I live in a small city in central Mexico that has a large expat population which makes for an interesting blend. They are re-doing the high street just around the corner from where I live. Here is a photo of the incomplete construction:
Yes, that's a cobblestone street. In fact, most roads in the countryside are also made with cobblestones. There is some use of concrete to embed the stones in, but this is mostly the same method of road construction used by the Roman legions. The advantage for modern Mexican workers is that you can do a street or a road without heavy equipment. Two guys and a wheelbarrow pretty much does it.
Now mind you, that surface conceals a modern sewage system and fibre-optic internet connections, but still the basic structure is thousands of years old. When I was a student in Spain I watched them re-do a cobblestone street in a similar way, though they used different stones.
Mexico has cultural traditions that are also very old--sadly, I don't know as much about them as I might.
What's my point here? As a composer I am always looking for a new kind of expression or a new way of expressing something, but the truth is that there is a relation between innovation and tradition and that relation is akin to that of foundation and superstructure. Stuff needs to be founded on other stuff, preferably solid and long-standing. But, you know, I don't think of this when I am composing. But after I have written something I often notice that it has roots--perhaps not very evident, but they are there. I think that Schoenberg was experiencing a similar process when he would go back and attempt to analyze something he had newly written in an attempt to "justify" it. I don't think that way at all, but I do think that creations that have aesthetic substance often have roots--sometimes very deep ones.
The Rite of Spring is a good example, but so is a lot of Stravinsky. Of course, he went to some pains to conceal the roots.
One of the shorter essays in the new Taruskin collection is "Was Shostakovich a Martyr, or Is That Just Fiction?" which is a review of the novel The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes. Taruskin was a suitable reviewer because the novel is a fictionalization of the life of Dmitri Shostakovich. This has long been highly-contested ground "between those who believe that Shostakovich was a blameless martyr, opposed to and victimized by the Soviet regime, and those of us who believe he made pragmatic compromises to survive and prosper..." [op. cit. p 329] Taruskin labels the novel a "beautifully written botch" and "hagiography."
Taruskin offers the example of Tolstoy in War and Peace who "knew that the difference between real and fictional worlds is that a fictional world is wholly known." But for historians "the whole documentary truth can never be known" as there are always other documents to be discovered, not to mention ones that have been destroyed.
Which brings me to my main point: as industrious activists busily scrub our history of its indiscretions, what is coming into view is not any kind of truth--historical truth will always be messy--but a kind of sanitized lie. As Taruskin mentions later on "No one makes a successful career anywhere without learning and executing a complicated social dance." [op. cit. p. 333] Well, that's a relief as it explains why my career fell short of success! I never really learned the complicated social dance.
History itself will always be complicated, contradictory and only partially known. Only through the adroit application of ideological cleansers can it be made pure. We used to accept that even Homer nods, but now all our cultural icons, from Kanye West to Anna Netrebko, must be ideologically sound, or be banished into the outer darkness.
This is turning history into fiction!
Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 8, mentioned in the essay, might be a suitable envoi.
The sense of country music as one’s own culture is shared by members of every group discussed here. Thus, to speak of country as white music today is not just a continuation of long-standing erasures; it erases anew. Country music is quintessentially American music, bearing audible traces of exchange among diverse groups in U.S. society. In our divided moment it’s music that speaks to a stereotype-shatteringly broad audience through themes of love of family, friends, community, and country; freedom and fun; and what Steve Goodson called “hillbilly humanism,” an ethos insisting that each person is worthy and none of us can judge another. At this pivotal point in our history, the music industry must recognize the rich diversity of country music’s past and present and embrace its potential for a more equitable and inclusive future.
Oddly, the paragraph just prior to this one talks about the influence of Mexico which rather suggests that country music is not quintessentially American:
Mexican influences and engagements in country music are the focus of my current research—which includes variously gendered vaqueros. In my fieldwork, Mexican American country fans spoke of the music’s crucial connections to the Mexican figure of the cowboy, working-class rancho culture, the former Mexican territories that constitute the American Southwest, and—in country’s patriotic songs—their love for both their American and Mexican cultures and identities.
While the roughly equivalent genre in Mexico might be called by a different name, "ranchero" for example, a similar populist form of music certainly exists. Canada is also mentioned, mainly for its indigenous contributions, but the existence of several kinds of equivalent musics in Canada isn't really acknowledged. These include, yes, "country music" but also "old-time" music and various regional forms. So I guess the obvious answers to the title questions are "no" and "no."
Student musicians in Iceland often find themselves crossing genre boundaries by necessity. There’s only one institution in the capital where you can study music to degree level, thrusting students of varied outlooks together. This eroding of musical silos has produced countless indefinable artists, including Hildur Guðnadóttir who became the first female composer to win an Oscar, Bafta and Golden Globe in the same season. It was for her score to the film Joker – a cello concerto in disguise. A cellist, singer, producer and composer, Guðnadóttir works across metal, electronica, classical and film music.
What really boggles me is that Iceland has a population about the same as the capital city of British Columbia, Victoria, where I lived and taught for over a decade. No energetic aesthetic ferment there, I can tell you! And then there is Finland...
Amid recent debates over several publishers’ removal of potentially offensive material from the work of popular 20th-century authors — including Roald Dahl, R.L. Stine and Agatha Christie — is a less discussed but no less thorny question about the method of the revisions. For some e-book owners, the changes appeared as if made by a book thief in the night: quietly and with no clear evidence of a disturbance.
For those who use a music streaming service, isn't this much like a different arrangement of a song being substituted? Say, a version of Across the Universe without all the Phil Specter strings? Or a performance of Bach on modern instead of original instruments. Or even an arrangement of a piano piece by Prokofiev with some of the dissonances removed? Sound ridiculous? Well, a few years ago the idea of Agatha Christie being surreptitiously censored would also have seemed ridiculous.
One of the many downsides of our clickbait obsessed culture is the neglect of not very clickbait-able J S Bach. To compensate for that in a very small way this post highlights some old and new, straight and not so straight, recordings of Bach's music that have given me particular pleasure recently.
Though there are many theories about the place of imagination in cognitive architecture, two are worth mentioning here, not least because all others can be traced to them. On the one hand, in their book Mindreading (2003), Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich argue that some components of our cognitive architecture are dedicated to imagination. For them, imagination is a distinct mental ability like belief and desire, and since those each have cognitive equipment dedicated to them in cognitive architecture, so too does imagination. With such dedicated equipment, we can explain how imagination is used for different ends. For instance, we can explain how imagination can be a source of knowledge, even though it is typically taken to be fantastical in nature. We can say that the imagination-equipment is connected to the belief-equipment such that, by leveraging that connection, imagination can be constrained, thereby leading us to knowledge. After all, being constrained is what distinguishes knowledge from fantasy. While you can fantasise about wildly improbable things, you can’t know wildly improbable things. Put simply, we can explain the epistemic uses of imagination.
Or being too quick to make an assumption. I've recently been watching this video:
Which deals with the interesting question, is everything that exists physical? And the answer is, most likely not. On the list of things that are not physical are consciousness, belief, imagination and so on. So, nope, you're not going to find the "structure" of imagination in the brain. I await your cards and letters!
Steve Reich isn’t crazy about the term “minimalism.” But he’s made his peace with it.
“In the early days, there was the possibility it would be called ‘trance music,’” he said. “So the name could have been worse.”
Whatever you want to call it, Reich, along with his friends and fellow composers Philip Glass and Terry Riley, created a new style of classical music in the 1960s and ’70s, one that emphasized repetition and shifting rhythmic patterns. It was a radical break from the thorny art music of the time, and it took decades for critics and scholars to accept its best works, including Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, into the canon.
Follow the link to read the whole thing.
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Once more with Gustavo where Norman Lebrecht explains how New York has such difficulty picking a conductor:
It has been 65 years since the New York Philharmonic last appointed the right conductor, so long ago that hardly anyone alive remembers it except as legend. The ensuing vacancy of imagination has meant that every well-intentioned baton since then has been held up against Leonard Bernstein’s and found wanting in every department — music, human and media.
Bernstein was music director for a record 11 years. His successors were doomed by comparison. Pierre Boulez was too ascetic, Zubin Mehta superficial, Kurt Masur heavy weather, Lorin Maazel boring, Alan Gilbert half-baked and Jaap Van Zweden an accounting error.
All that can be asserted right now is that New York has, for once in a lifetime, not picked the wrong baton.
Last year, Rolling Stone compiled a list of “The 50 Worst Decisions in Music History.” Near the top, alongside very high-profile errors in judgment like Decca Records’ rejection of the Beatles, there was a much less familiar episode: the time Blood, Sweat & Tears embarked on an Eastern European concert tour, underwritten by the State Department while the Vietnam War was raging. The reputation of the U.S. government was in tatters for young people, meaning the band looked, as the magazine put it, like “propaganda pawns — which is, more or less, what they were.”
An interesting read.
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Here's a different envoi to start: Muddy Waters back before there were any billionaire musicians.
And of course, the Bach Easter Oratorio with the Netherlands Bach Society:
And since we haven't put up any Steve Reich for a while here is Music for 18 Musicians, still one of his most influential pieces. Performance by a French ensemble:
I'm still working my way through the new Taruskin collection Musical Lives and Times Examined, now over halfway. I just finished a short piece, a review of Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story--How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War by Nigel Cliff. Just looking at that title you can guess that Taruskin is going to have a lot to say about that "Cold War." But he usually delivers much more than one expects and does so here. He provides a well-founded estimate of both Cliburn's strengths (by training he was as close as an American could get to being a Russian pianist) and weaknesses (the pressures of his unique career turned him into a "flesh and blood juke box"). But even better than that, in a couple of paragraphs he discerns the landscape of classical music in society since the 60s:
The strongest reaction I felt while reading this book was a pang of recognition that classical music is no longer seen, even fatuously, as an arena for national policy. It no longer represents nations, only (often rapacious) elites. That, rather than the end of superpower competition, is the big change that Cliburn's decline symbolizes. He was indeed a significant figure, and worthy of a book that says so, but Cliff puts him in the wrong context. He was the protagonist--or perhaps, more accurately, the figurehead--of the moment when classical music enjoyed a pinnacle of popularity and prestige from which it would plummet almost immediately. The sixties were the decade in which, as sociologists have shown and sought to explain, big changes in musical taste and consumption patterns, reflecting changes in demography and social attitudes, caused classical music to return to its tiny social niche after a couple of decades of pumped-up status vouchsafed by the New Deal and the touting of middlebrow culture.
Educated people, who until the 1960s habitually "graduated" from popular music to genres with higher social status--classical, jazz, coffeehouse "folk"--upon entering college, began retaining their popular music allegiances into adulthood, as they still do. Since then, no classical musician who was not already popular in the 1950s (perhaps only Leonard Bernstein besides Cliburn) has figured as a mass cultural or political icon, and such icons as still existed were worshiped nostalgically, by aging fans. [Taruskin, op. cit. p. 317]
Which rather makes me realize how out of step I have been, my entire career. In the 1960s I was a big fan of The Beatles and other popular music, but around 1969 I stumbled across classical music--not for any sociological or demographic reasons, but simply because the music affected me more intensely and in many more different ways than popular music. And I have basically stayed the course on that for my whole life. Yes, I guess I do feel I occupy a tiny social niche, but it is certainly not one with any elite status whatsoever let alone a "rapacious" one. I retain the tiny social hope that some of my compositions might reach others trapped in their tiny social niche!
Just a personal note: this week I had a video conference call with the string quartet in Vancouver who will be premiering my new quartet in May. They had a lot of questions about the second movement. Here is part of the score so you can see the problem:
Click to enlarge
This is in moment form, but there are a lot of different ways of skinning that cat. Interestingly, moment form dates from a piece by Stockhausen called Momente that was composed between 1962 and 1969. I probably read about it in a history of 20th century music sometime in the early 70s and I certainly heard some student composer versions between 1971 and 1973. I encountered moment form as a performer around 1980 in a piece for flute and guitar by Anthony Genge. Here is that piece:
The score consists of three pages, each of which is a "movement." The top half of each page has a number of "moments" for the flute and the bottom half the same for the guitar. You play the moments in any order. Some consist of rests. Around that time I wrote my first piece in moment form, organized more as a flow-chart. The moments were arranged in a stream, connected by lines and the conductor signaled which performers were to play which level. The piece was for guitar orchestra. Here is a performance of that work:
My piece Dark Dream for violin and guitar has a brief section in moment form which is structured like Night Rain. In the string quartet, the players start, either in the center or at the periphery and follow the spiral to the other end. Then you can go back, if you wish. There is considerable room for improvisation as each moment is like a kernel or seed that can be expanded on. As I said to the quartet the other day, the cool thing about this piece is that, as of this moment, there is absolutely no performance practice tradition, so we get to invent one.
Mention was made of Belgian guitarist Rafaella Smits recently in the comments. She was in the same master-class as me with José Tomás in Alicante in Spain in 1974. I have a couple of photos from back then. Here is one:
Sadly, I don't remember everyone's names--this was a long time ago! At the end of the class a few of us gathered on, I believe it was called the Ramblas, for a group photo. From left to right: the girlfriend of another Canadian guitarist, a guitarist who I didn't know, next is an English (or maybe Scottish?) guitarist whose name I also forget, but who was resident in Alicante for a long time and who had beautifully hand-copied and fingered (in various colors) manuscripts of pieces in the repertoire. Funny I remember all that but not his name. Next the other Canadian guitarist whose name was Allan I believe (I remember he used to practice so much he got deep "tracks" in his fingertips stained with green from corroded strings.) and another guitarist I didn't know--he might have been French. Next is the Mexican guitarist, Marco, who went on to a university teaching career back in Mexico. I remember him telling me that the Guardia Civil used to pick him up a few days before May 1st and keep him in custody until after--international worker's day--simply because he was a Mexican and as far as Spain under Franco was concerned, was therefore a communist! Next is, I believe, Rafaella Smits and her friend, another Belgian guitarist. Then, in the back in the red shirt is a Latin-American guitarist, but I forget from where. In front, crouching, is an Anglo-Irish guitarist that I shared an apartment with who liked to practice on the terrace so he could get a tan at the same time. Behind him in the white top, is another Latin-American guitarist as is the gentleman beside her with the beard--I believe he was from Peru. The young fellow behind them I don't remember. Back to the front, crouching next to my roommate is an American guitarist. Standing behind is a guitarist from the Philippines, a fine player whose name I forget. Finishing up in front are me looking up, and my good friend Klaus Helminen, from Finland, who spoke seven or eight languages and played a Daniel Friedrich guitar.
Let's hear a performance by Rafaella Smits. This is Elegie by Mertz:
Or as the English would spell it "programme." Speaking of the English, John Duarte the guitarist, composer and reviewer, used to call a certain kind of guitar program "rent-a-program" because it was so predictable: Some Renaissance music followed by either some Baroque (Bach) or Classical (Sor). The second half would, without fail, be either Spanish music or Spanish music preceded by a bit of 20th century music. Nowadays we tend to see Astor Piazzolla appearing in the second half.
This problem is not specific to guitarists, of course, string quartets are equally guilty. How many times have we seen this program: Haydn or Mozart followed by, perhaps, something modern with the second half devoted either to Beethoven or some big romantic piece. Pianists have so much repertoire that they easily can come up with something more interesting and they often do.
Anyway, in the interest of sparking some thinking about programming, I want to propose one. I've been working up a half-program that I might present in a private concert in the fall. This will consist of two pieces in D tuning: the Sonatina meridional of Ponce and the Chaconne by Bach. In that order, because there is really nothing that can come after the Chaconne--not in the guitar repertoire at least! So let's have that in the second half. Now, for the first half, how about beginning with several preludes by Ponce? Segovia published twelve in two books, but Ponce wrote twenty-four. Lots of options there. And for the rest of the first half, a small group of Venezuelan waltzes by Antonio Lauro. Lovely, tuneful music that doesn't get played as much as it should.
So there you have it, a program that should both appeal to a general guitar audience and be creative enough so no-one would cry "rent-a-program!" Let's cobble it together from YouTube with one of my recordings slipped in.
That's four, but I think we should have at least six preludes. Here is a recording of all 24, so listen to the first two or three.
Now for some Antonio Lauro, which will provide a nice foil to Ponce:
Just to show there is more than one way to play Lauro, I have also recorded the fourth one, Carora:
Intermission
First the Sonatina meridional by Ponce:
And finally, culminating with the Chaconne from the D minor violin partita in John Williams' transcription:
Sadly, because I was really looking forward to it, they unexpectedly cancelled the "Trans Day of Vengeance". The only suitable replacement we could come up with on short notice was "Rabid Serial Composers' Day." In commemoration, Boulez' Structures for two pianos:
What I really love about this piece is that the use of total serialism and the constant shifting of parameters means it is impossible to identify a misprint!
The other thing I love is that the Kontarsky brothers actually play it from memory, something one would have thought was also impossible.
