Today's Listening: March of the Scythians

This is pretty much the most heavy-metal piece for harpsichord, the Marche des Scythes by Pancrace Royer admirably executed by Jean Rondeau:

Current Favorite Musics

I don't have favorite recordings that last over time because I am in a process of constant discovery. One summer I spent listening only to gamelan music, the next summer it was Haydn string quartets. Right now I am listening mostly to Bruckner symphonies in this recording:

Not that long ago I spent a month or so listening through this box:

But this is a box I keep coming back to:

Here is a sample:

Outstanding Movies

I think the problem with The Music Salon was that it was getting into a rut, so the solution seems to be to simply widen the horizon a bit. To that end, let's consider some outstanding movies of the last fifty years.

I'm not going to do a numbered list, that's too clickbaity, so I will go from well-known to obscure. The star of three of the best-known and frankly best movies of the last fifty years is, of course, Bill Murray. In order of well-knownness they are Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day and Lost in Translation. They combine real wisdom with great entertainment value and not a trace of pretentiousness.

Two really good movies from a French director are Le Grand Bleu (The Big Blue) and Leon, The Professional, both by Luc Besson. He did a lot of other movies, some specifically for the English-speaking market, like The Fifth Element, but I think these are the most interesting.

Another great director is Australia's Peter Weir whose really great films include Gallipoli, The Year of Living Dangerously and Dead Poets Society. Every one of his films is utterly different from every other--no formulas!

I have to mention a couple of Japanese directors: Masaki Kobayashi who did Hara-Kiri and Akira Kurosawa who directed Seven Samurai, the inspiration for The Magnificent Seven western.

Finally, the most remarkable film I have seen in recent years, La Belle Noiseuse by Jacques Rivette.

A still from La Belle Noiseuse

A Contrapuntal Fantasy

Some have said that the greatest novel of the 20th century is The Gulag Archipelago by Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn. I'm not a literary critic so I can't say yea or nay to that, but I am re-reading it and it is certainly a very powerful and important book.

First a little context from the Wikipedia article on the Old Believers:

Old Believers, also called Old Ritualists,^[a] are Eastern Orthodox Christians who maintain the liturgical and ritual practices of the Russian Orthodox Church as they were before the reforms of Patriarch Nikon of Moscow between 1652 and 1666. 

Old Believer theology is characterized by this strict adherence to pre-reform traditions, as well as the belief that the reformed church's heresy is coeval with the arrival of the Antichrist.

As a result of this eschatological belief, as well as the church and state's mass persecution of the Old Believers, many fled to establish colonies and monasteries in the wilderness.

Now to Solzhenitsyn:

The Old Believers--eternally persecuted, eternal exiles--they are the ones who three centuries earlier divined the ruthlessness at the heart of Authority! In 1950 a plane was flying over the vast basin of the Podkamennaya Tunguska. The training of airmen has improved greatly since the war, and the zealous aviator spotted something that no-one before him had seen in twenty years: an unknown dwelling place in the taiga ... What they had found were the Yaruyevo Old Believers. When the great and longed-for Plague began--I mean collectivization--they had fled from this blessing into the depths of the taiga, a whole village of them. And they lived there without ever poking their noses out ... In this way the Yaruyevo Old Believers had won themselves twenty years of life! Twenty years of life as free human beings... [The Gulag Archipelago, pp 431-2]

Now here is the fantasy part: in a world where the arts have been collectivized, including music, and the Swiftian dinosaurs, velociraptors of the backbeat, roam the land, crushing all before them, a small village of contrapuntalists, following the ancient rites of DuFay, Josquin, Ockeghem, and Bach flee into the taiga and for many decades preserve the tapestries of counterpoint, completely isolated from the world. Like the Old Believers before them, once a year they send a single representative by obscure woodland paths to the local WalMart to purchase salt, blank paper and HB pencils to continue their quest for salvation and really good music.

And, of course, once a year they perform Nuper rosarum flores by Guillaume DuFay:

Beato on Bach (and me on everybody else...)

Rick Beato is a real musician and his videos are often surprising. Like this one, a tribute to Bach and Glenn Gould:

One of the joys of growing up on Vancouver Island in the 60s was that on CBC TV on Sunday afternoons you would often find Glenn Gould playing Bach on piano, or Orlando Gibbons on harpsichord or telling us remarkable things about music as in this video. Yes, all that is gone from television.

Now let me share a few out of the way cultural things. First of all, a couple of poems. No-one reads poems any more, let alone writes them. One exception was Spike on Buffy the Vampire Slayer who in his pre-vampire days was a rather feckless poet. Here is the first part of a poem by Sir Thomas Wyatt (1502 - 1542)

They flee from me that sometime did me seek,

With naked foot stalking in my chamber:

I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,

That now are wild and do not once remember

That sometime they have put themselves in danger

To take bread at my hand; and now they range,

Busily seeking with a continual change.

Written when he was in prison. This is from a wonderful anthology The Oxford Book of English Verse, the New Edition of 1941. This is an excerpt from a song lyric by Leonard Cohen:

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom for

trying to change the system from within. I'm coming

now, I'm coming to reward them. First we take Man-

hattan, then we take Berlin

I'm guided by a signal in the heavens. I'm guided by the

birthmark on my skin. I'm guided by the beauty of our

weapons. First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.

Next, from a famous poem by Wallace Stevens, The Emperor of Ice-Cream:

Call the roller of big cigars,

The muscular one, and bid him whip

In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

Let the wenches dawdle in such dress

As they are use to wear, and let the boys

Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.

Let be be finale of seem.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

How about a couple of books? One of the most enjoyable books I have ever read is The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein. Not only is it a great science fiction adventure, but it is the first book that I know of that has an artificial intelligence as a protagonist. It is also a libertarian novel and, that rarity, a tragedy. Master and Commander is perhaps the finest historical novel ever written, by Patrick O'Brian--and it starts with a string quartet concert on Minorca. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis is probably the funniest novel ever written, and a quick read.

That ought to keep you occupied for a few days!

Cautionary Tales!

Wow, the day after I said I was going to cut down on blogging, I already find something I want to share. This is a video about the dark side of being a concert pianist by Denis Zhdanov:

Whew! If you got through all that you will be asking yourself why would anyone ever want to be a concert pianist. From my own experience, everything he says is absolutely true. Yes, apart from that tiny fraction of superstars, all concert pianists struggle with poor pay, exhausting schedules, brutal competition requirements, demanding travel schedules and all the rest. Now here is the kicker: if you are a concert guitarist it is ten times as bad! Because, guess what, the opportunities are far fewer and the pay is even lower.

Let me do a quick comparison: one of my best fees as a concert guitarist was to be the featured soloist in a gala CBC concert in honor of Brazil. I was given three months to learn the Villa-Lobos Guitar concerto (and at the last minute was asked to play a couple of Preludes as a filler). This performance took place in the Orpheum Theatre, the largest concert venue in Vancouver and was broadcast nationwide on the CBC. Big deal, right? Oh, and the orchestra was the CBC Vancouver Orchestra, a very fine ensemble. Guess what the fee was for this?

$1,250 CDN. At current exchange rates that comes to $903.90 US. Better than a slap in the face with a wet mackerel, right? Ah yes, but you have to count in the four hours a day for three months I had to spend learning the concerto. From memory. That's 360 hours of practice time. So I actually only made $2.50 an hour. Also, bear in mind that this was a well-paying gig!

In my current job I am in real estate and am paid by commission. The amount varies according to the value of the property of course, but the smallest commission I will receive this year will be for $1,560 US and it will involve no more than ten hours work.

Honestly, being a concert guitarist is not an actual job. I'm not even sure it even qualifies as a hobby. It is more like charitable volunteer work. No matter how much you love music, it is hard to imagine actually wanting to spend your life doing something that offers virtually no rewards and, these days, very little public appreciation.

I love music, but I sure hate the music business.

The Music Salon: A Retrospective

A couple of weeks ago I put up a post wondering if it was time to wrap up The Music Salon. That provoked a number of interesting comments. Some suggested I take more breaks and maybe do some indexing of past posts. Others suggested that I make the blog more focussed, not so general. Another suggested that I put together some book-length collections of related posts. That's a pretty interesting idea that has occurred to me. But my favorite comment by far came from Craig K:

There's a quote from Montaigne that I often think of as it is very relevant to our world today. And that you are, in your own way, in the musical realm, "lending them a shoulder to raise them higher":

"I see most of the wits of my time using their ingenuity to obscure the glory of the beautiful and noble actions of antiquity, giving them some vile interpretation and conjuring up vain occasions and causes for them. What great subtlety! Give me the most excellent and purest action, and I will plausibly supply fifty vicious motives for it. God knows what a variety of interpretations may be placed on our inward will, for anyone who wants to elaborate them.

The same pains that they take to detract from these great names, and the same license, I would willingly take to lend them a shoulder to raise them higher. These great figures, whom the consensus of the wise has selected as examples to the world, I shall not hesitate to restore to their places of honor, as far as my ingenuity allows me to interpret them in a favorable light. But we are forced to believe that our powers of conception are far beneath their merit. It is the duty of good men to portray virtue as being as beautiful as possible; and it would not be unbecoming to us if passion carried us away in favor of such sacred models."

- Montaigne

Craig captures exactly what I have tried to do in this blog: celebrate what is truly magical in classical music and distinguish it from the routine, the kitschy, the opportunistic and the mediocre. Along with Richard Taruskin, I have often come to realize that the true enemies of classical music often come from within.

The true engine of the blog has always been the commentators who have often filled in the gaps, adjusted the compass and provided necessary pushback. Alas, to my last post, the Friday Miscellanea, there was not a single comment. So it seems that items of interest to me are of little interest to others. Or perhaps I have just taken up the same topics too many times. In any case, it seems there is less need for The Music Salon in these days of Swiftian triumph and naked roller-skating nuns.

So while I won't draw a line to indicate the end of The Music Salon as I may post something from time to time, I doubt I will make an effort to post on a regular basis.

Thanks to you all, it has been a deeply rewarding journey.

Let's have a suitable envoi, the Chaconne by Bach in the arrangement by Andrés Segovia: