Friday Miscellanea

"the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being"

--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

That's a pretty good quote. Mostly though, after reading it we go "cool idea" and then go back to life as usual. It might be more useful to think of how it applies to one's personal behavior.

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There has been a lot of criticism of director-driven European opera productions, but personally, the ones I have seen have been entrancing and stimulating. Alex Ross talks about a new production of Wagner: The Waves.

Leave it to the director Peter Sellars to make “Tristan” mind-bending once again. His production of the opera, created in collaboration with the video artist Bill Viola, was first seen last fall, in semi-staged form, at Disney Hall, in Los Angeles, and the definitive version opened last month at the Opéra Bastille, in Paris. I saw the last performance of the Paris run, and came away in something like the state of dazed bliss that Baudelaire described. 

Esa-Pekka Salonen led the pioneering performances of the Sellars-Viola “Tristan” in Los Angeles last fall, and he travelled with the production to Paris. He offered a hugely impressive interpretation of a score on which almost every great conductor of the past century has made his mark. Already in the Prelude, you had a sense of a canny master plan, with crescendos plotted like parabolas of expanding size. Not unexpectedly, this contemporary-minded conductor made much of the work’s sharper edges: he had the violins lean on a passing note in the Act III prelude, highlighting a brief semitone clash. There was a startling sonority in the scene of Tristan’s death: the wind and brass choirs were eerily glassy and smooth, almost electronic in timbre. For the most part, though, this was an authentically Romantic reading, not a revisionist one. True to the atmosphere of the production, it had a surging and ebbing natural rhythm.

Read the whole thing.

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 Can we now mark the classical concert reform movement as having reached its absurd stage?

The ‘Converse Conductor’ Fighting Elitism in Classical Music

Jonathon Heyward wears sneakers onstage and embraces genres like jazz as part of his effort to bring more people into the concert hall.

That might encourage Converse-wearers and jazz lovers, but anyone else? 

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Norman Lebrecht asks the musical question: WHEN DID THE ARTS COUNCIL CHANGE ITS TUNE?

The Arts Council was founded in 1946, in the words of Maynard Keynes, ‘to encourage the best British national arts, everywhere, and to do it as far as possible by supporting others rather than by setting up state-run enterprises.’

The arts, said Keynes, ‘owe no vow of obedience.’

The Arts Council, he specified, is no schoolmaster or regulator. ‘How satisfactory it would be if different parts of this country would again walk their several ways as they once did and learn to develop something different from their neighbours and characteristic of themselves.’

Today, Arts Council England defines itself as follows:

‘We are the national development agency for creativity and culture. We have set out our creative vision in ‘Let’s Create…’

How was that unconstitutional overthrow allowed to happen?

ACE needs urgently to be reverted to its founding purpose.

Does the UK even have a constitution?

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JOB OF THE WEEK: PROFESSOR OF COMPOSITION AT £44 AN HOUR

At the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester they are setting their fees low:

Salary Grade: £44.30 to £54.44 per hour (dependent on experience) (pending Pay Review)

Closing date: 12 Noon, Tuesday 6th August 2024

Interview date: Friday 16th August 2024

Applications are invited for a professor (Tutor) in the School of Composition. The appointee will be a composer with extensive professional experience. The appointee will have appropriate teaching experience in higher education, or other specialist composition teaching experience.

While an essential area of experience will be acoustic instrumental and vocal composition, additional and complementary areas of expertise might include electronic music, experimental music, and/or composition for theatre, dance, screen, and video game.

The appointee will be expected to deliver one-to-one composition lessons at undergraduate and postgraduate level, potentially some small group teaching, and may be called on to contribute to auditions, examination, and seminars as required.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!! Wait, you were serious? Let's put this alongside another salary story:

CLEVELAND FAILURES TAKE HUGE PAY HIKE

Heads of the Cleveland Institute of Music, where teachers have voted no-confidence in the leadership, are doing well out of the crisis.

President Paul Hogle (pictured) added $180,000 to his pay packet, which now tops $700k.

Executive vice-president Scott Harrison now makes quarter of a million.

These figures are Form 990s from fiscal year 2023

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!! Wait that was also serious?!??!

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It's a weird week when most of the items come from Slipped Disc. On to some envois. The only obvious choice is Tristan:

Here's something unusual: the first movement of the Symphony No. 15 by Shostakovich for piano, violin, cello and percussion trio:

And here is the original orchestral version:

Death and Transfiguration

 Death and Transfiguration (Tod und Verklärung in the original German) is a tone poem by Richard Strauss that expresses the dying thoughts of an artist who at the end achieves transcendence.

That piece was completed in 1889. Many years later, in the closing months of the war, April 1945, he completed a somewhat similar work, unlike the previous one, with no overt program. This is his Metamorphosen for 23 strings which he started composing the day after the destruction of the Vienna Opera House.

Here is a clip of an interview with a neurophysiologist and psychiatrist who also studied meditation:

I put these three things together because they, oddly, relate to one another. The experience of listening to the Strauss pieces cannot really be "explained" or captured with musicology or music theory any more than consciousness can be captured by the study of the neurons in the brain, as Roger Walsh explains. As Wittgenstein famously said at the end of the Tractatus:

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

But I think Wittgenstein would agree that those things can be expressed in music. We should just not try and talk about them...

UPDATE: If you want a hard, analytic argument for why a pure physicalist explanation of the world is insufficient, here you go:

Today's Listening: Bach, Cantata Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen BWV 51

 You can't do any better than listen to a little Bach on a Sunday morning. This is a particularly ecstatic cantata.

Just the Fachs!

Despite over fifty years in the music biz, I discover new things nearly every day. Often they are in the world of opera as I developed an interest in opera relatively late in life and opera is a universe of its own. We are all aware that there are different types of voice--it was in high school choir that I realized I was a bass (or more likely baritone) when they stuck me in that section. As a classical guitarist I accompanied many singers and noticed that they came in different varieties as well, though in choir, they are only divided into sopranos and altos, tenors and basses.

But when you come to opera the basic division of lower and higher voices divides into a host of different types called "Fachs" (in German the plural is Fächer). These relate more to operatic roles and the qualities needed to realize them. From the Wikipedia article:

The German Fach system (German pronunciation: [fax]; literally "compartment" or "subject of study", here in the sense of "vocal specialization") is a method of classifying singers, primarily opera singers, according to the range, weight, and color of their voices. It is used worldwide, but primarily in Europe, especially in German-speaking countries and by repertory opera houses.^[1]

The Fach system is a convenience for singers and opera houses. It prevents singers from being asked to sing roles which they are incapable of performing, or roles for which their vocal timbre is dramatically unsuited. Opera companies keep lists of available singers by Fach so that when they are casting roles for an upcoming production, they do not inadvertently contact performers who would be inappropriate for the part.^[2]

Why is the German system used? Likely because Germany has 80 opera houses and Austria has another thirteen. Mind you, Italy has a similar number and the names of these different voice types are typically from Italian.

Believe it or no, I only heard of the "Fach" system when I stumbled across this very informative YouTube clip:

And for men's voices:

Friday Miscellanea

The future is made through relinquishing or sacrificing the past.

--Asger Jorn, once member of the Situationist International

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Every week I struggle to find interesting and entertaining musical items and try to avoid politics, obituaries and too much doom-saying. It's not easy! The New York Times helps this week with this piece about Gluck: The Composer Who Changed Opera With ‘a Beautiful Simplicity’

Today, Gluck suffers a little from a reputation for formality, even stodginess. But with the period instrument ensemble Le Concert d’Astrée conducted gracefully yet energetically by Emmanuelle Haïm, the Aix double bill was a reminder of the vibrancy of his vision, a majestic yet vigorous directness.

This rare juxtaposition offers an immersion in Gluck’s revolutionary innovations — what became known as his reform of opera, paving the way for Wagner and modernity. By the middle of the 18th century, bloated extravagance was the mainstream of Italian opera, dominated by singers burbling mindless coloratura in an endless parade of arias that barely held together as narrative.

Gluck wrote in 1769 that these abuses had “turned the most sumptuous and beautiful of all spectacles into the most ridiculous and tedious.” To counter this, his aim was “to restrict music to its true function of helping poetry to be expressive and to represent the situations of the plot” — to seek “a beautiful simplicity.”

One of the most exciting developments in French music for the last few decades has been the successful revival of French opera from the 18th century.

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On An Overgrown Path thoughtfully considers that Great music has no independent existence

Changing the music in nuanced ways does not necessarily mean rappers with symphony orchestras. The Amsterdam Sinfonietta's excellent The Mahler Album also includes Mahler's arrangement of Beethoven's String Quartet no. 11 and an intensely moving arrangement for string orchestra of the Adagio from Mahler's Tenth Symphony. On other discs the Amsterdam Sinfonietta under artistic director Candida Thompson has recorded arrangements of two other Beethoven quartets, Shostakovich's Second and Fourth Quartets, Wagner's Tristan Prelude, and Berg's Sonata Opus 1. 

Although not as dramatic as Stokowski's Bach transcriptions these interpretations, particularly the quartet transcriptions with their added bass lines, made even this jaded classical nerd hear these masterworks with fresh ears. And in an expression of diversity that goes beyond classical's current myopic and tired obsession with gender diversity, the Amsterdam Sinfonietta is presenting in concert Philip Glass in India pairing Glass' Violin Concerto no. 2 “The Four American Seasons” with Indian ragas. All these are worthwhile case studies in changing the music without throwing baby integrity out with the bath water. (Incidentally, no personal connection with or free CDs and concert tickets, or - heaven forbid - alone payola, from the Amsterdam Sinfonietta, I just happen to be inspired by their work and buy their CDs.)

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From the New York Times: The Nearly Lost Work of a ‘Born Opera Composer’ Returns

Only one copy of “Anna” survives today, housed in the vast collection of the Naples Conservatory. It takes time to read an opera from a manuscript orchestral score. You have to decipher the calligraphy before you can start imagining the sounds, and this one is a particularly hasty job, full of errors and none too clear. But as I picked my way through it, appreciation gradually turned to admiration and eventually to outright amazement. This was the work of a born opera composer. This was the real thing.

Here is one way of putting it. Bel canto operas are structured in individual numbers — cavatina, duet, finale and so forth — and “Anna” is made of 12 such numbers. Not a single one is boring; not one sounds like padding, not one fails to embody and advance the story, not one falls in the wrong place. The 20-something beginner had a master’s grasp of opera as drama.

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While U.S. Companies Struggle, German Opera Houses Move Ahead Ambitiously

Since their closure in 2020 due to the coronavirus, American opera houses have been struggling to regain their financial footing—and their audiences. Most have reduced the number of performances they give and retreated to a repertoire of safe favorites. However, the Metropolitan Opera has taken a different tact by embracing untried contemporary works it hopes will appeal to younger, more diverse audiences. Recently released attendance data suggests that this Met initiative might not be working.

Bolstered by significant governmental support, European companies mostly appear to have returned to a pre-pandemic status quo. A recent visit to Germany found both the Hamburg and Berlin Staatsopers fearlessly mounting challenging operas of questionable popular appeal, but both Olivier Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise and Modest Mussorgsky’s Chowanschtschina (better known in the U.S. as Khovanshchina) proved to be singular artistic and reasonably popular successes.

I've long been saying that the so-called "crisis" in classical music is mostly a North American phenomenon--things are very different in Europe.

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I am planning on doing a post devoted to Leonard B. Meyer, but this was not the week for that! Coming soon, I hope. The theme this week seems to be opera, so let's listen to some. First up, a Venetian production of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice.

 Next Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina:

Finally Messiaen's Saint Francis of Assisi:

That should keep you occupied for the weekend!

Today's Listening: Schoenberg/Handel

 

The Survival of Culture

The strange situation in which a wealthy cultural nexus like San Francisco suddenly finds itself unable to afford the high culture of employing a creative genius like Esa-Pekka Salonen is a valuable indicator of an underlying problem.

When I was employed at McGill University, a high-quality English-language university in French-speaking Montreal, I had an interesting conversation with one of the administrators about who supported McGill. McGill was founded by a Scotsman, but a lot of its support came from Jewish donors. When a Quebec nationalist party was elected in the mid-70s, their aim was to starve English culture institutions like McGill in favor of French-speaking institutions like the Université de Montréal and the Université de Québec à Montréal. They also reshaped the composition of government departments and strove to remake the landscape of business in the province all with the aim of preserving French. One effect of this was a general exodus of English-speaking Jewish Quebeckers to Toronto, thus greatly diminishing the donor base of McGill.

A kind of inverted echo of this is what is currently going on in culture. Clement Greenberg described it as far back as 1939 in an essay titled "Avant-Garde and Kitsch." The relevant paragraph:

The avant-garde's specialization of itself, the fact that its best artists are artists' artists, its best poets poets' poets, has estranged a great many of those who were capable formerly of enjoying and appreciating ambitious art and literature, but who are now unwilling or unable to acquire an initiation into their craft secrets. The masses have always remained more or less indifferent to culture in the process of development. But today such culture is being abandoned by those to whom it actually belongs--our ruling class. For it is to the latter that the avant-garde belongs. No culture can develop without a social basis, without a source of stable income. And in the case of the avant-garde, this was provided by an elite among the ruling class of that society from which it assumed itself to be cut off, but to which it has always remained attached by an umbilical cord of gold. The paradox is real. And now this elite is rapidly shrinking. Since the avant-garde forms the only living culture we now have, the survival in the near future of culture in general is thus threatened.

Is this analysis still true? Is the avant-garde the only living culture we now have? Many would disagree, mentioning the popular arts in music, film and so on. Those are what Greenberg would call Kitsch: "popular, commercial art and literature ... pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music ... Hollywood movies, etc." (skipping over forms that are no longer popular--for "Tim Pan Alley" substitute Taylor Swift).

Kitsch is a product of the Industrial Revolution which urbanized the masses of Western Europe and America and established what is called universal literacy. Prior to this the only market for formal culture, as distinguished from folk culture, had been among those who, in additions to being able to read and write, could command the leisure and comfort that always goes hand in hand with cultivation of some sort.  This until then had been inextricably associated with literacy. But with the introduction of universal literacy, the ability to read and write became almost a minor skill like driving a car, and it no longer served to distinguish an individual's cultural inclinations, since it was no longer the exclusive concomitant of refined tastes ... To fill the demand of the new market, a new commodity was devised: ersatz culture, kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide ... Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times.

There is a great deal more in Greenburg's essay which is found in Art in Theory: 1900 - 2000, p. 539.