Salzburg 2019

I am going to get to Salzburg this summer and the slate of concerts looks pretty good. I have applied for the tickets already--you have to select them online and then wait to see if they have been "allocated" to you. I notice that the production of the Mozart opera Idomeneo is sold out already. Looks like there are tickets for everything else. I requested tickets for Grigory Sokolov on August 1st, the Bavarian Radio Symphony on Aug. 2 conducted by Mariss Jansons (Beethoven and Shostakovich), on Aug. 3 the Mozarteum Orchestra conducted by Ivor Bolton playing Mozart of course, on Aug. 4 Igor Levit playing Mahler and Liszt, on Aug. 5 the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Franz Welser-Möst playing Wagner, Strauss and Shostakovich, on Aug. 6 Evgeny Kissin playing Beethoven and that's all for now. I may try to get an additional ticket to the Camerata Salzburg conducted by Roger Norrington doing Mozart, Stravinsky and Haydn. I have been dying to hear Stravinsky in an historically informed performance on original instruments. 8>)

Here is a photo of the Big Hall, or as they say, the "Grosses Festspielhaus"

Aussie TV

My latest discoveries on Netflix are Aussie tv series. I have sampled Swedish and Finnish crime dramas, a Serbo-Croatian newspaper drama, action series from Israel and Turkey, a Russian show about a detective with an exceptional sense of smell, and one show about disaffected youth in Rome. None of them caught my fancy. But then I had a go at an Australian tv series and got hooked. So far I have not found one not worth watching.

Pine Gap is a one season show that takes place on a high-tech intelligence facility run jointly by the US and Australia in the Aussie outback. It just aired in 2018 so there likely will be more seasons coming out. It involves international intrigue and romance.

The Code also involves high-tech espionage, but it is more personal centered around two brothers, one of whom is a journalist and the other a brilliant, high-functioning Asperger's personality who can do just about anything with computers so he usually has to be kept away from them! Somehow he lands a gorgeous Iranian immigrant girlfriend. The three get mixed up in corruption in high places. Two seasons and well worth watching.

Secret City I have just started watching. It also involves corruption in government and stars a journalist. The amazing architecture of the Parliament House in Canberra, where much of the action takes place, is almost another character:

Click to enlarge

Wanted is my favorite so far. It follows the adventures of two women, one hiding out from the authorities after she killed her husband in self-defence, and the other the sheltered daughter of a wealthy businessman. While coincidentally waiting at a bus stop together they get mixed up in illegal drug deals, corrupt cops, and end up wanted, on the run and, of course, best friends. Three seasons and still going.

What all these series have in common is interesting and believable characters which seem to be rare in US tv these days. Plus, NO SUPERHERO COSTUMES AND NO CGI SPECIAL EFFECTS. If I see Thor throw his hammer one more time, or Iron Man rocket into the sky or Captain America do something really ludicrous with his shield I swear I'm going to hurl...

UPDATE: Just watching Season 3, episode 5 of Wanted and there was a little bit of dialogue that captures rather nicely the Australian view of things: the two leads are still on the run, on foot, and they come across an abandoned barn at dusk where they decide to hole up for the night. One character looking dubiously into the dark barn says "Do you think there'll be rats?" to which the other replies, "Not if there's snakes." Yep.

Art is Right Wing?

Reading Ann Althouse this morning, she refers to an old post of hers that sounds rather interesting: Art is right wing. That post itself quotes a comment she made on an even older post:

To be a great artist is inherently right wing. A great artist like Dylan or Picasso may have some superficial, naive, lefty things to say, but underneath, where it counts, there is a strong individual, taking responsibility for his place in the world and focusing on that.

Especially in today's environment, something like this is very provocative. Here is one comment on the post I linked:

There are two separate issues here: the creative element, that is, the art itself, and the artist's personal politics. Those artists who are leftists do not seem to realize that their individualism is at odds with actual leftism in practice.

Soviet and Chinese "art" and "literature" (the words require scare quotes in this context) made a mockery of true art, because their mandatory service to leftism destroyed originality and individualism. Only the dissidents made anything lasting.

I like the mapping out of a distinction between an artist's activity qua artist and their personal politics, but! The second paragraph, while seeming plausible, goes wildly wrong if you know something about Soviet art, specifically music composition in the Soviet Union. Three names come immediately to mind: Sergei Prokofiev, who left Russia in 1918 but in the 1930s spent more and more time going back and forth between the Soviet Union and France and in 1936 he returned permanently and took up residence in Moscow until his death in 1953, on the same day that Stalin died. Dmitri Shostakovich lived his entire professional life under the Soviet regime, born in 1906 he died in 1975. His music was condemned twice, in 1936 and 1948, but he survived both those attacks and continued to compose without ceasing until his death, though he did keep a number of works, such as the Violin Concerto no. 1, in the drawer until after Stalin's death. Sofia Gubaidulina struggled her entire career in the Soviet Union against official strictures and in 1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union, she took up residence in Hamburg, Germany.

Two out of the three: Prokofiev, Shostakovich with Aram Khatchaturian on the right.

Gubaidulina is a later generation, of course. The irony here is that a lot of the finest musicians in the oppressive political environment of the Soviet Union, were quite creative individuals whose work was often contrary to the imposed narrative. Of course they were not dissidents--there were no active, living dissidents under Stalin as he either had them shot or banished them, like Solzhenitsyn, to concentration camps. They were forced to write works that were at least superficially regime-praising, like some rather embarrassing cantatas, but most of their output was creatively quite free of those requirements. Examples would include all of Shostakovich's string quartets and Prokofiev's piano sonatas and concertos. Gubaidulina never seems to have written anything directly in service to the regime, but she came along much later.

If we look at the work of artists in Western countries today we seem to see more ideological conformity than in the Soviet Union! Isn't that a surprise? Most of the composers working in the US, for example, seem to be following the same playbook of identity, gender equity, diversity, environmentalism and so on. Art, for them at least, does not seem very right wing. We might look for evidence at Alex Ross' column on Notable Performances and Recordings of 2018:

At a time when some orchestras are unspooling entire seasons devoid of female and nonwhite composers, the L.A. Phil has commissioned twenty-two women and twenty-seven people of color. In October, at an event in the orchestra’s Green Umbrella new-music series, I was shaken by Tina Tallon’s “. . . for we who keep our lives in our throats . . .,” a response to sexual abuse.

Most works mentioned are quite free of political reference though none that I know of are as satirical of the current pieties as Shostakovich's Preface To The Complete Collection Of My Works And Brief Reflections Apropos This Preface, Op.112, or his absurdist opera The Nose.

I guess my point here is that the truth is in the details, not the superficially plausible generalization.

A good envoi here might be Shostakovich's Anti-Formalist Rayok, a work so satirical that it was not premiered in his lifetime:

In January 1989, a much-rumored work by Dmitri Shostakovich titled Anti-Formalist Rayok received its public premiere. Rayok is a single-act satirical opera/cantata for bass soloist and mixed chorus. Each character represents a prominent Soviet political figure: Joseph Stalin, Andrei Zhdanov, and Dmitri Shepilov. The text of the libretto is either taken directly from actual speeches given by these political figures or follows their idiosyncratic style of public speaking.

Of course we are not going to get any of the jokes.

Rameau for violin and guitar

Continuing my series of posts on transcriptions for violin and guitar. This piece by Rameau does not have the ideal texture for transcription for violin and guitar, but it works quite well and it is so very beautiful I make no apologies! The guitar needs to be tuned in low D. It is not hard to play, you just have to know that it is in rondeau form which means that you play (and repeat if you wish) the first section up to the double bar, then you play the first reprise, then repeat the first section again. You then jump to the second reprise and finish by ending with the first section. This can be summarized as A(A)BACA.

There is an absolutely sublime performance by Grigory Sokolov on piano, an encore from a concert in Berlin a few years ago.

Friday Miscellanea

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Plans are being released for a new London Centre for Music and The Guardian has the story. Price tag is 288 million and that's pounds not dollars.

The £288m figure is a large one, although much less than Hamburg’s magnificent Elbphilharmonie, which opened two years ago. It was originally estimated at €450m (£395m) and ended up costing €866m, most of it public money. Jean Nouvel’s publicly funded concert hall in Paris came in at €390m, three times over budget.

Sir Nicholas Kenyon, the managing director of the Barbican, pointed to the success of both concert halls in creating new demand for music.

“Hamburg’s hall has become a new symbol of that city as Disney Hall did for Los Angeles,” he said. “Think what Tate Modern achieved at the start of the millennium for raising the profile of contemporary visual arts. We can do the same for music in the 21st century.”

I hope to attend some concerts in the hall some day.

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Important news: from Slipped Disc we learn that the flat in St. Petersburg where Shostakovich began composition of his Symphony No. 7 is up for sale for a mere 27 million rubles or about $400,000 US.   Shouldn't it be a museum or something?

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There is a new biography of Chopin by Alan Walker. Terry Teachout talks about it and Chopin generally in Commentary.

Of the well-known composers of the 19th century, Fryderyk Chopin (as his name is spelled in Polish, his native tongue) is the only one whose complete works continue to be played regularly—indeed, without cease. Most of the pianists who had major international careers in the 20th century performed and recorded such staples of his catalogue as the A-flat Polonaise (“Heroic”) and the B-flat Minor Piano Sonata (“Funeral March”). They remain central to the repertoires of the rising generation of virtuosi, just as they have always been beloved by concertgoers. Yet Chopin’s phenomenal popularity was long viewed with suspicion by critics, in part because his compositions, without exception, all make use of the piano; in addition, most of them are solo pieces that are between two and 10 minutes in length. No other important classical composer has worked within so tightly circumscribed a compass.

Much as I like Terry Teachout's writing, he often reveals a smattering of musical ignorance. That first sentence needs correcting. There are quite a few 19th century composers whose (nearly) complete works get played regularly: Richard Wagner, Giuseppe Verdi and Franz Schubert to name a couple. And yes, there is at least one other important classical composer who worked within an even more tightly circumscribed compass: Domenico Scarlatti who is known almost exclusively for 555 brief sonatas for harpsichord. The article ends:

The once-conventional critical “wisdom” about Chopin’s music has finally become a thing of the past: He is now recognized as a master for whom no apologies of any kind need be made. And as fine as Alan Walker’s biography is, it is not necessary to read a word of it to know that Chopin was in every way the equal of any of the greatest classical composers who have ever lived. One need only listen—and marvel.

I really hate the casual use of scare quotes, especially around words like "wisdom" (oops). Yes, Chopin is a great composer about whom no apologies need be made, but not, perhaps, quite the equal of those guys who get placed first, second and third: Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. It comes down to a question of range or breadth or something.

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I expect great things, down the road, from students hailing from Pocatello, Idaho. District 25 announces new orchestra plan following parent, student backlash.

After dozens of parents and students voiced concerns about proposed changes to the Pocatello-Chubbuck School District 25 orchestra program during a school board meeting this week, district officials believe they have found a viable solution.

Jan Harwood, the district’s director of secondary education, told the Journal on Wednesday that district officials were able to coordinate scheduling that will allow for certified orchestra instructors to teach all 11 orchestra classes at Pocatello, Century and Highland high schools and at the district’s four middle schools during regular class hours every day of the week and all school year long.

Yahoo, and, how the heck did they manage that?

“After much discussion and schedule shuffling, we did it,” Harwood wrote in an Wednesday email distributed to all parents of students currently enrolled in the district’s orchestra program. “All 11 (daily) sections of orchestra will be taught by a certified orchestra teacher. High school students will have the opportunity to take orchestra in their high school each trimester without the need for travel.

“Ultimately, our orchestra program will grow from elementary to middle school to high school with a clear pathway to the Idaho State-Civic Symphony.”

Well, what I meant was, how the heck can you afford it? But no figures are mentioned in the article. Most school districts seem to cry lack of funding when it comes to competent musical instruction. But they always seem to have a big budget for administrative assistants, diversity counselors, and a host of other nebulous niches.

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Something Alex Ross does pretty well is keeping us abreast of what contemporary American composers are up to. His last is about two festivals of new opera: Psychotic Opera at the Prototype Festival.

In early January in New York, two festivals of new opera, music theatre, and multimedia events—the Prototype Festival, which has been running since 2013, and the Ferus Festival, which began in 2010—dismantled preconceptions of what opera is and does. In a Prototype event at the lower-Manhattan art space here, the downtown performance artist Joseph Keckler mixed operatic singing and oblique standup comedy in a one-man show called “Train with No Midnight.” At Ferus, which unfolds at National Sawdust, in Brooklyn, the composer Angélica Negrón showed scenes from “Chimera,” a work in progress about drag queens, featuring Alexis Michelle and the eleven-year-old performer Desmond Is Amazing.

Prototype likes shows with hot-button relevance, which can be exhausting: opera doesn’t always have to be dire. But there was no denying the sledgehammer power of Philip Venables’s “4.48 Psychosis,” which was presented at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, under Prototype’s aegis. This is an adaptation of the play of the same name by the British dramatist Sarah Kane, who committed suicide in 1999, shortly after completing it.

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We need a couple of envois today as well. Skipping over psychotic opera, let's have some Chopin. This is his Ballade no. 1 in G minor played by Krystian Zimerman:

And, what the heck, how about that Symphony No. 7 by Shostakovich? This is Marin Alsop conducting the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra:

Critic Wars

Anne Midgette at the Washington Post, a classical music critic whom I quite like and who is often linked to in this blog, has a piece up about the virtues of symphonic Star Wars: As a classical music critic, I used to think the ‘Star Wars’ score was beneath me. I was wrong. That headline is another example of humble-bragging or straw-man-creating that is so ubiquitous these days. Sure, John Williams is a hugely successful film music composer, but the success of the music in symphonic programs has perhaps more to do with the fact that audiences crave familiarity than actual inherent quality. Let's let Anne tell it:

I saw “A New Hope” with both the NSO and the BSO in September and found that the experience confirmed something I had started to suspect: As a classical music critic, I was clueless. That is: While I liked John Williams’s music just fine when I first saw the film at age 12, by the time I had attained legal adulthood, laden with a cargo of acquired snobbery about the superiority of Western civilization, I had learned, and bravely parroted, that “film music” was somehow beneath me. And for the next three decades, through all the sequels I didn’t see and the quartet Williams composed for the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2009, which I did, I continued to use “film music” as a pejorative term that, if looked at closely, probably meant to me something akin to “something which one enjoys, but shouldn’t.”

I detect something of a forced confession here. This is a standard trope these days as all classical critics are supposed to humble themselves and, of course demean the classical traditions of Western civilization. I think you have to sign a disloyalty oath or something. Let's let Anne continue:

This isn’t a reflection on Williams, who is one of the most successful and popular composers of all time. It’s a reflection on me, and a reflection on the notion of the canon that so many classical music lovers unquestioningly embrace. Buying into this hierarchy seemed for years to be an entry-level requirement for the kind of life in the arts I hoped to live: initially as a Serious Writer With Intellectual Pretensions; later as a classical music critic. Film music, and populism, were easy targets. It has taken me half a lifetime to fully realize what most people knew at the first hearing: Good means good, effective means effective. Given that I’ve always made a point of embracing the best of popular fiction — Rex Stout and StephenKing and John le Carré — why was I so closed to the best of popular music, including a score that always had me, and everyone else, humming along?

It’s not that I had a conversion experience only this September. I first started to realize the merits of the Williams score when the BSO programmed Williams alongside Philip Glass, and I realized that Williams held up just fine.

 More straw-man stuff. The phrase "notion of the canon" is already assuming the conclusion as does the subsequent phrase "that so many classical music lovers unquestioningly embrace." I can assure you that, as a matter of course, I question the quality of all the music I listen to! "Buying into this hierarchy" is another phrase making a foregone conclusion. Wouldn't it be nice if someone actually argued their point instead of just assuming it?

I had to chuckle at the Philip Glass comparison. Oh yes, Williams does hold up just fine alongside Glass. They are both very effective and rather thin musically. The truth is, if we wanted to actually pretend to be music critics for a moment, that John Williams is an enthusiastic looter of every striking orchestral effect used in the last hundred years from Rimsky-Korsakov to Gustav Holst, from Berlioz to Mahler, if there is a good trick, he has likely used it. Oh, I forgot Tchaikovsky. Sure this is good music but while effective it is also deeply, dare I say, derivative, which is why we enjoy it as a soundtrack but likely don't want to put it in the same category as some really great orchestral music by, you know, Rimsky-Korsakov, Gustav Holst, Berlioz, Mahler and Tchaikovsky who actually came up with these ideas and devices in the first place. See what I mean?

We need envois by Williams and some of his mentors. Here is a suite from Star Wars:

Here is a little Holst:

And a little Rimsky-Korsakov:

The General and the Specific

No idea what tags to use for this one! I was thinking about composition and about something that has bothered me for many years that I had trouble clarifying in my mind. Part of the idea comes from something a musicologist said in a doctoral seminar years ago. The seminar was on DuFay and we had been talking about some of the details of his employment by the church and the professor said, "as musicologists we are interested in the details." Another class on another occasion, theory this time, and the professor averred that theory was something like composition in reverse: what we were trying to do was "reverse-engineer" a piece of music to see how it was put together so that you could use what you discovered to write a piece of your own. On a fairly basic level, that has some truth to it, but on another level it is impossible. Imagine you are trying to reverse-engineer a sonata movement by Haydn. Every movement you look at is going to be put together differently in significant ways.

Ok, that's a couple of things that relate to what I am going to talk about. A third is something that goes on in my mind when I am thinking about composing. Sometimes I just have a very general idea like: "the climax of this piece should be a section that progressively saturates the rhythmic and harmonic space." Good idea, right? Actually, not, because it is too general. Most climaxes saturate the rhythmic and harmonic space to some degree, so this idea doesn't actually get you very far.

So, the general and the specific. Now that I think about it, this might also relate, distantly, to Plato's theory of the Forms.

The theory of Forms or theory of Ideas^[1][2][3] is a philosophical theory, concept, or world-view, attributed to Plato, that the physical world is not as real or true as eternal, absolute, unchangeable ideas.^[4] According to this theory, ideas in this sense, often capitalized and translated as "Ideas" or "Forms",^[5] are the non-physical essences of all things, of which objects and matter in the physical world are merely imitations. Plato speaks of these entities only through the characters (primarily Socrates) of his dialogues who sometimes suggest that these Forms are the only objects of study that can provide knowledge. The theory itself is contested from within Plato's dialogues, and it is a general point of controversy in philosophy. Whether the theory represents Plato's own views is held in doubt by modern scholarship.^[6] However, the theory is considered a classical solution to the problem of universals.

The problem of universals might be described as being about what we mean by certain terms. For examples, there are lots of objects we describe as being "chairs":

What makes them all "chairs"?  They are made of different materials and have different shapes. Their functions are even a bit different. We might say that what they share is "chairness" or the form of the Chair. For Plato, this Form has a reality of its own on a transcendent plane and everyday chairs are chairs because they metaphysically share in this "chairness." Aristotle had a slightly different take on it: the idea of a chair is in the mind of the builder and constitutes the "formal cause" of the physical chair. There are other theories, of course, that philosophers like to bat around.

Getting back to music (whew!), my point is that value in music is closely related to specificity. Another thing that prompted this thought is a musical neighbor that I have heard several times recently. He seems to only know two chords and spends hours simply going back and forth between them while improvising singing or synthesizer tracks on top. It is rather annoying and part of the reason is that this kind of thing is generic, not specific. The generic, the general, the abstract is, I propose, the enemy of creativity and aesthetic quality. Those pieces that we particularly enjoy and praise are very particular pieces. They have specific qualities that they do not share with other pieces. This is true, I believe of paintings, sculptures, drama and dance as well as music. Our intellectual faculty is always looking to generalize and abstract to arrive at some higher truth. But in art, certainly music, that "higher truth" is specific, not general. Every good piece of music that I can think of has a unique character that sets it apart from every other piece of music. Pieces of music that sound vaguely like other pieces of music are not highly valued aesthetically.

At this point you could certainly make an opposing argument. Lots and lots of popular music sounds vaguely alike, in fact it is intentionally made so. Lots of people highly value popular music, by definition, therefore my argument is invalid. Well, maybe. I tend to think that popular music has a superficial, immediate charm that fades rather quickly. Those songs that become popular "classics" tend to have just those kind of unique qualities that I have been talking about. Generic pop tends to fade pretty quickly.

So when you are trying to compose a good piece, you are always looking for the specific, not the general. What I find really remarkable is how composers so often manage to take something that seems at first to be rather general, and turn it into something specific and distinctive. A powerful example is the Art of Fugue by Bach, the whole of which is based on a very simple, almost generic, subject:

D minor triad outlined, C# leading tone, movement by step to third, descent by step from 4th to tonic.  That's it. Every subsequent fugue is based on a variation of this simple subject.

People sometimes talk about how art is about the imposition of order on chaos. In music at least, it is also about finding the unique and specific in the general and abstract. It is about creating or discovering individuality.

Let's listen to the Art of Fugue. This is Grigory Sokolov in a live concert in Leningrad around 1980: