Friday Miscellanea

Ted Gioia's latest has one of the funniest charts I have ever seen:

Click to enlarge

As he says, this seems to be saying that "The more metal bands per capita, the happier the country." Sounds like a bad case of mistaking correlation for causation...

* * *

I have a passing interest in economics so I occasionally read the blog of Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok. Recently Tyler wrote about How I listen to music. Lots of items on the list, but here are the interesting ones:

4. I don’t listen to much jazz at home any more, though I am no less keen to see a good jazz concert live.  Having already spent a lot of time with the great classics, at current margins I am disillusioned with most “jazz as recorded music.” 

6. Bach gets the most listening time.

Well, ok, not that many interesting ones. But go have a look for yourself.

 * * *

This piece from the New York Times on literary criticism applies, somewhat, to music: Who’s Afraid of Reissued Books?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that literary critics are the most annoying people in the world. They’re elitist, or undignified. They’re divisive. They’re snobs. Their profession is, in fact, dead, and has been for decades. And upon realizing that they are irrelevant, they take themselves way too seriously.

The urgent need to slot historical works of literature into some sort of forced contemporary relevance, whether by insisting on their prophetic nature or wiping them from the collective memory in order to rescue them, seems to miss the idea that reissues may have inherent value because they have aged, or even simply because they are enjoyable. Perhaps Ms. Taubes has something different or more to offer without being reduced to an early example of autofiction. Perhaps a Marguerite Duras novel of rural French poverty and exhaustion does not need to be introduced and contextualized within a story of being a tired mother in a white-collar home in the United States.

And perhaps we can just enjoy historic opera for the simple joys it provides as well as allowing new productions the freedom to discover new joys (or sorrows and outrage, I suppose).

* * *

And what a truly horrific acronym: ANUS SACKS TWO MUSIC PROFESSORS. Couldn't they have named their school the National University School of Music of Australia instead? NUSMA?

The Australian National University School of Music in Canberra, no stranger to controversy, has outdone itself by dismissing two long-serving teachers, the violinist and violist Tor Fromyhr and the cellist David Pereira.

ANUS says they were appointed incorrectly. They are being offered re-employment as casual labour.

And this sounds like just another way to convert good paying jobs with benefits to lower paying jobs with no benefits.

* * *

Hoping to find an article about, you know, music, I went to the Musicology Now site only to discover that there is no longer a Musicology Now site. This was a project of the American Musicological Society. Actual professors don't have the time, I guess and the students tend to produce politically correct drivel, am I right?

* * *

 Cash-strapped councils target arts, parks and leisure cuts

Councils in England are in a state of financial crisis with many facing effective bankruptcy in the next few years unless the funding system is reformed, according to a new report.

More than half the councils that responded to a survey said they were likely to be unable to balance their books in the next five years.

Two-thirds said they were cutting services.

Parks, leisure facilities, arts and culture are at the top of the list.

Let me try and shed some factual light on this. But first we need to translate "funding system reform" into the reality. What they mean is "higher taxes." The truth is that all governments everywhere are chronically short of funds and the reason is simple. Their primary motivations for spending are:

• buying votes so they can be re-elected
• social benefits (also buying votes so they can be re-elected)
• ample salaries and benefits for government workers, i.e. themselves
• the basic functions of government: security (i.e. the police), the administration of justice and defence
• other services such as infrastructure (roads, etc.) and cultural subsidies

Notice the order of priorities. Last on the list is things like cultural subsidies. As a matter of self-interest, for all governments everywhere the first three items will always command priority. However, in some societies cultural subsidies may be given a higher priority due to the choices of the voters. Germany, for example, finds the money to support eighty opera houses while in all of North America there are fewer than fifteen. That includes one in Mexico, two or three in Canada and ten or so in the US.

* * *

Pianist Tiffany Poon on Being a 21st-Century Classical Musician. I ran into Tiffany Poon on YouTube years ago and I enjoyed her personal clips such as the one on her first visit to Salzburg.

Poon, too, has spent an inordinate amount of time documenting her artistic process — yes, even the less glamorous parts of being a musician, like drilling the same tricky passage in Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto over and over and over. Today, day-in-the-life-of-a-musician-at-so-and-so-conservatory videos are aplenty online, but in 2017, when Poon, then a senior in the Columbia-Juilliard Program, began making them, she was ahead of the curve. 

“Learned to Play Harpsichord 2 Hours Before Performing,” one is titled, with 900,000 views. “Upgrade! Picking a New Steinway Model B Grand Piano,” reads another, with over 500,000 views. In the thumbnail of her vlog “Practicing Chopin - 10 Days Till Concert,” she’s staring at her music stand with an elbow propped on the keyboard, seeming quite exasperated. That one’s also been viewed more than 500,000 times. (If you’re curious, here’s a playlist of more than 150 vlogs Poon recorded between 2017 and 2021.) The videos have clearly struck a chord with viewers and have helped her build a YouTube subscriber base comparable in size to that of star violinist Ray Chen.

I'm leaving that in the original format so you can follow the links. I quit watching her videos quite a while ago because while it is certainly a normal part of life for a musician to drill over and over particular passages, it is hardly normal to spend much time listening to someone else do so! Though I do recall a time when I was a student in Salzburg. One evening I went out to the practice rooms to go over the Concierto de Aranjuez first movement at quarter-speed prior to playing it the next morning in Pepe Romero's master class. The practice rooms were in a small building behind the residence and as I went in I heard a violinist playing the same four bars from the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto over and over again. I vaguely recall it was a passage in thirds. Anyway, I spent a couple of hours on the Rodrigo and when I left I heard the same violinist still working on the same little section. I felt like such a slacker!

I know that Hilary Hahn has put up videos of herself practicing, but it would feel like masochism for me to do the same. And Schadenfreude to watch someone else practicing. Don't watch other people living their lives, for Pete's sake! Live your own life! Sheesh...

* * *

Now let's find some good music to listen to. How about Tiffany Poon? I can't seem to find a performance newer than six years ago. Here is some Beethoven:

Just about the first chamber music I ever tried to play was this, the Partita No. 1 by Bach arranged for French horn and guitar:

In honour of the ANUS sacking, here is the Sinfonia Concertante by Mozart for violin and viola:

I first discovered this piece while reading Paul Johnson's biography of Mozart where he mentions this as an example of how Mozart in later life wrote a piece of transcendental beauty oh, every few weeks.

Walter Piston 1894 - 1976

I put up a symphony by Walter Piston as an envoi to my post yesterday on varied topics. After listening to it I realized that Piston is very likely a seriously underrated composer. One suspects that in the welter of programs featuring women composers like Fanny Mendelssohn, black composers like William Grant Still and black women composers like Florence Price, music by mere dead white men like Walter Piston is likely to be over-looked. And so it is.

You need to start by reading the Wikipedia article on Walter Piston. He died about the time when I was still a young musician so my only awareness of him was the name on the cover of various textbooks:

I think I came along just a bit too late for those texts. For harmony, for example, we used Aldwell and Schachter and in my Fugue course we just used Bach. But my musical DNA does connect back to Piston, indirectly. One of my composition and theory teachers was Robert F. Jones who studied with Arthur Berger who was a student of Walter Piston. Piston himself was a student of the ubiquitous Nadia Boulanger:

On graduating summa cum laude from Harvard, Piston was awarded a John Knowles Paine Traveling Fellowship.^[7] He chose to go to Paris, living there from 1924 to 1926.^[9] At the Ecole Nationale de Musique in Paris, he studied composition and counterpoint with Nadia Boulanger, composition with Paul Dukas and violin with George Enescu.

Piston taught at Harvard from 1926 until he retired in 1960 and the list of his students is mind-boggling:

His students include Samuel Adler, Leroy Anderson, Arthur Berger, Leonard Bernstein, Gordon Binkerd, Elliott Carter, John Davison, Irving Fine, John Harbison, Karl Kohn, Ellis B. Kohs, Gail Kubik, Billy Jim Layton, Noël Lee, Robert Middleton, Robert Moevs, Daniel Pinkham, Mildred Barnes Royse, Frederic Rzewski, Allen Sapp, Harold Shapero, and Claudio Spies,^[2] as well as Frank D'Accone,^[10] Ann Ronell,^[11] Robert Strassburg,^[12] Yehudi Wyner,^[13] and William P. Perry.

So as a teacher he is probably one of the most influential music professors in North America in the 20th century. What about as a composer?

In 1943, the Alice M. Ditson fund of Columbia University commissioned Piston's Symphony No. 2, which was premiered by the National Symphony Orchestra on March 5, 1944 and was awarded a prize by the New York Music Critics' Circle. His next symphony, the Third, earned a Pulitzer Prize, as did his Symphony No. 7. His Viola Concerto and String Quartet No. 5 also later received Critics' Circle awards.^[2]

[All quotes from Wikipedia.]

 See the Wikipedia article for the long list of works that include pieces for every conceivable combination of instruments except for solo voice, opera and guitar. Let's listen to two symphonies and a string quartet to get an idea of his work. First, the Symphony No. 3 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Serge Koussevitzky. This is the premiere recording from 1948.

The Symphony No. 7 with the Louisville Orchestra conducted by Jorge Mester. The premiere was in 1961.

Finally, the String Quartet No. 5 with the Harlem Quartet:

So, what do you think?

Various Musings

This is Wittgenstein's General Propositional Formula which I am still working towards understanding. Bertrand Russell explains the elements of it as follows:

1. p with the dash over top stands for all atomic propositions.
2. that funny looking thing is the Greek lower case xi with the dash over top and stands for any set of propositions.
3. N (xi with dash) stands for the negation of all the propositions making up xi with dash.

My keyboard will not do any of these symbols except for the upper-case italic N and the brackets. Russell goes on to explain the formula in three more paragraphs that, frankly, shed little light. He summarizes by saying:

The symbol is intended to describe a process by the help of which, given the atomic propositions, all others can be manufactured.

Uh-huh. I'm currently studying a text on propositional logic which will, over time, clarify this. The problem is that this is on a level of generalization and abstraction so elevated that it is extremely difficult to grasp--and this despite the very plain and simple words used in explanations. But the whole discussion kind of assumes you just had a seminar in propositional logic.

[Added update: of course if you are a musician that formula is perfectly obvious: the passage is to be played piano with tenuto and a breath between each note. The big N stands for Nebenstimme and tells us the piece is by Arnold Schoenberg as this is how he indicated a secondary voice, as opposed to Hauptstimme, the main voice.]

* * *

Having a cup of Earl Grey tea with my breakfast reminds me of something that has been bugging me for years: Captain Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation is obviously intended to be French (even though the inspiration for the character was a pair of Swiss scientists) as is evidenced by his visit to the family vineyard in one of the films spun off from the tv series. His character is described like this:

Jean-Luc Picard was born to Maurice and Yvette Picard in La Barre, France, on July 13, 2305. As a child, he dreamed of joining Starfleet. He and the rest of his family speak English, with UK English dialects—the French language having become obscure by the 24th century... [from Wikipedia]

The problem is that Patrick Stewart, a Shakespearian actor born in Yorkshire, is so obviously not French in any way. That note about the French language having become obscure is a feeble attempt to paper over what is obviously either a serious mis-casting or a badly-conceived character. Frankly, I can't imagine an actual French character, or actor for that matter, playing the part of the captain of the Enterprise. So why not just admit the character is English? Who knows. But every time Captain Picard strides to the replicator and orders a cup of "tea, Earl Grey, hot" I curse inwardly.

* * *

The media are awful. That's been said a thousand times, but let me add some refinements. The idea of sober, truthful, discussion of the events of the day has been leached out to the point that the New York Times is a cookbook with articles interspersed designed to affirm whatever nonsense passes for fact on the Upper West Side. Even the Wall Street Journal to which I have fled because it is almost the only place left with actual news, frequently succumbs to absolute nonsense. Today featured an article on Mexico that discussed the apparent failure of AMLO, the current president, to solve the cartel violence problem. There were some scary statistics. As a matter of principle I refuse to accept any statistics without a precise and thorough description of how the data was obtained and the calculations derived. So, yes, I don't believe statistics. Apart from that there were photos of a few remote villages and some anecdotes. So, basically a made up story. But it leaves the reader the strong impression that Mexico is a chaotic, violent and corrupt society to be avoided. Mind you, my impression of Washington DC from the outside is quite similar. But I have lived in Mexico for 26 years and the truth is that Mexico, at least where I live, is a peaceful and productive society much given to traditional customs and courtesies. There are no homeless people and not even any shoplifting. As for television I have avoided it for a couple of decades now.

* * *

 I notice that a number of the books I have ordered from Amazon recently have been apparently printed to order. For example, my just-received text on propositional logic says on the last page:

Made in the USA

Coppell, TX

18 February 2024

Coppell is a suburb of Dallas and the book is copyright 2020. Quite a few others were also printed to order such as the 1611 edition of the King James Bible and the English edition of the Hebrew Bible. I only just started checking and I notice that the University of Chicago edition of Wittgenstein's Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology and Saul Kripke's book on Rule-following and the Private Language Argument published by Blackwell are also printed out in Coppell TX. This is really one of the fruits of information technology: any book can be printed out in a convenient location for speedy shipping. What a wonderful thing this is as one of the irritants of the intellectual life is not being able to get a particular book.

* * *

Now this blog is not exclusively about music, but that has certainly been the major focus and I am feeling deeply guilty over having nothing musical so far! So let's do some listening. I noticed the other day that Jay Nordlinger, music critic at The New Criterion was complaining that in all his years of reviewing concerts he has yet to hear a single symphony by Walter Piston. This is particularly shocking as Mr. Piston, a professor at Harvard, wrote the book, or rather books on this stuff. For decades his texts on harmony, counterpoint and orchestration were used in courses throughout North America. So here is the Symphony No. 6 with the Seattle Symphony conducted by Gerard Schwartz. A very fine work, it was recorded on Naxos.

[Another update: two of Piston's symphonies won the Pulitzer Prize in music.]

Friday Miscellanea

Juan Gris, Violin and Guitar

"If it is true that Mahler's music is worthless, as I believe to be the case, then the question is, what I think he ought to have done with his talent. For quite obviously it took a set of very rare talents to produce this bad music."

--Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 67e

* * *

I was delighted to stumble across this post at On An Overgrown Path: Not everyone climbs mountains. I'm somewhat nonplussed to discover that the title of the post is actually a quote from, well, me.

On his excellent The Music Salon Canadian blogger Bryan Townsend wrote:

On an Overgrown Path tells us There is no mass market for classical music. I'm pretty sure of two things regarding that: first, I have known this ever since I got into classical music, so it ain't news and two, that is a big part of the appeal. Not everyone climbs mountains and not everyone listens to classical music.

Bryan's thoughtful response supports my thesis that for two decades classical music has been chasing a non-existent mass market, as exemplified by the strategy of turning BBC Radio 3 into a clone of Classic FM complete with 'info-commercials'. But, and that is very important but, we cannot overlook that classical music is losing traction with audiences to an alarming extent. 

Bryan Townsend is right when he says 'Not everyone climbs mountains and not everyone listens to classical music'. But what happens when the lack of new mountain climbers means that the essential guides and Sherpas disappear to seek other work? What happens when the essential fixed ropes start failing due to lack of maintenance? What happens when the routes to base camps are closed down due to lack of traffic? What happens when essential funding for the climbing infrastructure is withdrawn due to the lack of mountaineers?  What happens when the mountains are dynamited by BBC Radio 3 to make them easier to climb?

This is exactly what is happening with classical music.

Yes, most sadly true: as the audience dries up, the schools of music begin to shut down, there are fewer role models for young musicians and composers and so on. My comment was just from an individual perspective.

* * *

I'm not sure this is indicative of the above, but English National Opera sacks singers during interval

Singers and musicians at the English National Opera were handed redundancy notices midway through the final performance of its acclaimed production of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Formal redundancy letters, which came following a long-running funding crisis at the company, began to be sent out electronically shortly before the curtain for the final performance of the opera’s run had gone up.

But many of the performers only saw the details of their redundancy during the interval, when they opened the notifications backstage.

Despite this, they went back on stage to finish the performance, winning plaudits from the audience at the London Coliseum.

* * *

Music theory from a mathematics perspective: How many melodies are there?

The equivalent of a writer staring at a blank page, wondering how to fill it, is a composer staring at the 88 black and white notes on a piano wondering how to compose a melody that's never been heard before. How can one possibly take the eight notes of a standard scale and write a brand new melody when so many great melodies have already been written? Perhaps they've all been taken!

So, to counter the fear of there being no new melodies, I thought it would be interesting to examine the number of melodies available to a composer looking at his blank stave to see how many there potentially are.

Follow the link for the answer. But the bottom line is:

So, a mere ten note melody will produce over 75 billion potential melodies of 13 notes within the octave! It's going to take our composer a while to work his way through those.

Of course, composers don't work like this!

* * *

The enjoyment of classical music is dependent on listening skills. If you have only ever listened to three minute pop songs you are not going to find a Bruckner symphony very easy to appreciate. Running parallel with this is the issue of reading skills, which seem to be in similar decline: Why Joe College can't read.

Students also lack reading stamina: They have trouble staying focused on a challenging text. In middle and high school, they read short passages to prepare for tests, but rarely whole novels, Kotsko writes. He links to Peter Greene's lament that students' knowledge of literature "is Cliff's Notes deep, and they may never develop the mental muscles to work their way through a long, meaty piece of literature."

Learning "to follow extended narratives and arguments" is a valuable life skill, Kotsko argues. Young people who can't engage with complexity won't be prepared for the world.

* * *

One wonders Is Philosophy Self-Help? Well, certainly lots of it isn't. But from the titles at least, some of it is, or purports to be.

In the past decade or so, there’s been a flowering of philosophical self-help—books authored by academics but intended to instruct us all. You can learn How to Be a Stoic, How to Be an Epicurean or How William James Can Save Your Life; you can walk Aristotle’s Way and go Hiking with Nietzsche. As of 2020, Oxford University Press has issued a series of “Guides to the Good Life”: short, accessible volumes that draw practical wisdom from historical traditions in philosophy, with entries on existentialism, Buddhism, Epicureanism, Confucianism and Kant.

After mulling over several conceptual models, the author concludes:

Philosophy seeds new concepts, novel understandings—as it might be, alienation, ideology, structural injustice; new ways of comprehending freedom, status, power. Philosophical argument serves more to nurture these concepts and give them life than to establish theorems critics can’t dispute. In Murdoch’s words, “the task of moral philosophers [is] to extend, as poets may extend, the limits of language, and enable it to illuminate regions which were formerly dark.”

Which is not terrible, but it avoids the whole question of truth which is, despite everything, still rather important.

* * *

An economist recently called classical music the greatest (nearly) free gift in life, so let's have some examples. First up, a Mozart string quartet from Wigmore Hall:

 Sibelius, Symphony No. 2:

My new favorite harpsichordist, Jean Rondeau with some terrifying Scarlatti:

And a completely different kind of terrifying: the first movement, De profundis, from the Symphony No. 14 by Shostakovich, sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXuJWbVti2I

Poem by Federico Garcia Lorca.

Escaping the Zombie Culture

When Ted Gioia is right, he's really right: 

The State of the Culture, 2024

Or a glimpse into post-entertainment society (it's not pretty)

The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Or call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time or whatever you want. But it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity.

The key is that each stimulus only lasts a few seconds, and must be repeated.

It’s a huge business, and will soon be larger than arts and entertainment combined. Everything is getting turned into TikTok—an aptly named platform for a business based on stimuli that must be repeated after only a few ticks of the clock.

TikTok made a fortune with fast-paced scrolling video. And now Facebook—once a place to connect with family and friends—is imitating it. So long, Granny, hello Reels. Twitter has done the same. And, of course, Instagram, YouTube, and everybody else trying to get rich on social media.

It is worth reading the whole thing. I've been pushing back against this kind of thing most of my life. He's wrong that it is a 2024 phenomenon, but the current version is supercharged by new software and media. I think the first time I encountered this kind of sensation was when I was given tranquilizers when I was in the hospital for a few days in my late teens. I got quite anxious when I realized that I had been staring at the wall for quite a while with no thoughts! This is not normal! But it was television that really brought it home. I never owned a television until I was in my forties, too busy and no interest. But when I got one, after a few years I discovered I was sitting there, mindlessly switching from channel to channel, looking for something, anything, to watch. When I realized this was becoming a habit, I cancelled my cable and gave my tv away. That was many years ago and I don't miss it. I noticed an even worse version of this on YouTube when you get hooked on watching those short clips. Mind you, YouTube can be enormously useful, you just have to watch how you interact with it.

I don't use any of the other social media like Facebook, X, TikTok, Instagram and all the others. In fact, a few years ago I decided it was time to "de-digitize" part of my life so I took up writing with a fountain pen, writing a daily journal, writing some poetry, doing some sketching, stopping the use of music software for composing and going back to pencil and eraser on staff paper and so on. Except for the sketching, I have kept all this up, quite happily. Oh, and possibly the most important one, every morning I start the day by reading something serious. Right now it is the Tractatus Logic-Philosophicus of Wittgenstein, but I have read a lot of other stuff. The first hour of the day is devoted to that and not the internet.

I have mentioned all of this before, but in the light of the Ted Gioia post I thought it was worth reiterating. Ann Althouse had something similar up this morning: 10 pages?!! If you scroll down you will see that mine is the third comment. Later on Ann quoted my comment and said:

Even one page of serious philosophy or poetry would be enough of a challenge. It's not the pages, it's the time and the degree of engagement.

Yes, the degree of engagement. Or you might say focus, or concentration. Because what all actual study or creative work requires is uninterrupted concentration--and that is what all our social media software is designed to frustrate, as Ted points out.

But, you know, the solution is pretty simple. Just stop and do something else. Something worth doing. Wood-carving, bird-watching, tennis (ok, pickleball), chess, reading an actual book, play guitar. Anything!

 

Sunday Musings

The world of the happy is a different one from that of the unhappy.

--Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, excerpt from proposition 6.43, by Ludwig Wittgenstein

I have stumbled across this idea myself a few times, describing it as the difference between standing in a swimming pool with your nose just above the water versus standing in a swimming pool with your nose just below the water. There is also an old quote by an English writer to the effect that if your income is three and sixpence and your expenses three and tuppence you are happy, but if your income is three and sixpence and your expenses four pounds, you are unhappy. The Wittgenstein quote is more about one's attitude toward the world. This also relates to questions of aesthetics. Beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder, but the causes must lie in the aesthetic object.

* * *

I thought of a musical analogy to a Wittgenstein remark about samples. Back when we used a reference standard meter kept in Paris the nature of its role meant that we cannot say that it is one meter long because there is nothing we can compare it to: it is the standard. Similarly, you can't tune a tuning fork as it is the standard. I suppose if you had a number of tuning forks, you could determine if one of them, for instance, were defective. But in that case it would not be a "tuning fork" because it could no longer be the standard. Another peculiar thing I ran across in Wittgenstein is that if there were an island somewhere with a plant that was poisonous to humans and animals, and if there were no humans or animals on the island then the plant would not be poisonous. These odd things come up when you are examining the nature of language and how it reflects or pictures the world. When I have finished my study of Wittgenstein then I am going to take a close look at how music notation reflects or pictures music itself.

* * *

A terrible thing has come to pass in British Columbia: B.C.'s 2024 vintage faces wipeout, as wine report predicts up to 99% loss due to cold

Across B.C., the 2024 vintage is facing a near-total wipeout, according to a report into the January cold snap commissioned by industry group Wine Growers British Columbia.

It says the province faces "catastrophic crop losses" of 97 to 99 per cent of typical grape production. 

Environment Canada data show Kelowna's daily low temperature breached -20 C from Jan. 12 to 14, hitting -26.9 C on Jan. 13.

Daily lows were around -20 C on Jan. 11 and Jan. 15, and did not return above -10 C until Jan. 20.

Wine growers say the loss in grape and wine production triggered by the deep freeze — described by the report as "an almost complete writeoff of the 2024 vintage" — is expected to result in revenue losses of up to $346 million for vineyards and wineries in B.C.

The industry is also anticipating an additional revenue loss for suppliers, logistic providers and distributors of up to $99 million.

British Columbia is my home province in Canada, though I haven't lived there for thirty-some years. When I was attending premieres there of my String Quartet No. 2 in May of last year, I took the opportunity to pick up some fine BC wines including an outstanding Bordeaux blend, a BC port and a couple of bottles of BC ice wine. Here is one I opened a little while ago:

Ice wine, for those who don't know it, is a very rare and special wine. It is made from ripe grapes that have experienced an early frost and are completely frozen. The Inniskillin label states that they harvest at precisely -10° Celsius. Crushing frozen grapes means that part of the water is retained as ice crystals so the juice is richer and sweeter making for a wonderful dessert wine. It tastes rather like honey, if honey were a wine. Ice wine was discovered in the 18th century by wine-makers in the Mosel valley in Germany. Only three countries produce it, to my knowledge: Germany, Austria and Canada and the latter is the largest producer. When I left for my flight back to Mexico I noticed stacks of BC ice wine in the duty-free shops. You really never see ice wine outside the producing countries as very little of it is exported.

So the whole BC wine industry has been wiped out, certainly for this year and perhaps for longer. How long will the vines take to recover? The wine industry has been developed over the last few decades and during this time the main region, the Okanagan, has not experienced catastrophic cold as it did this year. But, as we can see, it is still a very northern area for grape vines and the possibility was always there. Did investors and growers proceed with their plans partly based on the projections of higher temperatures due to anthropogenic climate change? And were the models projecting these changes flawed? These are probably good questions to ask.

* * *

Here is a suitable envoi from an UB40 album I used to have:

Today's Listening

From the marvelous Polish counter-tenor Jakub Józef Orliński and L'Arpeggiata:

 It's not often that you get a whole album of premiere recordings from the 17th century.