Not so miscellaneous today: before going to Thanksgiving dinner yesterday with friends, I had a couple of free hours so I listened to most of the St. Matthew Passion by Bach. What an amazing work! This is the version I heard:
I grew up with the Klemperer recording, but this version is very much better. There are two small orchestras, two mixed choirs, two sets of four vocal soloists and six boy sopranos. The way Bach uses these forces is really remarkable. There are frequent montages where the choirs interject short, brisk phrases into a texture that might be one or both orchestras with obbligato solo parts, or a chorale like texture with the melody of the boy sopranos floating above, within a narrative carried by recitatives from a host of characters: Judas, Pontius Pilate, priests, bystanders and, of course, Jesus with his surrounding halo of strings. This is as close as Bach ever got to opera, but it is nothing like opera. Oddly enough, the montage sections remind me of Stravinsky's Petrouschka.
Speaking of the Netherlands Bach Society's project to record all of Bach, I have listened to many recordings so far and I have been impressed with nearly all of them. No big stars, but very accomplished and committed musicians. Listening to this it is hard to see classical music as a dying genre, no longer of any relevance as a recent series of YouTube clips would have us believe!
Finally something interesting: two new pieces by J. S. Bach. No, not newly written of course, but newly discovered. Here is the New York Times:
In 1992 Peter Wollny, then a Harvard graduate student in musicology, was researching his dissertation at the Royal Library of Belgium when he came across two unsigned music manuscripts so strikingly original that he had copies made and set them aside.
“This is actually how I work,” Wollny said Tuesday. “Whenever I find something that poses a scholarly problem to me, I keep it. Even if it takes three decades, I don’t put it aside.”
Wollny began to develop a hunch about who wrote these two anonymous, undated works for organ: Johann Sebastian Bach. But finding evidence required years of musical detective work, and it was not until this week, 33 years after the random discovery he made while doing research on one of Bach’s sons, that he officially announced the discovery.
And here they are:
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As is often the case, the subhead is a nice summary: Cultural products are more than ever a class of financialized assets, whose owners are even further removed from artmaking
THE HISTORY OF THE MUSIC industry is a history of conglomeration. For decades, the business has been ruled by a dwindling number of corporations, each controlling an enormous market share that grows larger with every new merger or acquisition. Today just three record companies—Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group—control more than 80 percent of all recorded music released through a recognized label. And they do so with a collective iron fist, jealously guarding access to their vast catalogs, whether through album sales, streaming platforms, radio airplay, or commercial licensing. The Big Three’s disproportionate market-making power, according to scholar and musician Aram Sinnreich, has all the trappings of an oligopolistic cartel. And in turn, streaming itself, once a domain of renegades and upstarts, has consolidated around its own Big Three: Together Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music account for 90 percent of all streaming subscriptions.
I guess my problem is that I have no interest in music as an industry--only as an artform. But this is where we are.
Here is a particularly fine exemplar of human-created music. Jean Rondeau playing the Tombeau for M. Blancrocher from the new Louis Couperin collection:
A lovely recent performance of the Debussy Sonata for Cello and Piano:
And finally, the Piano Sonata no, 8 by Sergei Prokofiev:
The lowbrow dominates culture and anyone who questions the status quo is dismissed as an elitist killjoy. But with bland algorithmic content on the rise, perhaps we consumers should start taking our art a bit more seriously
That subhead neatly summarizes the argument so we can probably skip reading the article. But yes, speaking as one who never left cultural snobbery, it is always a good time to take notice of cultural things that are not actually crap. Sure, they take a bit more time. Reading Don Quixote takes more time than watching Netflix, but perhaps not if you factor in the time spent trying to find something to watch on Netflix. Thanks to On an overgrown path for the delightful use of the word "enshittified." Yes, the enshittification of culture and, well, social institutions in general, is far advanced.
Of late, an increasing number of voices, some new and some thoroughly familiar, have converged on Substack. Such erstwhile blogging heavyweights as Steve Smith, Tim Rutherford-Johnson, and Joshua Kosman are in residence. The great Paul Griffiths, who has been observing new music longer than most of us have been alive, has launched what music!
The rise of headphone listening has changed us profoundly—and maybe not for the better.
No, no, no, they have it all wrong. If anything, music is too popular, or, more accurately, there is too much popular music. About the only ray of sunshine is the widespread use of headphones which has saved so many of us the torture of listening to other people's music. If only we could make the use of headphones mandatory in all public spaces.
Now for some listening. One cannot be too familiar with the symphonies of the always inventive Joseph Haydn. Here is his Symphony No. 31, nicknamed "Hornsignal" and yes, there are lots of horns.
You also cannot be too familiar with the symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich. Here is the 8th with Alain Altinoglu conducting the Frankfurt Radio Symphony. This clip just appeared on YouTube six days ago.
For our last envoi, not a symphony but a serenade by Mozart. Even when writing music for diversion or background to a banquet, Mozart was simply incapable of writing anything less than superbly beautiful.
I said in my Friday Miscellanea post that I didn't see much worth commenting on. But just now, I did. More and more I find Rick Beato to be worth following because he often surprises. When it comes to popular music I'm usually a curmudgeon because the mass-produced industrial music we hear in just about every public space drives me right up the wall. But of course, there is a lot, well, some, really good "popular" music being created. Probably not really popular, but really interesting. And Rick Beato has just found some for us:
Yep, everything he says there is true. This really doesn't sound like anything you have heard before and yes, it really is beautiful. But deep in the harmonic structure, it reminds me very much of Debussy if he were alive today, living in London and working with a drummer named "II".
“Sinfonia” remains one of Berio’s most popular and indelible pieces. It appeals to lay listeners yet continues to fascinate experts. Throughout its five movements, the piece shows an inventive, clearly audible approach to form, an unsentimental melodiousness and extraordinarily skill in orchestration. Its most radical section is the third movement, which feels presciently overstimulating.
The piece “reflects a world marked by crises and conflicts — themes that remain profoundly relevant today,” De Benedictis said. “Wars, the destructive effects of capitalism (even more evident now than in 1968), the disintegration of the fundamental principles of coexistence, the frenzy of a fragmented and disjointed existence.”
At the opening of the third movement, a loud chord is followed by at least three distinct musical quotations in the space of seven measures: a climbing brass motive from the fourth movement of Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra; the coldly biting flutes, sleigh bells and inviting violin phrase from the opening of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony; and cresting music from the second movement of Debussy’s “La Mer.”
What makes the article particularly useful is that it offers a host of music clips as examples.
Every night, ten-year-old J.S. Bach reached his little fingers through a locked bookshelf with a latticed front, rolled up a book of sheet music inside, drew it out, and copied it by moonlight, for he was not allowed a candle. It took six months for him to finish this difficult endeavor, only for the copied manuscript to be found by his older brother and taken away.
This was a child who had music pouring into and out of his ears since before he could talk. As little as we know about his life story, this fact is undeniable. Something was going on inside his head, strongly, forever. So does it make sense to look at his life in terms of events, or something more, something equally internal?
Allemande
Even if you hate classical music, you’ve heard Bach’s six cello suites. At least, the prelude of the first suite, in movies and on television. Like in Master and Commander and Family Guy and The Hangover Part II. And in this American Express commercial showcasing household objects making frowny faces and smiley faces. In fact, it’s often heard in commercials advertising financial services. “In the case of recent television commercials, Bach has more or less taken on a single function: reassurance,” said musicologist Peter Kupfer. “It is no coincidence that most companies that use Bach in their commercials offer financial or insurance services (including American Express, MetLife, and Allstate), thus requiring a message of trust.”
There is a paragraph or two for each of the six movements of the Cello Suite No. 1, so you should read the whole thing.
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Frankly, looking in the usual places, I don't see anything else over the last week worth comment. Your mileage may vary, of course. But let's just move on to the envois. First up, of course, the Berio Sinfonia:
And the Bach Cello Suite No. 1:
Here is the Charpentier Te Deum, the drum-friendly interpretation:
And finally, in my travels in Oaxaca the last couple of weeks I stumbled across the 1969 film of The Battle of Britain. An all-star cast for a film that I have never known before. The main casting problem was that the average age of the pilots that flew in the Royal Air Force in 1940 was twenty! They simply couldn't find many actors that young. The best lines were from Laurence Olivier as Air Chief Marshal. When they finally turned the tide and were shooting down a lot more German planes than the Germans were shooting down British planes, he was asked to comment on a statement from the German ambassador in a press conference that the British numbers were simply wrong. Olivier said "I have no interest in propaganda. If we are right, they will give up. If they are right, they will be here in a week."
I'm not at home, but traveling in Oaxaca state, Mexico. Yesterday I flew from Puerto Escondido to Oaxaca in this plane:
This is a De Havilland Twin Otter, I think. Manufactured by De Havilland Canada
It seats fifteen, not counting the pilot, but for the first leg I was the only passenger. Now on to our regularly-scheduled program.
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In the Gramophone classical music awards:
Rising star María Dueñas, 22, was named young artist of the year. The Spanish violinist, who won first prize at the Menuhin competition in 2021 and records for Deutsche Grammophon, also took the instrumental category for her album of Paganini’s 24 Caprices.
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Also:
The recording of the year was awarded to the French conductor Raphaël Pichon and his choir and period-instrument orchestra Pygmalion for their recording of JS Bach’s Mass in B Minor on the Harmonia Mundi label. Gramophone hailed the performance as one “that gleams at the cellular level, radiating outwards with devotional warmth; in short, it is alive”.
A team led by Dr. Shinichi Furuya at the NeuroPiano Institute and Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc. has provided the first scientific evidence showing how pianists’ touch on the keys can actually change a piano’s timbre—the tonal character of its sound.
Artistic creativity in music, painting, and other forms of expression depends on the ability to shape how an audience perceives what they experience. Yet, until now, scientists did not know whether musicians could truly alter a piano’s timbre while performing, or what kinds of physical movements would make that possible.
The headline oversells the article, as always. No, no secret tricks are revealed. And every single sensitive listener has heard how pianists (and harpsichordists) can shape timbre. So this isn't actually news, just confirmation. It has a lot to do with the velocity of attack.
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Over at Slipped Disc, Norman Lebrecht is complaining about a new box of ten CDs of the harpsichord music of Louis Couperin.
Now not many things make me happier than an hour or so of solo harpsichord. Even two hours, at a push.
But ten hours of it, and by a composer who’s mostly known by the piano suite Ravel wrote at his tomb.
Can anyone sing a single tune by Louis?
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Wow, I thought Mexico was mostly free from this sort of thing: CONDUCTOR IS SACKED ‘FOR GENDER PARITY’
Members of the Mexico City Tipica Orchestra (OTCM) yesterday condemned the dismissal of their artistic director, Alberto Torres Xolocotzi, after authorities from the Mexico City Ministry of Culture, headed by Ana Francis López Bayghen, summoned the musician to inform him of the decision, citing “gender parity.”
“Yesterday, June 24, in a meeting with the Orquesta Típica and Mariana Gómez Godoy, director of Artistic and Cultural Heritage of the SC, I informed the members of the group that the artistic director’s contract was terminated,” meaning that “a female director will be appointed in her place, without holding a competitive examination as has been the case since 2017,” the musicians detailed in a document shared with Excélsior.
The musicians lamented this decision and expressed their dissatisfaction: “We express our condemnation of policies that discriminate against gender, that promote gender intolerance, and that violate the human and labor rights of our members.”
In the second paragraph, the quote should read “a female director will be appointed in his place" probably a translation error.
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Which brings us to our envois for the day. Let's start with Spanish violinist Maria Dueñas playing the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso by Saint-Saëns:
Here is Raphaël Pichon conducting the Sanctus from the Bach B minor mass:
The most remarkable color change I have ever heard on piano was achieved by Arthur Rubinstein in a concert in Spain in 1974. When he got to the major section of the Bach Chaconne, I swear the entire color of the piano changed--as striking as if it were blue then green.
Now I think we need some Louis Couperin. This is a prelude played by Jean Rondeau. Sorry, Blogger won't embed:
