Today's Listening: Bruckner

The first movement is 28 minutes long and the second movement even longer. But he manages to squeeze all four movements into less than an hour and a half. Remarkable performance by the Berlin Philharmonic. But what I find most remarkable is that the great Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache conducts it from memory. How can you possibly memorize an hour and a half of orchestral music this monumental? Plus he might have a few other works in his memory.

How to practice

You know how if you ever let anyone see how you do sit-ups or push-ups or planks or whatever, the first thing they say, invariably, is "you're doing that all wrong!"? And then you change your technique but still the next person says "no, that's not how you do it." So you should never let anyone other than your coach, if you have one, see you exercise.

Similarly, it is probably a bad idea to let anyone other than your teacher see how you practice guitar. And now I'm going to demonstrate why. Here is a clip of Alexandra Whittingham practicing:

 And I'm going to say "Alexandra, you're doing it all wrong!" Now Ms Whittingham is undoubtedly a more accomplished guitarist than I am--after all I retired from the concert stage a long time ago, and she is a fine musician and technician who has won major international competitions. But still, this is a very bad way to approach a new piece. As Itzhak Perlman said in a video once, if you practice the wrong way, it takes twice as many hours to undo it. This is true. Exactly how you approach a new piece is really important. Hacking away at it like this is obviously not a good approach. There is no point in doing this arpeggio before you even learn the notes of the chords.

I am reminded of that axiom from Biology 11: "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." In this context, it is the idea that in some ways for some pieces, they are built up a bit like how music developed historically. Without wandering off into the weeds, what I mean is that for a lot of pieces, like this one, instead of just hacking away at it, trying to sight-read it as it lies on the paper, a better approach is to reduce the texture to just the harmonies--play it as simple chords. Then you can more easily play just the right notes and connect them to what comes before and after. I learned this from Oscar Ghiglia.

Once you have all the harmonies clear, you can add in rhythm and then melody. She feels like she doesn't have time to do this, but honestly, you don't have the time to screw it up! What she is learning here is all the wrong stuff: how to misread the notes, go back and forth, and constantly interrupt the flow.

I don't mean to pick on Ms Whittingham, as I said she is an excellent guitarist and we have all been in situations where we are pressed for time and hack away at a new piece. But still... If I were a pianist I would probably have picked one of the clips of Tiffany Poon:

(But she is better at it. Guitarists are notoriously bad sight-readers.)

For different pieces there are different approaches. For a fugue or anything contrapuntal, obviously you want to read the voices individually. For many pieces you want to learn the melody first. Learn what to leave out: ornaments, fioratura, tricky rhythms. Learn the bones first, then put on the flesh and last of all the clothes and makeup.

Tiffany Poon, by the way, is no great shakes as a sight-reader. Experienced pianists (and violinists, etc.) can play pretty much anything at sight. First time. That is how all movie soundtracks are recorded. They are done in one two and half hour session. What you hear was most likely played once! That's what those guys get paid for. And yes that includes guitarists who do studio work. I once worked with a very gifted singer who could sight-read early music from the original notation. I kid you not.

Accents

We in the music world use accents all the time, in both our performances and in our notation. Here are some:

 But the English-speaking world has decided that not only will we eliminate all accents from written English (yes, we used to have some like this "noël" to indicate that there were two syllables. Similarly in "coördinate.") But that has all been declared obsolete. And we eliminate all accents from non-English words even when they are crucial. Take this example from a recent blog post:

• Apple is laying off 700 workers, including the entire team working on the Apple Car, which Apple still denies ever working on. (9to5Mac)
  
  What exactly do you put on you resume when you worked for a decade on a project that was never officially acknowledged and never produced any real-world results?
  

In the second paragraph there is a missing letter which makes it even harder to understand. This is how that paragraph should appear: "What exactly do you put on your resumé when you worked for a decade on a project that was never officially acknowledged and never produced any real-world results?"

The word is "resumé" with three syllables, meaning your curriculum vitae as opposed to the quite different word "resume" meaning to go back to doing something you were doing before. Totally different words distinguished only by the acute accent. How is this difficult? The accent changes the pronunciation and the meaning. If you know any French you constantly run into places where French words are used in English, shorn of their accents and therefore essential aspects of their pronunciation and meaning.

Yeah, I know that train has left the station, the ship the pier and the horse the barn, but really, it seems that all the battles worth fighting are ones that need to be revived. Call it a renaissance of lost causes. Or maybe an "early grammar movement" like the Early Music Movement. That turned out pretty well.

3800 Posts!

As of this morning, there are 3,800 posts on The Music Salon and 13,005 comments. Thanks to all who have commented and keep it up! I don't think I have ever put up Berlioz' colorful and charming Harold in Italy. Here is a performance by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony with viola soloist Antoine Tamestit and conductor Eliahu Inbal.

Friday Miscellanea

This is a view from the UK: The love that dare not speak its name and is it ever dire.

We have reached a point where the pendulum has swung so far the other way that classical music is struggling to maintain a foothold at all on some university music courses. If any academic were to propose a degree course based entirely around classical music — and I imagine few would dare — they would be regarded as eccentric at best, politically dubious at worst.

This is the nub of the embarrassment. Classical music is no longer simply something that people enjoy listening to, playing, studying and writing about; rather, it has been intensely politicised. The relentless elitism barbs have already done a great deal to turn people off classical music, but in recent years these historically illiterate insults have morphed into something even worse, as the elitism stereotype has merged with wider debates about equality in ways that are making the classical music world very edgy indeed.

But you need to read the whole thing. The writer traces the path of the downfall of classical music from the 70s and 80s when it was very well-attended. But I find it hard to believe that pure classical music courses have nearly disappeared from universities in the UK. They are certainly widely present in Canada.

* * *

What changed Rick Beato's life--and mine:

I think the very first Bach recordings I owned were Switched-On Bach and Christopher Parkening's recording of the Chaconne on guitar.

* * *

I don't know whether to laugh or cry: Top musicians among hundreds warning against replacing human artists with AI. Aren't these the same folks that have been using drum machines and Autotune for years?

More than 200 musical artists — including heavy hitters such as Billie Eilish, Katy Perry and Smokey Robinson — have penned an open letter to AI developers, tech firms and digital platforms to "cease the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists."

* * *

Here is something on a rarely-discussed topic: The Team Effort Behind One of Classical Music’s Greatest Hits. Due to time pressures and physical disability, Gustav Holst relied on a close circle of pianists and copyists in his compositional process:

“The Planets” was composed and orchestrated between 1914 and 1917, and was first performed for the public in 1920. During that six-year period, he relied heavily on a group of supportive women whom he later referred to in the dedication to his opera “At the Boar’s Head” as “my scribes.”

HOLST WAS A BUSY MUSICIAN when he began to think about “The Planets.” In addition to composing, he juggled work at three different institutions: Morley College, James Allen’s Girls’ School and St. Paul’s Girls’ School. He formed a strong attachment to those places, and his catalog reflects that, in pieces like “Brook Green Suite,” written for St. Paul’s junior orchestra while he was hospitalized toward the end of his life and titled after the school’s location in Brook Green, Hammersmith.

His activities were complicated by lifelong bad health. In particular, Holst had suffered since childhood from neuritis in his hands, first affecting his ability to play the piano — he later opted for the trombone — and later making him struggle with the more laborious aspects of composing. Those included copying, part-writing and orchestration, tasks that, in a time before digital engraving or photocopying, required “a huge amount of physical effort, and that took an awful lot of time,” the music historian Leah Broad said in an interview.

* * *

Picking up on a topic a few posts back: Puccini’s ‘Butterfly’ and ‘Turandot’: More Than Appropriation

This plain brown music box is therefore central to the ambivalence that lately surrounds Puccini, “Madama Butterfly” and “Turandot,” and the amorphous label of appropriation that has been applied to both. It reminds us that Puccini, who was always searching to endow his scores with “local color,” didn’t just compose exotic-seeming, faux-Asian tunes for his operas, but also sought out actual Asian examples. These works are tributes to the curiosity about other cultures — the desire to blend your traditions with others’ and tell stories about more than just yourself — that has animated art for as long as humans have been making it.

It’s helpful to remember that we are dealing here with Italian operas about Asia, not with Asian operas. I think audiences understand this distance even without specific directorial strategies that emphasize it. But such techniques can be effective; the Met’s sleek and lacquer-shiny current production, originally directed by Anthony Minghella, affectingly represents Cio-Cio-San’s son with a Bunraku puppet, constantly surrounded by operators draped in black.

* * * 

It’s All in the (Video) Game: Composers Embrace a Growing Industry

Horowitz and Looney want to tell you about the vast game frontiers attracting a disparate array of composers, from aspiring students looking to break into the industry to established artists versed in jazz, contemporary classical music, songcraft, and electronica. It’s a dominion where composition intersects with cutting-edge technology powered by an economy that dwarfs Hollywood.

The music created to accompany and enhance the quests, missions, adventures, and world-building that unfolds in games doesn’t stay in the digital realm. “It’s weird to say, but the new American Songbook that kids want to play comes from this game music,”

Not being a gamer, I think I missed this whole trend. There is also a new book: The Theory and Practice of Writing Music for Games.

* * *

 Alex Ross explains the age of the multi-tasking maestro: Conductors Had One Job. Now They Have Three or Four

"I love my three orchestras,” the twenty-eight-year-old Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä said the other day on WQXR, during a broadcast from Carnegie Hall. Mäkelä was leading an all-Stravinsky concert with the Orchestre de Paris, of which he has been the music director since 2021. The other orchestras in question are the Oslo Philharmonic, which he has led since 2020, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, where he holds the title of Artistic Partner. In 2027, Mäkelä will become the chief conductor of the Concertgebouw, which would appear on any shortlist of the world’s finest ensembles. No conductor in modern history, not even the lavishly hyped Gustavo Dudamel, has ever risen so quickly to the peak of the profession.

* * * 

Our first choice of envoi is obvious: The Planets by Gustav Holst.

And, of course, the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 by Bach:

And we should give a listen to Klaus Mäkelä. Here he is with a tight, disciplined and dynamic Shostakovich Symphony No. 7:

Today's Listening: Thomas Adès

 

How to have a good comment section

Even though I often don't agree with the assumptions of both the news and editorial sections of the paper, I read parts of the New York Times most mornings. This morning I ran across something that relates to why the comment section on this blog tends to work quite well: The Nobel Prize-Winning Professor Who Liked to Collaborate With His Adversaries. Here is the relevant quote:

Professor Kahneman saw such a dynamic as “angry science,” which he described as a “nasty world of critiques, replies and rejoinders,” and “as a contest, where the aim is to embarrass.” As Professor Kahneman put it, those who live in that nasty world offer “a summary caricature of the target position, refute the weakest argument in that caricature, and declare the total destruction of the adversary’s position.” In his account, angry science is “a demeaning experience.” That dynamic might sound familiar, particularly in our politics.

Instead, Professor Kahneman favored an alternative that he termed “adversarial collaboration.” When people who disagree work together to test a hypothesis, they are involved in a common endeavor. They are trying not to win, but to figure out what’s true. They might even become friends.

For the context, read the whole thing. The basic idea is to have respect for people who disagree with you and you will usually find that they will return the respect. The payoff is that you will both get closer to some truth. In the whole nearly thirteen year history of this blog I have only had to ban two commentators. Years ago they got into a ferocious argument about Narciso Yepes that was very much tangential to the original post. They refused to desist so I banned them both. On one other occasion I banned another commentator and deleted his comment simply because it was obscene and insulting. And that's it! In thirteen years and nearly 13,000 comments. For the internet that must be some kind of record?

In the world of music and aesthetics we recognize that there is always a lot of subjectivity and objective truth can be elusive so it benefits all of us to respect contrary opinions.

So, thanks to my commentators for recognizing this and for making the blog a better place. And do not water down your opinion as it may be most valuable in its strongest iteration.

Not sure what a suitable envoi would be, but how can you go wrong with a Mozart piano concerto? Maurizio Pollini just passed away, so let's hear his playing the Piano Concerto no. 23: