And for something completely different: Gamelan Semar Pegulingan from Bali

 

Today's Listening: Antoine de Lhoyer

The archive gnomes have been at work because in the last week I have run into two guitar composers that I have never heard of before. This is Antoine de Lhoyer (1768 - 1852).

It reminds me just a bit of Haydn.

Today's Listening: Willow

I honestly do not know what to think of this (found it via Ted Gioia) set by Will Smith's daughter Willow. I might like it. Not sure. Unlike Taylor Swift it actually has character.

Friday Miscellanea

 "The fairy-tale of artistic creativity, this pitiful relic of the myth of divine creation, has remained the last delusion of Western culture."

--Max Ernst (1891-1976)

Written for an exhibition in 1934, this is one of the most succinct expressions of the attitude that underlies a lot of attacks on the fine arts. Ernst was a member of the Dada group and later a central figure in the surrealist movement.

* * *

I know this is a bit far from the usual topics, but have a look anyway: Yesterday’s Men

One day in the autumn of 1980, during my first semester of graduate school, I was making my way to the English department when I came across a classmate. He was sitting on a bench, holding papers in his hand, and staring at nothing. When I asked him what was up, he told me that one of his professors had just returned a graded paper to him—the first paper he had written as a graduate student—and told him that he had inappropriately relied on the ideas of a literary critic named Northrop Frye. The professor had written that Frye was “yesterday’s man.” “Yesterday’s man,” my classmate repeated. “What does that even mean?”

Not so many years earlier, Frye had been the most important literary critic in the English-speaking world. But now he was increasingly being overshadowed by figures with strange names like Barthes and Derrida. A few weeks before my college graduation, a professor took me aside and whispered those names into my ear; feeling myself welcomed into some new freemasonry, I fetched an index card and wrote Bart, Derry Da. Only that initiation had prevented me from suffering a fate like that of my befuddled classmate. I tried to be sympathetic, not smug.

The whole thing is interesting if you have the time. Northrop Frye has stuck in my mind more than any other literary critic, especially folks like Barthes and Derrida. All this makes me recall again that there are definitely passing fashions in academia and also in the fine arts. That's why what endures and what doesn't is important.

* * *

Review of a new book: ‘Women and the Piano’ Review: Lives at the Keys

Nobody laughed when an 11-year-old Mozart sat down at the keyboard to play what one critic described as “the longest and most difficult pieces with impressive precision.” Performing next, her younger brother, Wolfgang Amadeus, was not too shabby either.

As Susan Tomes, a Scottish concert pianist and author, reminds us in her delightfully provocative and consistently informative account “Women and the Piano: A History in 50 Lives,” it was Maria Anna Mozart who initially received top billing at the European courts where her father, Leopold, took his two child prodigies on tour.

* * *

This clip talks about a topic that is pretty frequent around here:

I'm not sure I entirely agree with either position, but in answer to David Bruce, there are certainly 20th century pieces I love such as the Rite of Spring, Bartók String Quartet no. 4 and the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, string quartets and symphonies by Shostakovich, lots of stuff by Steve Reich, some by Philip Glass and a whack of other stuff if I took time to think. Prokofiev! In the 21st century, certainly some stuff by Gubaidulina, Caroline Shaw and likely some others. Honestly, would you rather listen to Taylor Swift?

 * * *

We constantly hear about grand plans to update and renew classical performance. We rarely hear when these plans go awry. But here is an example. Let's call it CBSO Reloaded:

Mention of the Vision rouses feelings that seasoned concertgoers should have felt something brewing even from the start of the current season, with the stark rebranding of each concert’s programme-book cover as “CBSO Remastered”, with perhaps a subliminal message of new brooms sweeping clean. The prospectus for the forthcoming 2024-25 season is equally unsettling. For the first time in decades the editorial blurb has not been written by an accredited writer on music, and speaks about toe-tapping to joyous works such as Bruckner Nine and Mahler Nine (music-lovers will understand that anomaly).

When management decides to update our concert experience, complainers are not welcome:

Another furore developed when one of the CBSO’s most loyal attendees, well-known to concert audiences throughout Birmingham, complained about the distractions of a photographer snapping away behind his seat. Eventually the CBSO management saw fit to issue a directive that people who continued to complain might be barred from attending concerts, or indeed any involvement with the orchestra. As recently revealed, the Arts Council of England has such a policy of threatening disgruntled clients.

Also:

There is a disturbing subtext to the entire situation, and that is the implication that the performances in the auditorium aren’t enough to attract audiences. What does this do to the morale of the players? Some anonymous contributions to Slipped Disc from within the ranks suggest that the players are disheartened and fearful, and that they feel the management should be thinking more about recouping financial shortfalls due to Birmingham City Council’s bankruptcy, and not wasting money on all the theatrical and lighting gimmicks.

You will be entertained!

* * *

Interview with an up and coming opera composer: Composer Gregory Spears Makes an Operatic Journey West

Sometimes we associate the word “operatic” with big, extreme feelings. But I think mixed emotions — ambivalence — are what opera does best. [Opera] conveys the complexity of emotions that might be hard to hear in everyday speech. The book had a lot of that. I liked the realness of this story and how complicated the characters were. They felt very real to me in their charm and in their flaws.

Also, I wanted to write a tragic love story — not tragic in the sense of gay oppression, but tragic in the sense that [these characters are] not a great match. Tragic in the sense that their love doesn’t last.

* * *

 Our first envoi is the Bartók Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. It's just a great, great piece and I've loved it from the first time I heard it:

 Here is a non-operatic piece by Gregory Spears:

Back in their glory days, here is the CBSO with Mahler Symphony No. 2. If you want people to know you are serious, just start with a double-bass solo.

Friday Miscellanea

Let us not mince words: the marvelous is always beautiful, anything

marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.

--André Breton.

It's a weird world we live in: Eric Clapton’s ‘Wonderful Tonight’ Guitar to Sell Amid Robust Music Memorabilia Market. You might get blocked by the paywall so the story is that an old Martin acoustic guitar that Clapton supposedly wrote a song on in 1977 is headed to auction and is estimated to sell for around $380,000 or the price of a house in many markets. This isn't one of his famous guitars like the Gibson he used to play on with Cream, or one of the Fender Stratocasters he played on in later years. Nope, this is just an old guitar with cigarette burns:

Clapton wrote “Wonderful Tonight” for his then-girlfriend Pattie Boyd, whom he would be married to from 1979 to 1989. The guitar has a number of other Clapton-specific features, such as cigarette burns in the finish, for which he was known to have across his guitars. 

Memorabilia tied to specific, significant music pieces like Clapton’s guitar are attracting a certain group of well-resourced auction buyers as they look to reconnect with some of their favorite artists and own a literal piece of music history.

"A literal piece of music history"! This seems pathetic, decadent and superficially materialistic all at the same time so hey, I guess it is the perfect reflection of our times with its strange obsession with celebrity.

* * *

 I think this is one of those things I'm going to be skeptical about: Music Just Changed Forever.

Imagine if after Oppenheimer successfully detonated the first atomic bomb, the rest of the world had just shrugged its shoulders and carried on as normal.

Because that’s what seems to have just happened in the entire field of human culture known as “music.”

A few weeks ago, a company called Suno released a new version of its AI-generated music app to the public. It works much like ChatGPT: You type in a prompt describing the song you’d like… and it creates it.

The results are, in my view, absolutely astounding. So much so that I think it will be viewed by history as the end of one musical era and the start of the next one. Just as The Bomb reshaped all of warfare, we’ve reached the point where AI is going to reshape all of music.

That's the basic assumption. Notice that this is the kind of argument that has become typical in public discourse these days. Driven by the need for traffic, much of what we encounter on the internet, on YouTube and elsewhere is characterized by ludicrous and excessive claims and analogies. It started with entirely evidence and research-free claims about the "Ten Best" this and that. It moved on to claims that someone "destroyed" someone else with a quip. And now, every new generation of computer software changes humanity "forever." Take a moment to realize that every widespread event changes everything "forever." The Internet, the smart phone, the use of drones in warfare, in music, the invention of recording, the invention of streaming, sampling, the use of autotune and drum machines, hell, the invention of nylon strings for classical guitar to replace gut. All of these things had an incremental and continuing impact which means they changed things "forever."

Don't I wish that there were courses in school and university that taught things like proportionality and perspective in argument, that taught history, that just taught how to make an argument and avoid logical errors. Oh, wait, there was a time when they did, but all that had to be banned in order to leave room for more ideological indoctrination.

Ok end of rant. My answer to the above claim is simply that computer algorithms do not "create" anything, they just slap together some generic stuff lifted from people who did actually create something. Go ahead, listen to the examples. One thing we can deduce is that pop music has become itself so akin to a generic industrial product that even a computer can fake it plausibly. To be fair, the writer later on admits that:

I don’t think [AI] will make a huge difference at the “top” of the industry. Taylor Swift, Coldplay and, regrettably, U2, will continue to release albums and sell out stadiums. No one is going to stop you somehow enjoying Bono’s music.

But where I do think AI will make a difference are the billion other lower-grade circumstances where music is playing. If you need background music for your corporate health and safety training video, or you need a theme tune for your podcast, then it is a no-brainer to use AI instead of paying an expensive musician.

For better or worse then, AI will become the ubiquitous source of, essentially, “elevator music” for the entire world...

So it's not actually music. It's more anti-music. 

* * *

The Guardian: Yuja Wang review – from delicate finesse to fierce intensity

Yuja Wang’s latest recital at the Festival Hall was a dazzling, at times beguiling affair, carefully structured and executed with her customary flamboyance, glamour and elegance. Chopin’s four Ballades formed the second half of the programme, but before the interval came works from around 1950: Samuel Barber’s Piano Sonata in E Flat Minor, and a selection of Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues.

Let's give deserving praise, her programming is far more creative than most pianists these days. She even had a piece by Pierre Boulez as an encore.

* * *

Norman Lebrecht wonders: WHERE DID UK MUSIC TEACHING GO WRONG?

There is only one British contestant at this year’s Leeds piano competition, an event founded by piano teacher Fanny Waterman (pictured) to advance awareness of the instrument and its talented young performers.

Just one.

I looked through the list of current players in the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester’s concert this week in Granada. One in five players were Spanish. I struggled to find a single Brit.

Getting into these elite events requires training at the highest level.

Have we just lost it?

* * * 

In case you were wondering: What is the state of opera in L.A.? Here is just a taste of the article:

Although no longer known for boldly progressive main stage productions — the likes of Achim Freyer’s Wagner “Ring” cycle (far and away the most imaginative of any American “Ring”) and a series of Robert Wilson stagings — L.A. Opera delivers a “Turandot” that does at least provide local color. Hockney designed his “Turandot” sets for San Francisco Opera and Chicago Lyric Opera, where they were first used in 1992. Still, he was at the time an Angeleno. His blues were the Pacific Ocean. His reds were Malibu sunsets. 

The Hockney “Turandot” dazzles. He transformed objectionably quaint Chinoiserie of yore into a vibrant East-West artistic fusion. But of the seven operas Hockney designed (including a wondrous “Tristan und Isolde” for Music Center Opera in 1987), his “Turandot” is the most problematic and holds up least well.

* * *

I guess we have to have a scandal of the week: In Free Fall: The classical music industry reacts to allegations of sexual harassment against conductor François-Xavier Roth

When the French conductor François-Xavier Roth woke up the week before last in his apartment in Paris, his career was in excellent shape. He had just given two concerts with the Berlin Philharmonic. He had a tour to look forward to with Les Siècles, the period instrument ensemble he founded. He was the Music Director of the Gürzenich Orchestra, the general music director of the city of Cologne, the Principal Guest Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, and Chief Conductor and Artist Director designate of the SWR Symphonieorchester in Stuttgart. His calendar was packed and the gigs kept getting better. Roth’s name stood for eclectic yet carefully curated programs, creative interpretations, and joyful experimentation beyond the well-trodden paths of the repertoire. He was equally capable of discovering unknown works and rediscovering well-known classics. 

On May 22, suddenly nobody seemed to want anything to do with Roth. In the French satirical magazine Le Canard enchaîné, which is renowned for its investigative reporting, seven musicians accused Roth of harassment in the form of sexual text messages, including dick pics. (VAN was informed of Le Canard enchaîné’s upcoming article in advance, reporting exclusively on the story.) The evening the story was published, Roth was replaced by his assistant Adrien Perruchon for a concert with Les Siècles. The next day, Roth canceled all his upcoming engagements until further notice.

* * *

The New York Times interviews Mitsuko Uchida: Mitsuko Uchida Says What She Thinks

When we met in the lobby of a hotel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Uchida was in the middle of a particularly busy stretch of concerts. Almost immediately, our conversation took an unexpected turn, as she made it clear she was irked by my questions about her life and music. 

A scholarly artist, Uchida was intent on testing my musical knowledge, stopping the interview several times to quiz me on the German Renaissance, the invention of musical copyright, Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” and the deaths of Schubert and Webern. Unimpressed, she at one point suggested I leave my job for a year to study music full time.

I think the problem there was that the New York Times hasn't quite realized that few artists have much respect for the journalism profession any more. Here is a delightful exchange:

When you take time to dream, do you have revelations about life or music?

I never have revelations in my life. Or if I do, I won’t tell you.

* * * 

Let's have something from Yuja Wang. It is hard to find something by her on YouTube that is neither a concerto, an interview, clips featuring her costuming or a biography. But here is a Rachmaninov prelude:

So since we have one prelude, let's have all preludes today. Here is Marcin Dylla with the Prelude No. 1 by Villa-Lobos:

Here is the Prelude no. 1 in C major from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Bk I by Bach on clavichord:

And finally, the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune by Debussy:

"Prelude" covers a lot of ground!

Today's Listening: Fabulous Muttons!

 

Today's Listening: Duphly

One of the charming traits of the clavecinistes was to title some pieces after other clavecinistes. Here is an example La Forqueray by Jacques Duphly.

 

Here is another one, this time by François Couperin: