Alisa Wellerstein at Wigmore Hall

 One of the brightest lights in this rather dark season of shuttered concert halls has been London's Wigmore Hall that has consistently offered us high quality programming under whatever restrictions were in effect. Often the hall held only the artist, a BBC commentator and a sound engineer. Thankfully the Wigmore is back to full capacity concerts as we can see in this recital streamed today by cellist Alisa Wellerstein in a program of solo works by Osvaldo Golijov and J. S. Bach.

Friday Miscellanea

The New York Times has an article on an American composer: The Changing American Canon Sounds Like Jessie Montgomery Before even reading, I have a problem with the headline. Sure, it is clever and strongly supportive, but it is also a misunderstanding of what a "canon" is. Before you are solidly in the classical canon, I think your music has to have been around for, oh, fifty to a hundred years or so. But let's have a look at the article:

Classical institutions en masse have made earnest, if sometimes clumsy, efforts to rise to the moment and grant overdue attention to the marginalized composers who have always had answers to the question of America’s musical identity.

One composer the field has especially turned to is Jessie Montgomery, whose often personal yet widely resonant music — forged in Manhattan, a mirror turned on the whole country — will be difficult to miss in the coming season.

In 2021 she is expected to see 400 orchestral performances which is an amazing number!

“She’s pretty much changing the canon for American orchestras,” said Afa S. Dworkin, the president and artistic director of the Sphinx Organization, which promotes racial and ethnic diversity in music. “The true language of American classical music is something that will distinguish our canon, and she is shaping its evolution.”

I think I have heard Ms Montgomery in concert when she was with the Catalyst Quartet who were featured in our chamber music series a number of years ago. Let's have a listen. I think I have put this piece up previously: Strum, by Jessie Montgomery with the Catalyst Quartet:

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This seems totally off-topic, but it is one of the most fascinating things I have read this week, and it relates to a long-standing discussion here relating to the function of tradition in music creativity. The discussion is on Railroad gauges:

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.

Why was that gauge used?

Well, because that's the way they built them in England, and English engineers designed the first US railroads.

Why did the English build them like that?

Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the wagon tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

So, why did 'they' use that gauge then?

Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that same wheel spacing.

Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?

Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break more often on some of the old, long distance roads in England . You see, that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads?

Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England ) for their legions. Those roads have been used ever since.

And what about the ruts in the roads?

Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match or run the risk of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome , they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever.

So the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder 'What horse's ass came up with this?', you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horses' asses.)

Now, the twist to the story:

When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah . The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.

So, a major Space Shuttle design feature, of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system, was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass. And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important? Ancient horse's asses control almost everything......

My only quibble with this is that Imperial Rome did not actually use "war chariots." What they did use on those roads were transport carts and wagons and that's where the width came from. And it could have been the width of two mules or donkeys. It was the native Britons that used war chariots--and they didn't build roads.

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 Why can’t we identify music notes as well as colors? A perfect pitch study offers clues.

Both light and sound travel as waves, with characteristics that allow people with typical vision and hearing to perceive and categorize them when they reach their eyes and ears: “That’s a small red dog barking,” someone might say.

But while people can easily name most colors in different groups—distinguishing the specific frequencies and wavelengths of light—few can do the same for musical notes, which represent sounds with distinct, unchanging pitches. Hearing a musical note and naming it is beyond the listening expertise of most people.

In fact, this ability is rare enough that society celebrates people who can label musical notes heard spontaneously: They are said to have “perfect pitch,” or “absolute pitch” as scientists who study the science of auditory perception call the ability. More common among musicians is “relative pitch,” the ability to name musical notes in relation to one another on a scale (“do, re, mi”) but not without a reference note.

I stumbled across this thanks to Slipped Disc.

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HOW THE INTERNET RUINED ART

Thanks to social media, the public sphere has been replaced with emotional outbursts and opportunities for consumption. Museums have followed suit, relinquishing their mission to enlighten and challenge the public and offering mere content instead. The one ray of hope is art, which, Kraynak believes, is unique as a vehicle for complex, critical thought.

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Why Poetry Is So Crucial Right Now

Indeed, in our age of social media, words are often used as weapons. Poetry instead treats words with care. They are slowly fashioned into lanterns — things that can illuminate and guide. Debate certainly matters. Arguments matter. But when the urgent controversies of the day seem like all there is to say about life and death or love or God, poetry reminds me of those mysterious truths that can’t be reduced solely to linear thought.

Poetry itself can engage in smart debate, of course. Yet even didactic poetry — poetry that makes an argument — does so in a more creative, meticulous and compelling way than we usually see in our heated public discourse.

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A rather eclectic mix this week. Let's have a couple of envoi. First, here is a rather nice performance by David Russell of Bach's Prelude, Fugue and Allegro, BWV 998 just recently live-streamed.

And here is Vladimir Horowitz playing a Chopin Polonaise:

Another Perspective on Salzburg

Alex Ross went to Tanglewood this year instead of Salzburg, but Jay Nordlinger was there and wrote a nice piece on the Grigory Sokolov recital that I didn't manage to attend: ‘Hello to Music’

Grigory Sokolov is an odd duck — I say that with considerable admiration. He is his own man, going his own way. He is unconventional, idiosyncratic — you might even say eccentric. He won the gold medal at the Tchaikovsky Competition when he was 16. (The year was 1966.) He is the youngest person ever to win that medal.

Early on, he toured Great Britain, the United States, and the rest of the world. Now he stays in Europe. He doesn’t play concertos, either — no engagements with orchestra. Just recitals. He plays about 70 of those a year, and they are all devoted to a single program: a single slate of pieces. (The slate changes each year, I should say.)

Typically, he walks onto a stage rather grim-faced and bows solemnly. Then he begins. He maintains his demeanor all through an evening. A Sokolov recital is like a religious rite. The pianist plays as though he were doing the most important thing in all the world — and his audience listens in hushed wonder.

Please be advised that musicians’ bios in programs are practically useless. They seldom give you biographical information: where the person was born, what his nationality is, who his teachers were, etc. It’s a lot of PR puff.

This is how Sokolov’s bio begins:

Grigory Sokolov is widely recognized as one of today’s greatest pianists, an artist universally admired for his visionary insight, spellbinding spontaneity and uncompromising devotion to music. His masterful interpretations of compelling intensity and expressive beauty arise from profound knowledge of the works in his vast repertoire.

All of that PR blather just happens to be true.

Yep.

And here he is playing Chopin Polonaises:

4'33 is never going away

John Cage wrote a lot of music using a variety of unconventional techniques but the piece that he will likely always be most famous for is the untitled piece usually known as 4'33. The piece, for no particular designated instrument or ensemble, is in three movements. The only detail in the score is the duration of each movement. Added together the total duration of the three movements comes to 4'33. It was premiered on piano by pianist David Tudor in 1952. The Wikipedia article linked above provides some context on the history of the score and performances, historical predecessors and context and so on. I have seen the Peters edition of the score, sometimes referred to as the First Tacet Edition because the instruction to the performer(s) for each movement is simply "tacet" or remain silent.

Cage has made a number of observations about the piece over the years. An early concept seemed to imply that the function was to insert three or four minutes of silence into a stream of music. He contemplated selling it to the Muzak corporation. A later conception was that the silence of the performer would simply reveal that there is no true silence--the space would be filled by the sounds of nature or even the breathing and heartbeat of the listeners, not to mention birds, passing cars, etc.

I say that the piece is never going away because it has utility in all sorts of dimensions. The conductor Kiril Petrenko used it to protest the closing of orchestra concerts in Germany:

I notice that even though he seems to be conducting from the score, he rushes the performance which is well under four minutes. Must have been the excitement of the moment.

One of the most interesting aspects of the piece from an aesthetic or semantic point of view is that it has potentially unbounded meaning or significance. Every time you play a note or a chord or a rhythm you are defining and hence restricting the expression. But the emptiness of this piece is like the emptiness of the open sky: it is open to all possibilities, all thoughts, all moods and atmospheres.

The contrast of this piece with almost all others highlights the busyness of so much music, the flurries of notes and rhythms, dashing helter-skelter from one moment to the next. This piece is one moment (or three moments) of silence which reveals to us the noisiness of our usual environment. It is like a meditation on silence--or anything, really. But a meditation, not an endeavour or pursuit. It pursues nothing, states nothing and implies nothing. And in doing so it implies anything and everything.

No, we will not be getting rid of this piece any time soon. Another performance, this time on piano by David Tudor:

Very different interpretation, don't you think?

High Culture vs High Demand

Adam Kirsch wrote a piece for the New Criterion recently that got reprinted in the Wall Street Journal: High Culture, Not High Demand. The opening makes a strong point.

Kindle and Spotify give us a degree of access to “the best which has been thought and said” that a Medici or a Rockefeller couldn’t have bought at any price, while simultaneously reminding us that almost no one cares.

For instance, if you search for Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on Spotify, the most popular recording of the most popular piece in the classical repertoire is the one made in 1984 by Herbert von Karajan with the Berlin Philharmonic. The first movement has been streamed about 1.5 million times, the third about half a million (which tells a story in itself). By contrast, the hit song “Driver’s License,” by the teen pop star Olivia Rodrigo, was released in January 2021 and by the end of May it had been streamed 800 million times. . . .

And don't even think about Gangnam Style! One of the benefits of growing older is that you can make comparisons over fairly long stretches of time based on your own experience, thereby avoiding all the distortions of the picture offered to us by the mass media, or by academic historians. From my own experience, the interest in high culture among young people has diminished considerably over the last fifty years. Another quote from the article.

How many Americans pay attention to serious contemporary literature, art, or music? An estimate of one-half of one percent of the population—1.6 million people—would surely be on the high side.

The Wall Street Journal just has a brief excerpt. Here is the whole piece: Culture as counterculture. Some further excerpts:

Today’s pop lyricists don’t poke fun at Beethoven and Tchaikovsky because young listeners no longer recognize those names as possessing any cultural authority or prestige, if they recognize them at all. It would make as much sense to write a pop song called “Roll Over Palestrina” or “Rock Me, Hildegard von Bingen,” since all composers are equally unfamiliar to a mass audience. 

Like the disappearance of a certain species of frog or insect, this is a small change that signals a profound transformation of the climate—in this case, the cultural climate.

This is kind of reassuring:

Another way of putting it is that high culture now functions like a counterculture, entailing a conscious act of dissent from the mainstream. Popular culture—television shows, pop songs, memes—is every American’s first language, the one we acquire whether we want to or not. Learning to understand and appreciate high culture is like learning a second language, which requires deliberate effort (and which Americans are famously averse to doing).

Welcome to The Music Salon, a counterculture blog. And here is a countercultural envoi: this is Les Ombres du temps by Henri Dutilleux with the Radio France Orchestra conducted by Mikko Franck.

Let me add just one more quote from the article:

In twenty-first-century America, certainly, high culture appears deeply subversive. Plato’s Republic teaches contempt for democracy as surely as King Lear teaches contempt for humanity. The Goldberg Variations are useless in the strict sense—they can be put to no use; they do nothing to make the listener more effective or a better citizen. Indeed, the most unsettling thing about high culture is that it is not a means to an end but an end in itself—which makes it the exact opposite of money, our usual standard for measuring worth. 

Why do so many Bach performances sound so robotic?

I'm including three examples of robotic playing below, though two of them would also qualify as "playing Bach as if you really hated his music." The first performance is of a young player and shows the technical perfection that young guitarists strive for these days. More power to them for that. But the robotic clunking through the notes is not to be praised. Not by me anyway. The first player actually took a tiny bit of time on one note in the first section and it was so unusual as to cause surprise in the listener.

The second and third performances are by seasoned players from an earlier generation and they are considerably less smooth technically. But just as robotic. It is as if there is some sort of stopwatch ticking away somewhere that prohibits them taking any time for phrasing or even taking a more reasonable tempo, you know, one that would allow the notes to breath and the listener, perhaps, to enjoy the performance?

Nothing against guitarists, by the way, I'm sure that there are examples on all the instruments. It is just that, being a guitarist myself, I know where to find the offending performances! 

Friday Miscellanea

Rick Beato has a prolific channel on YouTube in which he not only talks about music in his core area, pop and rock, but also wanders further afield. This little tribute to Bach is actually not too bad:

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 From The Guardian we learn How John Cage, the great disrupter, had the last laugh – by writing beautiful music:

In the summer of 1990 John Cage gave a lecture at the International New Music gathering in Darmstadt, Germany, and effectively admitted defeat. The then 76-year-old US composer announced that his philosophical ideas of freedom and collaboration, concepts built into his avant garde musical compositions since the 1950s, had failed to influence reality. The world had got worse, not better. It was “a life spent … beating my head against a wall”, he announced. There was, however, one consolation. “I no longer consider it necessary to find alternatives to harmony,” he said. “After all these years I am finally writing beautiful music.”

Cage was referring to his Number Pieces, around 40 late works named after the quantity of performers involved (from 1 to 101) in which individual musicians could choose when and how long to play (within designated time brackets) resulting in often quiet and meditative pieces, a marked contrast to the previous, often abrasive compositions he’d built his 40-year reputation on.

Late John Cage sounds a lot like late Morton Feldman. 

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It is both interesting and heartening to hear how some musicians have responded to the pandemic: Isolated By Pandemic, Violinist Jennifer Koh Nurtured A New Community Online.

When the pandemic arrived, it hit artists like Jennifer Koh hard. A classical violinist whose repertoire runs from Bach and Beethoven to newly minted pieces, she returned to her New York home from a concert in March 2020, and within a day found all of her engagements postponed.

"My first reaction was panic, because I lost all of my work," Koh says. "It was not good times." At one point she had to rely on food stamps.

But she's also the kind of artist who creates projects for herself and her friends and colleagues. Concerned about ways the pandemic was affecting the musical community, she came up with an idea: she asked prominent composers, like Tania León and Vijay Iyer, to write short solo violin pieces, then had them nominate emerging composers to write pieces, as well. And, by April 4th, she gave her first recital on Instagram.

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What is the problem with Australia? After just attending a festival in Austria where nearly all the concerts were packed and held in the usual venues, I see that Australia is cancelling everything: ‘It just feels safer’: the Australian musicians pivoting from an industry in crisis 

With Australia reeling from the Delta strain, major festivals including Splendour and Bluesfest have been cancelled for the second year running, with an estimated 7,000 gigs and live events cancelled each week.

Strict restrictions and slow vaccination rates, coupled with unpredictable snap lockdowns, have made it impossible for musicians to plan tours and promote albums; and with many music industry workers ineligible for jobkeeper (which ceased on 28 March this year) and federal grants schemes failing to trickle down, there are rising concerns that government rescue packages aren’t reaching the people who need it.

Many of those people are musicians, in an industry that was worth $1.8bn to the national economy in 2019. And in 2021, some of those musicians are pivoting away from the industry to find work elsewhere.

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The New York Times has an interesting survey of what is happening with classical music in the city: For Music, a Fall Deluge of Performances Is Beginning

On Saturday the Attacca Quartet played a heavily amplified yet lovingly textured program for hundreds in Prospect Park, as part of the Celebrate Brooklyn festival. (The pop group San Fermin headlined the evening.) In a half-hour sprint that managed not to feel rushed, the group played excerpts from its July debut on the Sony Classical label: the dance music-suffused (but somehow not schticky) “Real Life.”

Here is a sample:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th2QoQ_yxPU&t=122s

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 Let's have some envois. First up, one of John Cage's Number Pieces. This is Seven2 played by Apartment House:

And this is my favorite piece from the Art of Fugue, the Canon per Augmentationem in Contrario Motu:

The second voice enters down a fifth, inverted, and in double note values. Then, in the second half, the two parts switch with the lower voice leading.