition generally whether it is manifested in the canonic classical music repertoire or in any of the institutions devoted to the preservation and transmission of high culture: conservatories, humanities departments in universities, libraries (now becoming digital) and eventually even art museums, now enjoying considerable popularity.
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From Slipped Disc comes the news that the Salzburg Easter festival is off due to the general lockdown. Fingers crossed for the summer festival...
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And speaking of culture and the American elite, the inauguration of the new American president was not celebrated with any classical musicians. Slipped Disc, again, has the story. I must confess that I didn't watch the festivities, as I usually don't, but I recall classical musicians such as Yo Yo Ma being frequently heard at previous inaugurations. But nowadays, only pop and country artists are heard.
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Alex Ross weighs in on recent books on Beethoven in a piece in The New Yorker: Keep Beethoven Weird.
Is it possible that Beethoven felt confined by his own incipient myth—that he sought freedom, in a sense, from being Beethoven? The hammering splendors of his so-called heroic period, which began with the “Eroica” in 1804 and lasted intermittently for about a decade, at once began to hold audiences in thrall, but they constitute only a fraction of Beethoven’s output and grow scarce in the late period. The Ninth Symphony, with its tragic-gestured first movement and its world-embracing choral finale, is the obvious exception; yet Beethoven felt uncertain about the piece after its première, and evidently contemplated replacing the “Ode to Joy” with a purely instrumental finale, for which he had already made sketches. Those ideas wound up in the String Quartet, Opus 132, which inhabits an entirely different realm. Kinderman maps out the hidden relationship between the oratorical symphony and the introspective quartet, suggesting that Beethoven “showed himself capable of regarding Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ with distancing irony.”
This is one of Ross' better pieces with a really good and balanced survey of recent writings. Plus, extra points for proper use of the word "aperçu."
The crux is that streaming — like all business — has winners and losers. And with the collapse of live revenues, the issues in how streaming pays (or doesn’t) is being discussed. Ingham calculates that 1% of all artists receive 90% of the revenue from streaming. That’s about 43,000 artists (and remember, many of these artists are subject to agreements where their share of this is far less than required). Of that 1%, many have been significantly impacted by COVID, as their streaming income has not replaced their live income. The other 99%, around 3 million artists, earn the other 10%. And remember, the race to being the 1% can only be won by 1%. This isn’t fair, but it is business.
It is worth having a look at the rest of the article.
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A piece on Franz Schubert, a lovely composer who is finally getting some of the appreciation he deserves: A lost paradise of purity
Of all the premature deaths among the ranks of the creative, none is more painful to contemplate than Franz Schubert’s. His cutting off in November 1828 at the age of 31 was not as brutal in strictly chronological terms as Keats’s at the age of 25 in 1821, but there is with Schubert a yearning to know the music which he never composed that is even greater than the regret for Keats’s unwritten poems. All Schubert’s works are in a sense early works, and it is striking to think that by the time Haydn reached the age at which Schubert died, he had written none of the music for which we now revere him.
Schubert’s last three piano sonatas (D958-960) were completed in September 1828. Perhaps the most obvious allusion to death in general, if not to his own mortality, is the macabre Totentanz which is the unremitting tarantella finale of D958. Likewise, the bass trill that is never far below the surface in the seemingly unruffled first movement of D960 announces that “Even in Arcadia, I am present”. However, the andantino of D959 is on a different plane of alienation. It is all the more aberrant in a work which is generally so warm-hearted and affirmatory. Alfred Brendel writes of its “desolate grace behind which madness lies”.
And that has to lead us to our envoi, the Andantino from the Piano Sonata in A major, D. 959 played by Mitsuko Uchida:
