Thenness and Nowness

I could have just said "Then and Now," but that would have missed the slight frisson of philosophical abstraction that I like to add to my posts--kinda like MacDonald's special sauce on the Big Mac. Speaking of hamburgers, this post was partly inspired by this Carl Hardee's Jr. commercial. Have a look:

Now I like that--not because I am a fan of their food, I don't think I have ever set foot in one of their establishments--no, I like it because the theme is "back to the roots."

I was mulling over the idea of thenness and nowness and some examples came to mind. We have to go back a few years. When I was in first year university I was enrolled in a German course and the text was pretty good. For the readings it had a pretty fair selection of German literature that included folks like Goethe and a bunch more that I don't recall. I kept the book on my shelves for decades after and only lost it in the Great Evil Mover Event of several years ago. I had to take another German course when I was a grad student in musicology, much more recently, and the contrast was striking: the new text had no actual German literature, just mundane readings from advertisements and other ordinary fodder.

Let's take another example: I just bought a book on yoga for people over fifty (yes, I know, depressing, isn't it!) and I can't help but compare it to a book I had when I was twelve on yoga. This one:

Here is the one I just bought:

After doing a little bit of browsing, I cannot but think that the old one is much better than the new one. It got right down to business while the new one spends a remarkable amount of time babbling about how the author got into teaching, more babbling about how wonderful yoga is and how it can reverse ageing and so on. The first fifty, sixty pages are like an extended infomercial for the book. Please! The only thing the new book has over the old one is better design and better photos. Well, clearer photos--as far as illustrating poses they are no better than the old ones. The whole book just exudes an aura of phoniness and BS. But oh so flattering to the reader and the author, wow, is it ever. The old book just spent all of its time teaching you about yoga and as a result, taught you a lot more.

We keep hearing about how our culture is being dumbed down, but we kind of nod our heads disapprovingly without actually taking it in. The truth is that two things are happening with the transmission of knowledge. First, yes, except for very specialized contexts, all knowledge is being dumbed down to a remarkable extent. At the same time it is being pumped up with glitz and design and flashy colors and marketing and flattering the recipients. The other thing that is happening is that there is very often some sort of ideological subtext where they smuggle in whatever fashionable memes they can: climate change! equity! inequality! You know that script.

I read somewhere that there are only two fundamental themes in politics: "Bright New Day!" and "Back to Basics!" I guess it is time for the latter as we have had about as much of the former as we can stand, for a while anyway.

The arts are often a harbinger of social change, though reading them successfully is not very easy. But I think we can trace a movement in music that is about as "back to basics" as you can get. Yes, I have talked about this before, but that does not make it any less striking. In the late 60s and early 70s several composers in the US, among them Philip Glass and Steve Reich, went back to the musical basics with a vengeance. Here are a couple of examples. First, Philip Glass, Music With Changing Parts:

Next, Steve Reich with Music for Large Ensemble:

Attacks on Western Civilization Continue...

Apparently the left side of society is more "open" and therefore more creative, according to psychologists. Well, maybe, but lately it seems as if an inordinate amount of that creativity consists of finding ever more creative ways of wreaking havoc on the cultural traditions of the West. Today's example comes from the Guardian with the innocuous title: "Music education is now only for the white and the wealthy." One might assume that the article is going to be about extending the benefits to the non-white and non-wealthy, but the author, Charlotte Gill, goes much further:

For a creative subject, music has always been taught in a far too academic way, meaning that theoretical knowledge is the main route to advancement. While there are routes into musical careers for the untrained, and many pop, rap and grime artists have never studied music formally, there are also dozens of choirs and amateur collectives that put a huge focus on musical notation.

This is a cryptic, tricky language – rather like Latin – that can only be read by a small number of people, most of whom have benefited from private education. Children who do not have the resources, or ability, to comprehend it, are written off. Even when they are capable performers.

So what she really wants is to return music to the pre-literate state it had before the invention of music notation a thousand years ago. As is so often the case, the author's attitude is shaped by her own biography:

I cannot sight read. This is something that means I cannot join the many choirs around the UK that name this as a requirement. The patterns and figures of music don’t easily unravel in my mind. I suspect that’s the case for many other children and adults; some get notation, others don’t. Neither is indicative of talent, but while we do not find lateral, inclusive ways to engage people – as well as loosening our ideas of what constitutes musical ability – we are losing masses of would-be performers.

The inability to sight-read is certainly indicative of a lack of talent in that area, one would think.

The insistence on theoretical understanding is underpinned by the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, which sets the most widely-used music exams. To meet its requirements, pupils must work through limited repertoires of old, mostly classical music, focusing most of their efforts on mastering musical literacy, above songwriting, composing, or even enjoyment.

Damn those Associated Boards for privileging classical music over songwriting!

Well, I won't keep quoting, as you get the idea. The basic precept of post-modernism is that there are no values and therefore, no need to teach any understanding of them, theoretical, aesthetic or otherwise. The only thing that matters is your subjective whim, here cleverly disguised as "enjoyment" as if the very idea that anyone anywhere might actually enjoy performing and listening to classical music is a very peculiar one.

Ms Gill got rather a lot of pushback from professional musicians, as related at Slipped Disc:

Charlotte C. Gill (‘Music education is now only for the white and wealthy’) argues that ‘to enable more children to learn [music], we must stop teaching in such an academic way.’ While rightly noting the increasing chasm between state and private education in terms of music provision, her conclusions about musical notation and theoretical skills amount to simple anti-intellectualism.

Gill dismisses the study of music ‘theory’ and argues patronisingly that musical notation is ‘a cryptic, tricky language (…) that can only be read by a small number of people’. This claim flies in the face of countless initiatives over two centuries making musical literacy available to those of many backgrounds. As with written language, musical notation enables effective and accurate communication, as well as critical access to huge amounts of knowledge. In many musical fields, those without it will be at a deep disadvantage and dependent upon others.

Gill’s comments about ‘limited repertoires of old, mostly classical music’ are unfounded and presented without evidence: composing, listening, singing, and playing are embedded in much musical education, which also widely encompasses jazz, popular, and non-Western traditions. Claiming that classical music comprises a limited repertory is inaccurate: composers have been adding to its repertory for centuries and continue to do so. We agree with Gill that aural and other skills are equally important as those in notation. However, through her romanticisation of illiteracy, Gill’s position could serve to make literate musical education even more exclusive through being marginalised in state schools yet further.

There follows a very, very, very long list of signatories.

Speaking of choirs, Guido of Arezzo invented the idea of a lined staff largely to be able to record specific melodies. He also invented a way of sight-singing to help choirs learn to read this new-fangled writing.

If things keep going in the direction they have, then in a few years I fully expect someone to be opining in the Guardian that the idea of requiring students to read at all is unnecessary. English is, after all, a cryptic, tricky language and learning how to read it largely unneeded now that we have audible books. If you are creative, just dictate your novel into your iPad or iPhone. Really, what is the point of requiring anyone to read written languages?

Our envoi is the Symphony No. 5 by Prokofiev conducted at the Proms by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. You will notice that many of the people onstage are actually reading from musical notation. The performance itself starts just before the 5 minute mark:

Prince, Interviewed

There is a hilarious interview with Prince by CNBC commentator Maria Bartiromo in which he refuses to sing, but offers to accompany her while she sings. Confusion ensues:

I like this because Prince is a creative guy and creative people like to do things differently whenever possible. In a typical celebrity interview, and they are almost all typical, the celebrity is basically performing their celebrity. But here, Prince just acts like a musician. Hey, you want to make some music, let's make some music. I'll play guitar and you sing. If Bartiromo were as creative as Prince, she would have at least tried. After all, everyone can sing, it is just that some do it better than others. So what comes across is how terribly afraid Maria is of people hearing her try to sing on television. That's the real story here. Clever how Prince does that...

So ask yourself: what would you have done in this situation? There is an easy and obvious solution, even if you don't know a single song by Prince. Everything is an improvisation. So you don't know Delirious from 1999? Doesn't matter, just sing anything. You don't even need words. Just riff on the lick he is playing on the guitar. Then you would be making music with Prince. And you can be sure if you sing something other than the lick he is playing, he will pick up on it and fool around with it. That's how it works. But what is interesting is how Maria won't allow herself to sing a single note. She thinks that it is just a joke, but it isn't. He really isn't going to sing. He'll play guitar, ok, but you have to sing. Actually, this is a fascinating clip because it shows what has happened to us, as a culture. Due to the professionalization of music, ordinary people feel that they are not allowed to be musical in public. And isn't that a shame.

You don't know any blues?

UPDATE: I keep thinking of things Maria Bartiromo could have done or said that would have made the interview more fun, or at least, less embarrassing! How about breaking out with "I got the Prince came on my show and refused to sing and I had to blues .... for Christmas!" Or, "I'm Italian, I only sing Puccini and Verdi? Do you know O mio babbino caro?"

The Strange World of Culture in Canada

As an only marginally socialized young person, much of the world of art and culture puzzled the heck out of me, growing up. A lot of this was an incapacity to realize that simple evil and nastiness was present even in the most prestigious arts institutions. As Solzhenitsyn said:

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

 But this truth was one omitted from most of the books I read about the arts which concerned themselves with uncontroversial topics like the technical progress of the arts, or the history of the arts (which they took to be the same thing) or personalities in the arts or, in music, style and repertoire. All very useful things to know, but only part of the story and the most flattering part at that. The more interesting story is perhaps how truly creative artists are often frustrated or ignored by the "arts community" which is, sadly, to a great part comprised of self-serving, narcissistic, careerist mediocrities who spend all their time puffing up their own meagre accomplishments.

Canada, with its naive devotion to dangerous abstractions like "arts policy", which is really nothing more than the arts establishment's attempt to control arts expression to further its own political aims, is a particularly supportive environment for arts careerism as it is for elite oligarchies. We find both these unpleasant characteristics in the sordid tale of "The heiress, the impresario and the juiciest divorce ever" in Maclean's Magazine. Here is an excerpt, but you really need to read the whole thing:

On April 28, 2014, a joyful Eleanor McCain shared her love for Jeff Melanson on Facebook, posting a photo of the two of them sitting next to one another on a stone bench. The daughter of the late frozen french-fry titan Wallace McCain, who has carved out a career as a singer, is wearing a pink dress and vintage jacket while smiling adoringly at the man she called her “fiancé.” He’s attired in a dark blue suit, looking away from her, into the distance, a beatific smile on his face. The accompanying message—a hybrid love-letter/PR statement—pays tribute to Melanson, citing his 2½ years running the Banff Centre and his recently announced position as president and CEO of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra: “I am very proud of Jeff for his recent appointments, all of his accomplishments and most of all the integrity, character and grace with which he handles everything in his life. Congratulations my love!” she wrote, attaching links to media stories celebrating Melanson’s return: The TSO “needs a miracle worker and it has found one,” the Toronto Star gushed in one.

But the combatants also represent the extremes of the insular Canadian art world—buyer and seller, donor and visionary—and at least some of what’s wrong with it. If McCain bought her way into the arts scene, “[losing] money on her ‘artistic’ endeavours,” as her estranged husband alleges in his claim that she “buys opportunities for herself and loses money on her ‘artistic’ endeavours’,” Melanson sold his way in: catapulting to celebrity status, particularly among the philanthropic elite, with a compelling, marketable vision of how the arts enrich communities, nations and economies. Such was Melanson’s charisma and celebrity that this is a world in which the hare, not the tortoise, gets the spotlight even if he doesn’t finish the race. It’s seldom acknowledged that his near-$1-billion plan for the Banff Centre was abandoned 2½ years in, and his epic $166.4-million plan for the money-losing TSO to build a recording studio and media lab went unquestioned publicly.

Let's just have a listen to the artistic side of Eleanor McCain. I choose this excerpt only because I performed the Concierto de Aranjuez by Joaquin Rodrigo on this same stage with the same orchestra--and they weren't nearly as bored as they appear here:

What about Jeff Melanson, her ex? He is the other side of the Canadian arts scene, not the trust fund amateur, but the snake-oil salesman. Here are some excerpts from a fawning puff-piece in the Globe and Mail:

The term rock-star arts administrator is not used with great regularity – even less so with “Canadian” tacked on in front of it – but this is a story about one. Jeff Melanson shocked the Canadian arts establishment last month when he announced that he was leaving the Banff Centre, the renowned creativity incubator and performance hub, where he has been president since 2012. Two weeks later, another announcement: He would be, come the fall, president and CEO of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.

Melanson has been Canada's leading arts administrator, at least in music, with stints at the Royal Conservatory of Music Community School in Toronto, the National Ballet School, arts advisor to Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, the Banff Centre and finally the Toronto Symphony. These are the leading performing arts institutions in English Canada. Maclean's mentions some of his accomplishments:

Melanson checked all the boxes, appealing to a younger audience in a way older donors could appreciate. At Banff, to the consternation of some, he shifted focus from classical music to jazz, world music and indie bands. Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew was given a residency; Melanson sang backup on a recording project. He reached out to First Nations, staging a Banff first: an all-night ceremony that saw elders bless the campus. It was a pattern repeated at the TSO; partnerships included one with the Polaris Music Prize that saw the orchestra cover Drake’s Know Yourself and DJ Skratch Bastid headline a show.

After he left Banff to take up the position at the Toronto Symphony:

At Banff, where the expansion plan has been downsized and the digital radio station shuttered, there’s a sense of embarrassment. “After the shock, I think the general feeling was one of being used. It was more a sense of shame that they had been duped into submission by this fast-talking guy and then abandoned,” says one insider. “Eleanor McCain is not the only one jilted here,” said another. At the TSO, the Studio Project is “on the back burner,” says a spokesman.

This is the sad tale of arts in Canada: it is dominated by an incestuous ring of insiders who merely use the arts for their own career ambitions. They are mediocrities and worse: scam artists and slick talkers. People with no understanding or interest in actual aesthetic value, but only what public and patron funds they can cream off for themselves. It is a dark and depressing tale, but one that the public has little sense of because the media keep shining, forgive me, the shit and blowing pixie dust over everything.

Of course there are real artists in Canada. But they get little credit and are hugely overshadowed by people like this. After a while, they either move away or give up in discouragement because it is the mediocrities and scam artists that set the standards and make the important decisions.

Let's see if we can clear the palate with some good music. This is young Canadian guitarist Drew Henderson, whom I just discovered recently. He is playing the Zapateado from the Three Spanish Pieces by Joaquin Rodrigo:

Friday Miscellanea

One of the things I like about my new place is that I have a banana tree and a key lime tree. And the banana tree is just beginning to fruit:

Do you see them there in the middle? I think they are actually plantains, those big, squarish bananas that you actually cook and serve as a vegetable, especially in Yucatan cuisine.

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Ann Althouse is devoting a post to her (and Paul Shaffer's) youthful discovery of the Four Seasons:

Shaffer was listening to the radio in the early 60s, at the same time I had my most intense radio experiences, and I had exactly the same reaction to The 4 Seasons and to the early Beatles. (What was the big deal in a world that already had The 4 Seasons?!).

Well, I dunno. It's certainly an unusual vocal style:

But I don't need to hear it more than once. Personally...

* * *

Damian Thompson over at the Spectator is getting tough with Maurizio Pollini:

The man has been sucking the life out of Beethoven piano sonatas for decades, but surely never so annoyingly as he did last week, when he opened the spring season of the Southbank Centre’s International Piano Series.

The applause was thunderous, it’s true, but it was a particular type of applause that you hear more often at the Southbank than anywhere else: a veteran soloist being cheered to the rafters, not for the music (I hope — unless the audience were cloth-eared morons) but for being himself.

Listening to his Pathétique sonata, I wondered if he was just there to collect his cheque. He could hardly be bothered to dot the chords in the Grave opening, which should be tightly coiled so the main theme shoots up the keyboard like a rocket. That didn’t happen. In all three Beethoven sonatas, Pollini ironed out contrasts of tempo and dynamics. Also, he kept shaving the ends of phrases and squeezing pauses, as if to say, ‘Let’s get this over with.’

I don’t see why we should make excuses for him because he’s 75 years old. Knowing when to retire is one of the tests of a great pianist.

I heard Andrés Segovia in 1976 when he was 83 years old and he was magnificent. He played a program that would have been too demanding for me at the time, and I was a 25 year old performance major! The first half, including a large Sor sonata, was an hour of music and the second half almost as much. This was followed by six or seven encores! You know, Segovia never did retire. In the middle of his last tour, he fell ill, canceled the last couple of concerts and flew home where he passed away just a few months later.

* * *

There is a new album of Bach out by the trio of Yo-Yo Ma, Chris Thile and Edgar Meyer. That is, cello, mandolin and double bass. Sure, Bach never wrote for this combination, but transcriptions of his music abound for every combination imaginable. I have written about Chris Thile's Bach before, without much enthusiasm, I have to say. What puzzles me is why reviews of new recordings, such as Norman Lebrecht's of the new Bach album in Musical Toronto, omit links to clips on YouTube? There are a lot there as publicity for the album. I guess it is because the links go away after a while. But, since they are there, let's have a listen. This is the trio playing the first movement of the Trio Sonata BWV 530:

Very folksy in a contrived publicity and marketing manner. The music? Trivial. Lebrecht gives them a generous two stars for the inoffensive background noise. It is not bad--these are all fine players, of course--but it is not really worthy of Bach either.

* * *

Norman Lebrecht has a little clip up of police sergeant Jim Quackenbush of Portland, Oregon playing Beethoven. He is a pretty fine amateur pianist who has studied with some well-known artists. Let's hear it for every amateur musician in the world!!

* * *

Quite a while back I did a post on the violin concerto that noted that the concerto form (or genre, whatever) has amazing longevity. There are great concertos from every century since Vivaldi made the form popular until now. Vulture magazine has an article making the same point with some interesting examples:

A few decades ago, I would not have put money on the survival of the concerto, except as an antiquarian curiosity. Celebrity soloists continued milking the classics, but the rest of the music world seemed to have moved on from all that gladiatorial bravura, the individual versus the collective story line that made the genre such a Romantic-era staple. And yet composers have kept returning to the sturdy drama of a lone virtuoso (or a few) fronting a thronging orchestra, and new works by Sofia Gubaidulina, Lera Auerbach, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Timo Andres suggest that the genre is having a new heyday. Different as they are, these composers all revisit conventions but shun cliché, merging formal boldness with expressive flair.

* * *

Back in the 1970s every aspiring young guitarist was in love with the music of Léo Brouwer, the Cuban guitarist composer. Finally we had a modern master who wrote music that was fresh and contemporary. Brouwer remains productive even now and has written an impressive number of guitar concertos. But for me, he never surpassed the excitement and novelty of the pieces he wrote in the late 1960s. The most impressive of these were Elogio de la Danza and La Espiral Eterna. The performers are, for Elogio, Pepe Romero and for Espiral, Brouwer himself:

The influence in Elogio is Stravinsky, but the wonderful use of the guitar's colors and textures is pure Leo Brouwer. Espiral Eterna is influenced by the tape music of Stockhausen, with whom Brouwer studied.

* * *

As a bonus today, and a follow-up to yesterday's post on Jordan Peterson, here is a talk he gave ten years ago (note the goatee and darker hair) about music. He begins by saying "I think that music is a genuine mystery" which immediately caught my attention because I have been saying the same thing here for years. He starts by talking about music, but then takes a long journey through many other things, finally getting back to music at around the 39 minute mark. Worth taking the journey, though.

What Artists Do

I had a commentator complaining recently that I always seem to have it in for academia. Well, I often do, yes, and I think they entirely deserve it! But, in point of fact, there are some brilliant and wonderful people in academia, some of whom I had the great priviledge to study and work with. I recall a terrific philosophy professor from my undergraduate days and a truly great violinist from my teaching days. I recently ran across someone that really exemplifies what academia should be, at its finest. This is psychology professor Jordan B. Peterson of the University of Toronto giving an impromptu talk about an artist named Tadeusz Biernot on the occasion of an exhibit of his work in Toronto. In the process he gives a brilliant explanation of who artists are and what they do and why it is so valuable. This clip begins with two and a half minutes introduction to the artist and the exhibit. The rest is the talk by Peterson.

Just about everything in the talk is interesting and unusual. Prof. Peterson recently became very notorious for criticizing new legislation in Ontario that requires that people in many walks of life must use the pronouns that individuals request. He put up a couple of videos pointing out that individual identity is NOT a subjective whim, but a negotiation between the individual and the people that surround him (or do I mean "her"?).

But Peterson is so very much more than a political gadfly. He is a genuinely brilliant scholar who is very learned in myth, philosophy, history and literature. Here is an excerpt from a lecture in which he talks about the mythology of ancient Egypt and what it might mean to us today:

He is a bit Jungian, but knows his Nietzsche as well. He just seems brilliant and very learned in all sorts of areas. Here is a TED talk he gave on, well, what? Being human?

Teaching Styles and Methods

At a rough approximation, I think I have studied with approximately twenty or so different instrumental teachers in my time. This includes a few amateur guitarists in the very early days, then José Tomas in Alicante, Spain, Michael Strutt in Montréal, Léo Brouwer in Montréal and Toronto, Oscar Ghiglia in Banff, Alberta and Pepe Romero in Victoria, BC and Salzburg, Austria. Plus I have sat in on several master classes given by Abel Carlevaro and the occasional one by a pianist or singer.

Everyone has a different approach. I can hardly remember a thing that Tomas said in the many private lessons I had with him, but I remember his examples very well. One day I came to class with the John Duarte arrangement of the First Cello Suite by Bach. In this version, probably the most widely performed, the original in G major is transposed up a fifth to D major. Then the sixth string of the guitar is tuned down to D and bass lines are added. After I played, just the prelude, I think, Tomas picked up his eight-string guitar, dug around amongst his scores, and sight read the prelude from the original cello music in G major. It sounded so rich in comparison with the tinny sounding version up a fifth that I immediately gave up the idea of learning the Duarte arrangement. In the original key, it certainly did not need an added bass line. I was playing a six-string, not an eight-string guitar so Tomas suggested I try it in A major instead, which, years later, I did. After transposing and learning the whole suite I decided that it needed the third string to be in F# as well as the sixth in D, so I re-learned it. I also recorded the whole suite. Here is the prelude.

With Oscar Ghiglia, on the other hand, I hardly recall him playing anything in particular, but I remember what he said, very well. He loved to teach with metaphor. I remember him comparing the slow part of the prelude to the first lute suite by Bach to an opera plot. When the harmony got to a very dramatic V4/2 chord, he uttered in a deep voice: "revenge!" It seemed to perfectly capture the drama of the moment. Another time he might teach the same passage with an entirely different metaphor. I remember the devastating critique he gave of one woman's Bach: "you played that like you were going shopping!"

But I think all teachers give little demonstrations of how a phrase might go best, or how to balance a certain harmony.

Pepe Romero seemed to take a two-pronged approach: on the one hand he really focussed on technique. Uniquely among all the master classes I have seen, he would start each session with ten or fifteen minutes of technique with everyone playing together. He has some great exercises and I use them to this day to warm up and maintain my technique. One happy result of this was that nearly every guitarist had, by the end of the course, a much higher level of technical confidence. The importance of this cannot be over-rated. The other part of his approach was perhaps psychological. He talked about things like not playing from ego and about having a spiritual base. When it came to the music, he didn't say a lot. I think he has a very instinctive approach.

Oh, one other thing about José Tomas' approach: he had a scholarly side and also was an absolute master of fingerings. His editions of Bach or Scarlatti or Weiss were always the most practically and efficiently fingered.

Frankly, I don't remember a darn thing Leo Brouwer said either of the times I played for him--oh, apart from him asking about my odd sitting position the first time. I used to sit with the guitar positively wedged into my left thigh and tilting very forward.

One very funny thing I remember from Abel Carlevaro's master classes: he would say the same thing to every player: "you have two problems, the right hand and the left hand." True enough!

One more thing about Oscar Ghiglia: he had a sardonic side and seemed to really dislike everything about Argentina. I made the mistake of playing a piece by Máximo Diego Pujol, a guitarist-composer from Buenos Aires, for him once and all he did was tell a really disgusting joke about Argentinians. This was the piece.

One final thought about teaching: hardly any style or method gets to the really nitty-gritty core of what you need to play music. I think it boils down to concentration: if you have really good focus and concentration, then you can use your musicality and technical command at its best. If not, then the performance will come apart. So however you work, you need to develop your focus and concentration. I don't recall any teachers talking much about that...

Let's end with a fine performance by a young Canadian guitarist who seems to have this concentration thing down. This is Drew Henderson playing the Allegro from the Violin Sonata No. 2 BWV 1003 by J. S. Bach.