2023 Posts with the most comments: June

 Two post tie for the honor this month. First, my detailed dismantling of the deceptive dialogues of Ted Gioia: The Harmony of Ted. A sample:

Ok, let's take a run at his latest effort: Is There Such a Thing as Western Harmony? That really captures the Ted Method which seems very similar to the approach of many YouTubers. Make a flat, challenging, controversial statement that is only controversial to people who are unacquainted with the topic. Here are some similar titles from YouTube: "How The Beatles wrote their most ambitious song," "The greatest 30 seconds of Classical Music," "Top 10 metal moments in classical music," "HOW TO READ MUSIC IN 15 MINUTES," "The string Quartet explained in less than 5 minutes," and so on and on.

Mr. Gioia operates on a higher level, of course, he does not purport to explain harmony in three minutes or less. Instead of promising something impossible in a jiffy, he takes a well-established historical fact and shows how roguishly cool he is by calling it into question. And he does it by an age-old technique named after those clever Greeks: sophistry: "A plausible but misleading or fallacious argument."

My commentators weighed in in general agreement.

The other post was one about my String Quartet No. 2 with a clip of the performance. Again, my commentators were kind and we got into some interesting discussions of musical form. A sample:

 Moment form brings up some interesting philosophical issues: what you have in front of you is not a score, for example. It is a set of instructions for creating a performance which you could record and then transcribe into a score. But that defeats the whole purpose, of course. It does depend a great deal on what the performers can bring to the table. In my conception of moment form it always has a certain Eastern quality: lots of silence, wisps of sound, etc. But even with a quartet that are 3/4 Asian, they are actually strictly trained in the Western European concepts of form and performance. So they don't necessarily take to the basic concept.

Most performers are going to simply play the moments as if they were a score. What you want to do is be hyper-attuned to the atmosphere and take each moment as contributing to that atmosphere. That is the performance practice. I have never really thought about these things until recently because I have always been directly involved in the performance and therefore helping to create the right atmosphere.

As an envoi, here is my piece for violin and guitar, Dark Dream:

 

Salzburg July/August 2024

After missing two years, I am planning to go back to Salzburg for the 2024 Festival. I managed to find some good deals for accommodation so I might be able to afford the airfare which seems to go up every year. I'm hoping to get tickets for fifteen concerts over twenty-two days. You apply now and they tell you what tickets you have been allotted in May. So I am hoping to see Jordi Savall and Concert des Nations do Charpentier and Pärt, the Mozarteum Orchestra with the Linz Symphony and the Piano Concerto K 466 with Lukas Sternath, Don Giovanni, Lea Desandre and the Jupiter Ensemble with Dowland et al, Schoenberg chamber music, Weinberg The Idiot, choral music by Mozart with the Mozarteum Orchestra and chorus, piano recitals by Sokolov, Levit, Aimard, Kissin, Volodos and Kantorow, another Mozarteum Orchestra concert with Regula Mühlemann (soprano) and finally, the Vienna Philharmonic doing Bruckner Symphony No. 8. I doubt there is anywhere else on earth you could see and hear all that in three weeks. Mind you, there are likely better places for just opera.

https://www.salzburgerfestspiele.at/en/tickets/programme?season=9

2023 Posts with the most comments: May

 This month it was the Friday Miscellanea from May 5. The discussion revolved around record shops, bookstores, and a review of Philip Ewell's new book. Sample comment:

I wouldn’t expect a reopened HMV to have many recordings for sale, let alone the sort of rich classical-music inventory that was a feature of some megastores before the turn of the millennium. In Europe today, bookshops have severely cut their stock of actual books, instead selling stationery or hip knickknacks – if you actually want a book to read, you’re supposed to order it from an online shop. So, I would expect a revived HMV to focus more on music memorabilia than recordings, if not the very same unrelated items that bookshops rely on to make money.

I noticed an interesting phenomenon recently. Some books I have ordered from Amazon in hard copy that are what you might call "out of the mainstream" such as the 1611 King James version of the Bible as well as Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy and the Hebrew Bible in English translation have all been printed in Texas within days of my ordering them. Print on demand in other words. 

Let's supplement this with Tchaikovsky's Hymn of the Cherubim.

2023 Posts with the most comments: April

We almost had another disputation with Ethan Hein, but by a nose, this post came in with the most comments: If I could only hear one... Not a single political comment here, it was all about favorite performers on different instruments.

The favored ensemble was L'Arpeggiata and here is a clip:

2023 Posts with the most comments: March

 Just edging out the first post on the Oxford University Press' DEI policy was my wacky take on music history: Music History Backwards. It was fun to write, but what sparked the discussion was an accidental mention of socialism which led to a nice discussion. Sample comment:

I feel increasingly close to the imaginative world and aesthetics of 19th century socialists like Ruskin, Morris et al. I think in some ways, though not all, many in my generation are actually becoming more left-wing with age and experience. The experience of present-day capitalism has been radicalising; anyone who loves and is involved in classical music surely feels this especially, with the art form in this country increasingly unsupported by the state, both at the professional and educational level, and instead reliant on markets and patronage. The stereotypical move from left to right over the course of one's life no longer seems to apply; something has definitely changed. Then there's the strange situation where, in a number of European countries (and I believe Israel and some other countries too), it's the young who are the most right-wing and the old who are the most liberal/left, judging by how people vote.

But I've already veered from the proper areas of discussions for this blog, so will stop!

The basic policy of this blog is NO POLITICAL DISCUSSION. But, just like in the courtroom, if someone opens the door in the comments, then all is fair game.

Short one today, so let's have a little envoi. Here is one of my favorite guitarists, Canadian Drew Henderson with the Sonata in G minor by Bach for solo violin on a 7-string guitar.

2023 Posts with most comments: February

The February post with the most comments had a similar theme: Threads of Influence. The post began by noting Oxford University Press' new DEI policy:

Oxford University Press is committed to promoting and maintaining a culture of equality, diversity, and inclusion, and acting upon issues of diversity and inclusion is vitally important to fulfilling our mission. We recognize that many groups are currently under-represented in our music catalogue, and we are committed to changing and rapidly   improving this through future publishing. As part of this commitment, we are currently accepting submissions from composers who:

• live with a disability; and/or

• are women; and/or

• identify on the broader spectrum of gender; and/or 

• are from under-represented ethnic groups; and/or

• are from a lower socio-economic group

We encourage composers from these groups to submit their music for review.

My observation was that this is saying that no white males need apply. This caused a bit of discussion. One wonders how audiences would react to a similar policy with concert programming. No more white males would eliminate the vast majority of what people seem to want to hear. So I think that the whole DEI project is doomed to DIE in the very near future. 

2023 Posts with most comments: January

The post getting the most comments in January was one in which I quoted from a City Journal article by Heather MacDonald. As she is a conservative commentator, this almost guaranteed some disputation. Read it all here: Musical Charity

I will just add one point: Ethan Hein argued with me about the degree to which white males are excluded from university jobs. This article from City Journal offers some pretty solid evidence: No White Faculty Allowed

A recent internal investigation into faculty hiring at the University of Washington reveals the exhaustive efforts that universities make to discriminate against white job applicants. After the university’s Department of Psychology identified a white candidate as best qualified for a tenure-track professor position in early 2023, the department’s Diversity Advisory Committee pressured the hiring committee to re-rank candidates in accordance with the methodology laid out in an internal handbook titled “Promising Practices for Increasing Equity in Faculty Searches” so that a black woman would receive the job instead. This handbook, obtained by the National Association of Scholars, spells out how to exclude candidates of undesirable races and ensure that candidates of preferred races get hired.

The handbook sheds light on past discriminatory hiring practices in the psychology department. In the 2020–21 academic year, the department hired only BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of color) candidates for five tenure-track positions. Delighted by its success in excluding all white candidates, the department’s Diversity Advisory Committee commissioned the “Promising Practices” handbook as a case study documenting its past manipulation of the hiring process. The handbook served as a how-to manual in the 2022–2023 academic year, ensuring that a BIPOC candidate would be hired for the department’s only tenure-track professorship that year.

I recommend reading the whole thing. My view is that this is absurd, unjust, racist and about to be overturned. And the existence of a policy like this is one reason I am very glad to have left academia.