Friday Miscellanea

From the New York Times: The Complex History Behind a Vienna Philharmonic Tradition.

If the Vienna Philharmonic’s annual New Year’s Concert is a global success, its legacy and reach rest on five pillars: a marvelous orchestra; internationally renowned conductors; a timeless repertoire, by the Strauss family and other composers of the 19th century; a splendid location, the gilded Musikverein; and TV broadcasts watched most recently by some 1.2 million people in 92 countries on five continents.

The event, which returns this weekend with Franz Welser-Möst leading the Philharmonic, is by now a familiar one, and a multiday affair with three concerts. Between the preview performance, the New Year’s Eve Concert and the New Year’s Concert, conductors and the orchestra are faced with the extreme demands of an emotionally and physically challenging marathon. Just days after the series of concerts, CDs and DVDs of the Jan. 1 concert are released for sale worldwide.

* * * 

One of the more unfashionable principles held to be true around here is that the crucial element in all aesthetics is quality, which is traditionally exhibited in the idea of a "masterpiece." This is often attacked from various angles: the relativity of taste, equity, social justice and even things like decolonization. Obviously masterpieces produced by dead white men are intrinsically suspect! But despite this, those pesky masterpieces keep hanging around, the real benchmarks and touchstones of their genres. The Wall Street Journal has an ongoing series titled "Masterpiece" and they collect the most popular ones of the year here: The Most Popular ‘Masterpiece’ Columns of 2022. One of the most interesting:

“The Waste Land,” the most influential poem of the 20th century, was published 100 years ago in T.S. Eliot’s highbrow journal The Criterion. This wildly original and difficult long poem portrays with imaginative authority the modern world as a spiritual desert. Wretched people devoid of religious belief lead a meaningless existence. By describing the bitter mood, after World War I had destroyed a belief in European civilization, the poem touched raw nerves.

The poem is written in disconnected pieces (“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”) and has sudden transitions.

Feel free to set this beside The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky, arguably the greatest composition of the 20th century. Another essay in the series is on Dante and begins with this quote:

T.S. Eliot said: “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.”

But he is wrong, of course: there is Homer. 

* * *

Here is something interesting: Pandemic Woes Lead Met Opera to Tap Endowment and Embrace New Work

Facing tepid ticket sales, the company will withdraw up to $30 million from its endowment and stage more operas by living composers, which have been outselling the classics.

Art does often respond to necessity, going back to the Renaissance. And it does not necessarily result in bad art.

* * *

Here's an interesting little statistic: https://twitter.com/byHeatherLong/status/1607808853462089728. Americans are far more likely to move to Mexico than Canada. Well, yeah, just compare the weather!

* * *

From the Guardian: Tears, cheers and whirlytubes: our critics pick their classical highlights of 2022. Picking out one example almost at random:

No artist touched the soul more deeply and more often than the German baritone Christian Gerhaher. I heard him five times in 2022, all at the Wigmore Hall. Three recitals were devoted to Hugo Wolf, bringing peerless vocal illumination to this highly varied repertoire. The most recent, reunited with his regular accompanist Gerold Huber, was a hair-raising account of Schubert’s Schwanengesang cycle. But the most extraordinary was Gerhaher’s appearance at a private memorial concert for Bernard Haitink, at which his singing of Mahler’s Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen touched levels of vocal artistry that are exceptionally rare.

* * *

Slipped Disc weighs in on: ALL-NEW 2023 POWER COUPLES OF CLASSICAL MUSIC. Or it might just be an excuse to post a photo of Yuja Wang's legs.

* * *

'Second chair' musicians are just as trained as principals and paid lower. Here's why.

There are generally three roles in any section, and each is a tenured position that takes an audition to win.

First, there’s the principal player, the section leader.

Next is associate principal, who plays first part on some pieces during a concert if the principal wants to focus on a particular work. For concertgoers, this is why the wind section often looks different in the first and second halves of a symphony performance.

“The idea is that the demands of principal positions are such that to play entire programs isn’t conducive to peak performance,” said Ron Samuels, Pittsburgh’s second clarinetist, who played principal in a smaller orchestra in Toledo, Ohio, for 15 years before moving to Pittsburgh.

More information at the link, but it is actually a fairly complex situation that goes well beyond how much training the musicians have.

* * *

 Here is baritone Christian Gerhaher and pianist Gerold Huber with a Schubert lied.

Here is Hommage à T. S. Eliot by Sofia Gubaidulina, one example of her close aesthetic connections with other art genres:

And finally, the Vienna Philharmonic New Year's concert from last year:

New Jordan Peterson Video

I doubt that there is a more important thinker in the English-speaking world today, which is reason enough to have a look at his latest talk. But there are more reasons than that. This talk, just posted yesterday, is given in connection with his new role as Chancellor of Ralston College and takes place in the ancient site of Ephesus in what is now Turkey. He untangles so many of the profound problems underlying not only our aesthetic conflicts, but also ones of a broader social nature dealing with justice, science, value and so on. I recommend you have a listen. YouTube these days is polluted with so many Peterson clips, many of them of questionable value as they are ripped from their original context, but this one is a well-organized and well-delivered presentation of some very important ideas and principles.

Creativity and Personal Expression

 A recent comment got me thinking because I realized that I didn't agree with the underlying assumption which was that creativity was closely tied to personal expression. This struck me because I am just starting a new composition and it is at times like these that I find myself confronting the basic problem which is, what am I trying to do? It seems odd to say, but I am not trying to express anything personal at all. In my earlier life, I was pretty convinced that this was the job: express yourself. Of course, this immediately leads to the very frustrating question of why would anyone want to hear it? This is the fundamental issue I have with jazz and most pop music which really is about expressing yourself.

I was talking with an old friend yesterday and I described in a few words what is hard about music composition: you have to start by just sitting in front of a blank sheet of paper, staring at it, until something occurs to you. This might take minutes, hours, days, weeks or in extreme cases, years. I've been staring at a particular page in my notebook for nearly a year now and only in the last couple of weeks have started to get somewhere. 

I started to think about a new piece for guitar in January, but got nowhere until this month. Slowly some ideas started to emerge and they led to other ideas and so on. Right now I am just considering some basic structural outlines, some pitch materials and relating this to the Greek myth of Hecate. I find that finding a way of relating these three things is a way of generating a musical fabric.

What does this have to do with my personal life and feelings? Nothing, really. This is an act of exploration in an aesthetic universe. It doesn't have anything to do with my personal life as the goal is to go somewhere I have never been.

This immediately brings up the question of why would anyone else want to listen to the resulting music? Well, if it is dull, boring, painful for no reason, or just weird, then, no, I can't think of a single reason. But the goal is actually to come up with something dynamic, stimulating and fresh, so that would be the reason to listen.

I described how Stravinsky composed the Rite of Spring, in a tiny village in Switzerland over the course of around eight months, spending every day in a tiny 8' X 8' room with nothing more than a chair and an upright piano (and the notebook and pencil, of course!). Speaking of notebooks, the one shown above is my favorite: a Moleskine A5 Music Notebook. I'm not a fan of Moleskine in general as their paper quality seems to have gone downhill, but for my purposes this is perfect. The left hand page is blank and the right hand page has blank music staves so you can jot down both general ideas and diagrams and specific musical ideas.  The pencil is also a favorite, a Graphgear 1000 in .5 HB.

Yes, you do have to have some creative spark, which really consists in being able to let your mind freewheel and open to whatever may drift by. But the big challenge is the determination to sit there until something does drift by and the understanding and craft of how to work this idea out and come up with a finished composition. That's really all there is to the "creative process" which is why it is so impossible to teach (though, mind you, nearly every music department has at least one staff member with that job description: professor of music composition. I'm just not sure what they do exactly. Chat about it, I guess. But the important thing is really to provide composers with some sort of regular paycheck!

Let's listen to the fruit of Stravinsky's stay in that little village in Switzerland. This is a recreation of the original costumes and choreography with Valery Gergiev conducting the Orchestra and Ballet of the Mariinsky Theatre:

And of course...

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4Anu6qvhrM&t=1622s

Some of the most joyful music ever.

UPDATE:  A suggestion, the only way I know to avoid the irritating ads on YouTube is to download the Opera browser and select the ad-blocker in preferences. Other browsers, even Brave, don't seem effective.|

Today's Listening

Here is something unusual: the Villa-Lobos Guitar Concerto played on three guitars.

 This turns it into an interesting piece of chamber music with a much different, tighter, kind of ensemble. I learned this piece in three months for a live broadcast with the CBC Vancouver Orchestra. It is heard a good deal less than it should be! This arrangement really seems to work.

Friday Miscellanea

Our Municipal Christmas Tree

Mexico is a lot better at things like Day of the Dead and Holy Week than Christmas which is really a Northern European festival. Still, lots of parties are had and gifts exchanged and the municipality puts up an artificial Christmas tree in the central plaza. So Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all readers of The Music Salon. I am grateful for your interest and will do my best to put up at least one weekly post and hopefully more in the coming year. I have business responsibilities that take time and I am also spending a lot more time on the guitar, plus I am back composing. I am revising my String Quartet No. 2 which will finally have its much-postponed premiere in Vancouver next May. I hope you are all well and happy and looking forward to a better 2023 than 2022. Let's hope this year was not "average" in the Russian meaning: average year, worse than last year, better than next year! So, on with the regular Friday miscellanea.

* * *

First up, the Salzburg Festival just announced their program for next summer which can be found here https://www.salzburgerfestspiele.at/cms/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/programmbuch_2023_72dpi.pdf

* * *

This looks like a very interesting book and it goes on my list to read next year: The Northern Silence: Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture.

Andrew Mellor journeys to the heart of the Nordic cultural psyche. From Reykjavik to Rovaniemi, he examines the success of Nordic music’s performers, the attitude of its audiences, and the sound of its composers past and present—celebrating some of the most remarkable music ever written along the way. Mellor peers into the dark side of the Scandinavian utopia, from xenophobia and alcoholism to parochialism and the twilight of the social democratic dream. Drawing on a range of genres and firsthand encounters, he reveals that our fascination with Nordic societies and our love for Nordic music might be more intertwined than first thought.

* * *

From an economics blog: My Conversation with John Adams

COWEN: How do you avoid what Harold Bloom called the anxiety of influence?

ADAMS: Harold Bloom was a very great literary critic, sometimes a little bit of a windbag, but his writings on Coleridge and Shelley, and especially on Shakespeare, were very important to me. He had a phrase that he coined, the anxiety of influence, which is interesting because he himself was not a creator. He was a critic, but he intuited that we creators, whether we’re painters or novelists or filmmakers or composers — that we live, so to speak, under the shadow of the greats that preceded us.

If you’re a poet, you’ve got all this great literature behind you, whether it’s Shakespeare or Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson. And likewise for me, I’ve got really heavyweight predecessors in Beethoven, in Bach, in Mahler, in Stravinsky. Maybe that’s what he meant, just the anxiety of, is what I do even comparable with this great art? Another thing is, if I have an idea, has somebody already thought of it before? Those are the neurotic aspects of my life, but I’m no different than anybody else. We just have to deal with those concerns.

COWEN: Are you more afraid of Mozart or of Charles Ives?

ADAMS: [laughs] I’m not afraid of either of them. I love them. I obviously love Mozart more than Charles Ives. Charles Ives is a very, very unusual figure. He was almost completely unknown in most of the 20th century until Leonard Bernstein, who was very glamorous and very well known — Bernstein brought him to the public notice, and he coined this idea that Charles Ives was the Abraham Lincoln of music. Of course, Americans love something they can grasp onto like, “Oh, yes, I can relate to that. He’s the Abraham Lincoln of music.”

Charles Ives was a hermit. He worked during the day in an insurance firm, at which he was very successful, but spent his weekends and his summer vacations composing. His work is very sentimental, also very avant-garde for its time. I’ve conducted quite a few of his pieces. They are not, I have to admit, 100 percent satisfying, and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that Ives never heard these pieces, or hardly ever heard them.

When you’re composing, you have to hear something and then realize, “Oh, that works and that doesn’t.” I think the fact that Ives — maybe he was just born before his time. He was born in Connecticut in the 1870s, and America at that time just was still a very raw country and not ready for a classical experimental composer.

COWEN: You seem to understand everything in music, from Indian ragas to popular songs, classical music, jazz. Do you ever worry that you have too many influences?

* * *

Bach’s accidental masterpiece: The keyboard works of The Well-Tempered Clavier sound more novel and luminous 300 years later than in their composer’s day.

Unfortunately behind a paywall. But it provides me the opportunity to make an observation about Bach: his major works during his lifetime were overwhelmingly for the church and include hundreds of cantatas (composed on an almost weekly basis), plus the massive passions, oratorios and other works for soloists, chorus and orchestra. But while we certainly listen to these works today, we seem to derive the greatest enjoyment from his more mundane compositions such as the Well-Tempered Clavier, written to demonstrate a new tuning system, the inventions, written to educate his children, the Goldberg variations, written as a diversion to while away the hours and the solo music for cello and violin, written to demonstrate the potential of these relatively newish instruments. For the longest time these were regarded as little more than technical studies. But now, all of these works seem to represent to us the essence of Bach's craft, unlinked to any religious message.

* * *

Alex Ross in the New Yorker: Looking Past the Celebrity Conductor

Some years ago, when I was interviewing the pianist Mitsuko Uchida, she poked fun at the idea of a youthful star conductor: “Do you want yourself to be operated on by a genius twenty-year-old heart surgeon? Do you want to go to the theatre and see a teen-ager play King Lear?” Uchida’s point was that practitioners of the arm-waving profession tend to grow better and wiser with age. Orchestras register not only the gestures a conductor makes in front of them but also the history of music-making that those gestures reflect. Herbert Blomstedt, who is ninety-five, can mesmerize a jaded first-tier ensemble with a gentle wave of his hands. It’s more than a question of personal mystique: it’s trust in a cumulative record of collective work.

That's an intriguing start to an excellent discussion of young conductors--especially their shortcomings.

* * *

New research finds UK public ‘can’t live without music’, while musicians face brutal conditions

This data follows on from a survey released by the charity last month which showed that close to half of professional musicians think they will be forced to leave the industry, due to the ‘brutal’ impact of the cost of living crisis, alongside the ongoing impact of the pandemic and Brexit. 

At a time when music is more important to Brits than ever, six in ten professional musicians (60 per cent) say they are worse off financially now compared to the same time last year. Nine out of ten (90 per cent) are worried about affording food over the next six months, with 84 per cent concerned about paying their mortgage or rent.

* * *

 The Cello Suite No 6 by Bach is probably the least well-known of the set. Here it is performed on a five-string cello for which it was originally written.

Here is the Symphony No. 5 by Sibelius with Jukka-Pekka Saraste & Lahti Symphony Orchestra:

And here is John Adams' Shaker Loops:

Friday Miscellanea

Finland, music's superpower: The Rising Star of Conducting Arrives in New York. As a Canadian, once again I am astonished at how many great musicians Finland produces, at a fraction of the population of Canada.

The hype, that is, around the 26-year-old Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä. He’s the fastest-rising maestro of his generation, a darling of fellow musicians and orchestra administrators alike. It seems that every time I meet with someone in the industry lately, there comes a moment in the conversation when I’m asked, “Have you heard Klaus Mäkelä?”

Outside New York, it’s been hard not to. He has collected podium appointments so quickly, an ensemble as prestigious as the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam was willing to create a title, artistic partner, to keep him in reserve until he officially becomes its chief conductor in 2027. That’s when his contracts will be up at the Orchestre de Paris and the Oslo Philharmonic; already, there are whispers about where he could go next.

* * *

From The New Criterion, a tribute to the Orlando Consort: A farewell to voices

Anchored by Robert Macdonald’s bass and propelled upward by Matthew Venner’s lofty countertenor, the Consort had no issue filling the church’s massive nave with sound. From behind their unadorned music stands and without pomp, the small chorus cast barreling waves of voice into every corner of the space with quintet pieces such as De profundis clamavi (Desprez) and maintained the same vigor in more restrained pieces, including Brumel’s (1460–1513) Mater patris et filia, arranged for a trio.

* * *

Has Spotify really wrapped up the mystery of musical taste? Well, I strongly suspect no, but let's have a look:

But for anthropologists, taste is less of a romance than a science. “People often think about taste as being really individual,” Seaver laughs apologetically. “But in the social sciences we say: ‘Ah, that’s not really true.’ Your tastes are part of a broader social patterning that extends beyond you.” He suggests that our typical understanding of taste is shaped by the illusion of choice, akin to going to the record shop: “Among a set of available selections, what record are you going to pick?” Seaver asks me to carry out a thought experiment. “Imagine, what would it mean to have taste in music before there was audio recording?”

It’s flattering to think of taste as a personal choice because it encourages us to believe in our own individuality. Music technologies have long capitalised on this, all while leveraging the emotional connection between a listener and a song.

Nope. In my book, taste is a cultivated collection of aesthetic judgements.

* * *

A Seattle Business Blasts Classical Music To Harass Homeless Encampment Aha! It's not to their taste!

* * *

Melodies unheard, a review of a new book on Music of Ancient Greece.

 However distant the practice of Greek music may be from our experience, the ideal persists. The continued presence of Greek words in musical terminology testifies to ancient music’s cultural authority. (The Greek kithara or concert lyre is the source, via Spanish, for our word guitar, though the two instruments bear little resemblance.) Ambition to revive the music of Greek drama motivated the Italian Renaissance invention of opera and inspired Wagner’s romantic syntheses of myth and spectacle. Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy—the full title is The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music—identified in music the generative force behind the supposed Hellenic Dionysian spirit. Above all, Greek theories about music’s nature and effects—from Plato, Aristotle, and the Pythagoreans, among others—continue to shape our attitudes toward music, even if the sounds that provoked such reflections have long since faded to silence.

The whole review is well worth reading.

* * * 

 As an alumnus of McGill University in Montreal, Québec, Canada, I like to keep tabs on the state of affairs in the School of Music. Here is an ex-roommate of mine, Hank Knox, now head of early music performance, conducting the McGill Baroque Orchestra and opera studio in a performance of Handel's opera Rodelinda.

(McGill has three orchestras: the McGill Symphony, who have often played Carnegie Hall, the McGill Chamber Orchestra and the McGill Baroque Orchestra--that's two more than a lot of cities!)

And here is Klaus Mäkelä conducting the Concertgebouw at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg in two symphonies by Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky: the #6 of each. I particularly love the Shostakovich.

A final delight: the Orlando Consort with De profundis clamavi by Josquin: