Today's Listening: Shostakovich

There is only one piece similar to this one that I can recall: the Seven Last Words for string quartet by Joseph Haydn. This is the String Quartet No. 15 by Shostakovich which consists of six movements, all adagio. Played by the Jerusalem Quartet:

Friday Miscellanea

Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very

serious person we are when we are not an artist.

--José Ortega y Gasset (1925)

Trying to return the Friday Miscellanea to light and chuckling:

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The New York Times reports on the Curtis Institute: At This School, the Students Live Entirely for Music. First, let's turn down the hype a bit: all good music schools are like this: small semi-monastic communities of devoted students and teachers. You can be a music student at a major university and barely know what else is happening on campus. You may not have even set foot in the main library. You spend all your time either in class or in practice rooms or rehearsal: this is the norm for music students.

[Curtis is] an extremely selective school whose roughly 150 students come from around the world to study with almost monastic focus. Even among conservatories, it is exceptional, with a wide age range — from preadolescence to post-baccalaureate adulthood — and a personalized approach, of schedules and repertoire, for musicians who live almost entirely for their art.

I went out with a Curtis graduate, a bassoonist. She said she learned a Vivaldi concerto every week and that if you attend Curtis, you have an in at every orchestra in North America because they are populated with Curtis graduates. The article follows the lives of five students and, while a bit hagiographic, is worth a read. I will try to give a report on what it is like at the Mozarteum when I am in Salzburg this summer.

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I'm trying to include as much comic, light-hearted and fun items as possible this week, but they are hard to find. This one is worth watching even though it is serious. Samuel Andreyev is a Candian composer who lives in France and he has a lot of interesting clips on everything from Webern to Captain Beefheart. Here he untangles a few misconceptions about the aesthetics of music. This is actually a Q&A clip, so the title is a bit misleading, but stick with it, he gives some interesting answers.

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Much of my education happened outside of university--though it was certainly attending university that set me on the right path. Still, nowadays universities seem less, well, enriching than they used to. Here is an interesting discussion: Deep Reading Will Save Your Soul.

I had students like this at Columbia and Yale. There were never a lot of them, and to judge from what’s been happening to humanities enrollments, there are fewer and fewer. (From 2013 to 2022, the number of people graduating with bachelors degrees in English fell by 36%. As a share of all degrees, it fell by 42%, to less than 1 in 60.) They would tell me—these pilgrims, these intellectuals in embryo, these kindled souls—how hard they were finding it to get the kind of education they had come to college for. Professors were often preoccupied, with little patience for mentorship, the open-ended office-hours exploration. Classes, even in fields like philosophy, felt lifeless, impersonal, like engineering but with words instead of numbers. Worst of all were their fellow undergraduates, those climbers and careerists. “It’s hard to build your soul,” as one of my students once put it to me, “when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs.”

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Here is the kind of wacky performance that we haven't seen since the 60s. In the key of 5G: the ‘dimensionalist’ who wrote a symphony for 1,000 phones

Symphony concerts aren’t supposed to be like this. This week, the audience for the world premiere of Huang Ruo’s City of Floating Sounds will download an app and stand at one of four designated starting points on the streets of Manchester. Then they will select and play out loud one of 11 synchronised prerecorded tracks to the symphony on their phones as they stroll towards the Factory International Warehouse, following routes suggested by the app. There are constraints: if you’re sipping cappuccino on Canal Street and are five minutes late pressing play, what you hear will be synchronised with others parts already in play on other phones. Hopefully audiences will all arrive at the concert at the same time for part two of the experience, a live performance of the whole symphony.

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I GREW UP WITH CLASSICAL MUSIC FOR DUMMIES

The rising Finn Tarmo Peltokoski, at 24 the youngest conductor ever signed by Deutsche Grammophon, talks to BR about his formative influences:

‘I don’t really come from a musical family, but Mozart’s music was always present in our home. We had a CD – something like “Classical Music for Dummies”. It had all the hits on it, including the first movements of the Symphony in G minor. But I can’t remember it specifically. But I do remember that I saw The Magic Flute for the first time when I was about eleven. Mozart was always there somehow.’

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Keeping it comic: our first envoi is Mozart's Musical Joke, K. 522:

 The humor in the first movement is fairly subtle, but it gets rather coarse in the Minuet, especially at the expense of the horns. Next my favorite piece of grotesquerie the Danse Macabre, op. 40 of Saint-Saëns:

Shostakovich had a manic, sardonic side and it shows no more clearly than in this Polka from the ballet The Golden Age:

Today's Listening: Bruckner Te Deum

In my first year as a university music student I sang in a performance of this piece, but I'm not sure I have heard it since. Until just now.

 Some of it sounds just a bit like Carl Orff if he were a better composer.

Today's Listening: Vaughan Williams

For everyone who couldn't stand yesterday's listening, here is the Vaughan Williams Piano Quintet. Like the Schubert Piano Quintet it is a bass-heavy ensemble with violin, viola, cello and double bass with the piano. A charmingly robust and rambunctious piece.

 

Today's Listening: Morton Feldman

Here you go, the perfect antidote to too much pop music: For Bunita Marcus by Morton Feldman.

 You didn't have any plans for the next hour and a bit, did you?

Today's Listening: Rodrigo

Marcin Dylla is one of the finest of the current generation of classical guitarists being both a strong technician and a fine musician. Lately he has joined with the Kupinski Guitar Duo to record some concerto performances. A while ago they released the Villa-Lobos Concerto and yesterday they released the Rodrigo Concierto de Aranjuez. While this is certainly well-played, it is not as successful as the Villa-Lobos because of the strong instrumental colors in the orchestra that are simply missing.

Recently Ana Vidovic released her version which consisted simply of playing the guitar solo part with no orchestral backing. The tragedy here is that fine artists like Dylla and Vidovic should be playing this concerto--and a bunch of other guitar concertos--with orchestras all over the place instead of being forced into these inadequate solutions. The Concierto de Aranjuez is a great piece, one of the finest 20th century concertos. When I was a solo concert artist I had a number of opportunities to play it with different orchestras and even got a chance to do the Villa-Lobos. But times have changed and it seems that guitarists are no longer sought after. The classical world has narrowed its horizons and there are vanishing few concerto performances that are not by piano, violin or cello. That's it.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but this performance of John Williams with the Berlin Philharmonic is the kind of concert that is probably gone forever-

A Composer's Manifesto

I've been reading a large collection of theories of art which comprises a great number of artist's manifestoes. This has led me to wonder just what I might write that would constitute a manifesto: what it is that I am trying to do when I compose music. As I have no discernible public career as a composer--or a very, very tiny one--I believe I can speak with complete honesty. If anyone is in a similar boat, it might be of some use. So here goes.

I have to give a little background: I was born and lived my early life in the far north of Canada, an area sometimes described as "taiga." We lived in quite a number of very small towns and even in the wilderness itself. In the farthest north of these if you dug down ten or so feet at the end of the brief summer, late August, you would find the ground still frozen--permafrost. So while I was very aware of nature, it was not until we moved to Vancouver Island in my mid teens that I encountered something you might call "culture." The one exception to this was my mother, who was a country fiddler.

Living in the relatively well-populated west coast of Canada I encountered popular music first, then later classical music (in the form of old, scratchy LPs) and finally, Asian culture (in the local library) and Asian music (at the listening library of the university). I only mention things that had an impact or influence. So my initial model of a composer was derived from reading the biographies of people like Beethoven, Schoenberg and John Cage. Later I read a large number of biographies and listened to many hours of music by these and many other composers, but these were the ones I encountered first. Thinking back, I think the first composer I really loved was Claude Debussy.

While I was playing popular music I wrote a lot of songs, probably the main inspiration for these was Bob Dylan. Later, when I became a classical guitarist, my early attempts at composition were influenced by poetry as much as music. Later people like Ligeti and Steve Reich were important. Many years later, after I had retired as a performer, I again returned to poetry as an inspiration and my first serious attempt at composition was a series of songs. Here is one, setting a poem by John Donne:

And another, on a poem by Li Po:

As you can hear, the musical "language" is very different and in a relationship with the text.

Moving to instrumental music, the problem of style was very difficult for me. Here is something manifesto-like: what I want to do is create something with a real, individual character, because that is, for me, a crucial element for something to be an artwork. It doesn't have to be in the current popular style (whether that be serialism or ethnic-derived or ecologically correct), it doesn't have to be initially well liked, it doesn't have to express my inner suffering or whatever--it just has to have a real aesthetic character because that is what I hear when I listen to music I admire. Whether it is Bach, Berg or Steve Reich, what I hear is an artwork with a real, individual character. I would say a characteristic beauty, but as we all know, "beauty" is impossible to define, besides,  aesthetic beauty usually contains elements of ugliness as contrast. Dissonance is essential for us to hear consonance.

So where I am now, is in the position of taking tiny hints from things I admire (and trying to conceal their origin!), trying to allow some influences to inspire other ideas and finally, trying to hew out something that has real character. Not many successes amid quite a few failures, but this piece for violin and guitar is not altogether bad (the reference there is to a comment Beethoven made about one of his finest pieces: he said it was "not altogether lacking in fantasy..."):

So there you go.