Friday Miscellanea

First up, Leonard Bernstein gives a lesson in how to play "digiddy-dum" on triangle:

* * *

This explains a lot:

Funny, I don't see Blogger anywhere there...

* * *

Sometimes we just need a little reminder that art is one of the most precious elements of our lives and our souls. And sometimes it is artists, who are often neglected, who feel that no-one understands or appreciates what they are doing, who above all need a bit of reassuring. This is one of the most touching scenes from the British tv series Doctor Who. They have gone a bit back in time in the TARDIS and end up visiting Vincent van Gogh in Provence. He, you might recall, did not sell a single painting in his lifetime and died as unknown and neglected as a painter can be. The Doctor and his lovely companion, take Vincent on a trip in the TARDIS to the Musée d'Orsay in 2010 to see a little exhibit of his work. While there he learns that his life was not wasted after all...

* * *

Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy the playing of Khatia Buniatishvili, but this combination of a particularly high-octane virtuoso piece by Liszt, souped up by Horowitz to even higher levels of fireworks, performed by Khatia in a red sparkly dress that through some miracle of design managed to stay on throughout the whole performance renders me more or less speechless. It took real courage to wear that dress on stage. Especially given the sforzato accents...

* * *

The Guardian has a new educational series on classical music. Debussy: where to start with his music. There are others on Shostakovich and Schubert.

It was a description he always rejected, but Claude Debussy (1862-1918) is often thought of as an impressionist, a musical equivalent to Monet or Renoir. But he was much more than a composer of ravishingly delicate piano pieces and luminously coloured orchestral tapestries. Together with Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, Debussy was one of the great pioneers of modernism. Without him, the course of 20th-century music might have been very different, and his influence is still felt today.

True, that! A friend of mine did a doctorate in composition with Morton Feldman at SUNY Stony Brook and one of the questions on his final exam was "How did Debussy influence music in the 20th century?" One of those succinct questions that needs an eight-thousand word answer.

* * *

The big question here in North America is when and how can we get back to live concerts again. In Bavaria they seem to have this figured out and Slipped Disc has the rules and procedures.

* * *

And also from Slipped Disc is the answer, to be found in the comments: CANADA LOSES REST OF ITS OPERA SEASON.

in Europe it is Governments order and social mission to keep the arts accessible to the people. So to each seat and ticket the government pays a subvention. Because the costs of the chorus, singers, production costs, technicians, orchestra are much higher than the ticket income.

In the USA and Canada – without these subventions – the cost of one seat for an opera show would exceed several thousands of dollars, if you play only for 300-500 spectators… And then the house would stay completely empty.

In Europe the governments are willing to support the performing arts to the extent that it is possible to put on symphony and opera performances with every other seat empty. In North America, this would bankrupt every organization in a couple of weeks. So what will happen to musicians in North America? It is anybody's guess, but we know two things: they won't be receiving a paycheck anytime soon, and, they won't be getting jobs in restaurants either.

 * * *

There is an amazing number of articles this week that are not actually worth reading because they either rehash what we have heard before many times, and that would include this article: (Ethno)Music(ology): 12 Scholars Respond to a Field Undergoing a Key Change. Sample quote:

In discussing the fraught history of scholarly (and non-scholarly) music study, Roe-Min Kok of McGill’s Schulich School of Music explains: “Classical music is a very, very old profession, where the training and professional practices have feudal roots.” Typically, a music student progresses from instructor to instructor under an informal system of patronage, whereby connections are shared and rewards bestowed. “The ones who do best in this system tend to be white, male, and from privileged backgrounds.”

Or they manage to say nothing at all and do so in a very chaotic fashion: Is Pandemic Brain Changing Your Taste in Music? You're Not Alone.

After that we need to listen to some music!

* * *

Here is an absolutely lovely envoi, L'Art de Toucher le Clavecin of François Couperin played by Blandine Rannou.

And for something completely different, here is a piece by Takemitsu for guitar with the 6th tuned to E-flat and the 2nd tuned to B-flat. Very interesting sonority.

Musing on Pencils

 Speaking of pencils, I just got a couple of nifty Japanese mechanical pencils. When it comes to anything stationary related like pencils, pens or paper, it is usually the Japanese or the Italians who are the best. And then, of course, the Chinese are copying them for less!

When I got my new pencils, one in .7mm and one in .5mm I noticed that I had an old mechanical pencil that was always my favorite: a Staedtler Mars Micro .5mm, still going strong. I have had it so long I don't even remember buying it. But it was at least thirty-five or forty years ago. Apparently good mechanical pencils, like good fountain pens simply don't wear out. This one even has the original eraser:

Click to enlarge

If you click you should be able to see the brand name. When it comes to mechanical pencils it is either the Japanese or the Germans. This is a German brand. I went on Amazon and you can still buy this exact pencil in exactly the same color on Amazon for $9.

https://www.amazon.com/Mars-Micro-Mechanical-Pencil-Width/dp/B000GPI5XI/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=staedtler+mars+micro&qid=1601912481&sr=8-1

Here is my vintage Staedtler with my new acquisitions, Pentel GraphGear 1000 which are really nifty pencils, but cost between $12 and $20 depending on where you order from.

Click to enlarge

I will obviously be passing all these along to my heirs...

Musing on Composition

I have to say that my new approach to composition is working pretty well. What I have done is gone back to a much older system of basic conception, followed by pencil sketches, followed by tryouts on the keyboard and finally putting it into Finale. For a long time I just defaulted to Finale, but it was always a double-edged sword: one side benefit, the other side restrictions. Oftentimes I would just be wrestling with the program to get the idea into a form the notation would accept. Or struggling to get the playback to sound like I wanted it to. This is all distracting from the actual job of composing. But a pencil doesn't distract you at all!

In any case, the piano piece, tentatively titled Remembering What Is to Come, is coming along quite well. The only thing I am really puzzled about is the harmonic structure. But that is just my usual headache.

There is this short story by Jorge Luis Borges, as I recall, that says something about every writer creating his own predecessors and influences. I heard a Japanese piece for piano about forty years ago that has really stuck in my mind, though I can't recall the composer. It for sure was not Takemitsu. But in the absence of that composer I am going to say that my new piano piece is not influenced by Takemitsu, because I don't even recall what any of his piano music sounds like. I am listening to one piece right now, Piano Distance, and I can definitively state that it is not influencing me. Well, hardly at all. But there is a Japanese sense of flow that does have an influence on what I do.

Here is that piece by Takemitsu, which I say again, is not an influence.

Or, as the Vorlon ambassador once said in Babylon 5, "knowledge is a three-edged sword."

Virtual Concerts

 I see the the Vancouver Island Symphony (based in Nanaimo, BC) with a predecessor of which I played a Vivaldi concerto with once, is doing some "virtual" concerts. A number of orchestras have been trying something similar. Now I understand why they are doing this: it is both to give the players something to do and to keep in touch with their audiences. But there is a terrible danger here: One of the reasons you go to hear a local orchestra is because you haven't the time or money to travel to Vienna to hear the Vienna Philharmonic or Berlin to hear the Berlin Philharmonic or Los Angeles to hear the Los Angeles Philharmonic or St. Petersburg to hear the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater. Right? You go to your local orchestra concert because you really want to hear the sound of a live orchestra.

But what if it was just as easy to hear the Vienna player as your local ones? Well, of course you would catch the Vienna Phillies because, frankly, at many things, they are the best in the world. Just as the Mariinsky players are the best at different things. But the hard truth is that the local orchestra, if your orchestra is like the Vancouver Island Symphony, are not better at any repertoire than the big international superstar orchestras. They just aren't.

But in the world of virtual concerts there is absolutely no reason to listen to the local players when you can be listening to the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra with good sound and an excellent picture. Their virtual concert is exactly as easy to access as the local orchestra's. Does this mean local orchestras are doomed?

Absolutely.

Unless we can get back to real, not virtual, live concerts pretty damn soon.

A Course in Composition

If ever I have to give a course in music composition--hey, stranger things have happened--then I think this is how I would organize it.

First we need some history; you need to know the context and background of the artform. Second, we need some theory. We should not be accused of not teaching the basics. Third, we need some aesthetics for inspiration and guide. Then you have to do a lot of work, figuring out just what sort of composer you are.

I. History

I would go right back to 12th century Notre Dame and the music of Léonin and Pérotin because often it is the older music that can be most appealing to young composers fearful of being influenced by the Latest Thing.

In a university context you should be able to count on your musicological colleagues to teach a lot of this, but absent that, we should have a look/listen to Guillaume de Machaut:

A little Renaissance sacred music:

And something secular:

Then some French Baroque:

J. S. Bach, of course:

Haydn:

The nearly-cancelled Beethoven:

Berlioz:

All that should take a while because I would want to talk about what these composers were doing and how they were doing it. Now I know that this kind of instruction fell by the wayside during the Crazy Years of modernism. Someone like Steve Reich, for example, hardly studied any of this. He was a drummer in his early years and then became a philosophy major at university. Then he studied African drumming and Javanese gamelan. His first years as a composer were spent with tape machines. He refers to the 19th century as being dominated by "brown varnish" music or words to that effect. Philip Glass was different, though. He had a solid education in music at Peabody, the University of Chicago, Juilliard, and studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. You don't get more establishment than that.

Part of my sense that the education of a composer should involve exposure to the traditions of Western European music comes from the experiences of a friend of mine. He did a BFA at a Canadian university during the years when the visual arts were in the throes of "concept art." Instead of doing things like learn how to draw, perspective, life drawing studies, all that stuff, they did projects like figure out how to wrap an egg so it could be dropped two stories without breaking. Oh, and etchings, I'm almost sure they did etchings. In later years he complained bitterly about not getting a decent education in the basics of art and would sardonically refer to his credential as a "bachelor of f**k all." So if I have the opportunity of teaching composition students at some point, they are going to come out of it actually knowing something about music!

Theory and Aesthetics to follow in future posts.

Friday Miscellanea

 Guitar 4-hands? You bet!

Ok, well how about four guitars? Here is the Dublin Guitar Quartet playing Philip Glass:

* * *

There seems to be a new genre of YouTube clips that consist solely of silent captures of Yuja Wang in various states of concert undress:

* * *

You might recall that I was born in northern Canada where it typically gets down to 40 degrees below zero in the winter. Once, in fact, I was outside when it was 60º below zero, but that was a unique experience. At 60º below you will NOT get your car started, even with a block heater. Here is a little video of Whitehorse in the Yukon at 40º below. Notice that there are few people on the streets and every one of them is very warmly dressed with especially the ears covered. At 40º below, your ears will start to freeze in just a couple of minutes.

That mist you see? It's not water vapor, it's ice crystals. Except in the shot of the river, that's steam coming off the water. At 40 below.

* * *

Via Slipped Disc we are alerted to this report on Opera in Vienna:

The Staatstoper in Vienna is normally the busiest opera house in the world, so it was no surprise that it announced it intended to mount a full programme of opera for the 2020/21 season despite Covid 19.  Austria has suffered the virus like everywhere in Europe but owing to sensible policies it has recorded much lower infection and death rates than the UK... The opera house had taken sensible precautions for Covid. Socially distanced seating meant they were seating roughly one thousand instead of two thousand people, with gaps between seats. You had to wear masks when entering the opera house until you were seated, and then you could choose whether to take them off during the performance, although some people kept them on throughout. 

We saw 4 operas over 4 nights and there aren't many other places in the world where you can do that just now. ‘Elektra’, which was streamed round the world on the 11th of September, the night we were there, is of course very much a Viennese opera, composed by Richard Strauss and written by Hugo Von Hofmannsthal based on Sophocles’ play but heavily influenced by that famous Vienna resident Sigmund Freud. Our second night at Vienna starred one of the oldest and perhaps most famous opera singers of all, 79-year-old Placido Domingo, singing in Verdi's ‘Simon Boccanegra’.  Domingo now sings baritone roles, but he really isn't a baritone, just a tenor who finds reaching the high notes more difficult and can't quite get the depth and darkness of the lower notes. Having said that he remains a fine actor and carried off the role of the aging Doge of Genoa very convincingly.

Read the whole thing!

* * *

Here is an article on Beethoven beautifully illustrating the dangers of knowing a little bit about something and unleashing the fell monsters of ideology.

 We hear the famous melodies for the thousandth time, whether in movies, commercials, or concerts, from the third, fifth, sixth, or ninth symphonies or from piano concertos and sonatas or pieces of chamber music. But the cutting edge of this music has been dulled through overuse. That is, we have forgotten, and no longer seem to hear, the intensely political nature of Beethoven’s music—its subversive, revolutionary, passionately democratic, and freedom-exalting nature. 

Let us, then, turn again with fresh ears and open minds to “the first great democrat of music,” in the words of Ferruccio Busoni. Let us draw inspiration from him in our own struggles to humanize and democratize the world. And let’s be sure not to forget, in the cultural wasteland that is twenty-first-century America, the nobler aspects of our civilization’s heritage.

The thing is that this is very plausible, but at the same time, only a half-truth. If it was for the revolutionary fervor of his music that we revered Beethoven, we might revere composers like Cherubini and Luigi Nono even more, because they are revolutionary in a more obviously political way. Beethoven is in the first rank of great composers, not for his political content, but for his aesthetic content. Not to say that the things the writer points out are not there, they are, but it is not the political referentiality that makes the music great. Beethoven is not the musical equivalent of Che Guevara.

* * *

Europeans always seem to have the best think pieces on music. Here is one by Xenia Hanusiak: Music is a philosophy, rich in ideas that language cannot say.

Music is a Socratic teacher. Its melodies and call-and-response mechanisms, together with the subsequent variations in modulations and rhythms, steer us away from linear thinking and towards nuance. When we attend to an improvisation, track the journey of a voice in any one of Bach’s preludes, or follow the route of a single instrument in a symphony – the oboe in Arvo Pärt’s Symphony No 3 (1971), or the clarinet in George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (1924) – with our dissecting technique, we can subsume the formal inventiveness of music into our approaches to the art of questioning life, refining and redefining our interrogations to enlist more creative responses.

* * *

Let's have some hopeful, heartfelt, happy envois today. First up, some Heinrich Biber, of whom we don't hear nearly enough:

And Mad Rush played by Philip Glass in a concert in Montreal:

The Role of Aesthetics

If you search for the tag "aesthetics" you will come up with many, many posts on this blog--hundreds at least. There are two reasons for this, first, that I tend to slap on the "aesthetics" tag when I can't think what else it could be or if the post is uncategorizable, second because of the crucial role aesthetics has played in my life and the one that I believe it does, or should play, in social life in general. One of the few places one hears this addressed is in a couple of times that Jordan Peterson has mentioned it in talks and clips on YouTube. Here is an example:

One interesting thing is that Jordan Peterson was born very close to where I was born in northern Alberta, Canada--twenty or thirty miles apart, which up there is like being next door neighbors.

The role of aesthetics in my life is so important that I think of it as what I fled to, trying to escape the stifling environment I was born into. I say stifling because, even though it was wide open nature, to someone with an intellectual bent, it was like being in one of those tanks where you float without sensation--no sounds, no light. One place we lived when I was young, was so far north it was taiga with permafrost, meaning that you could dig down in the ground at the end of August and, about ten or twelve feet down, the ground would still be frozen. The summer wasn't long enough for more than just the surface to thaw out. This was when I was five or six years old and, honestly, the only thing I could find to play with was moss.

The landscape was basically small, stunted trees and moss: frozen in the winter and soggy in the brief summer. You might say, gee, go to the store and buy a toy. Ah, no stores, not within a two or three hour drive at least. Well, wait, there was a Hudson's Bay trading post where if you took in some mink or beaver skins they would trade you flour and sugar. Yes, it must have been one of the last. There was a Department of Defence radar base in the neighborhood, and a tribe of Indigenous People, but that, literally, was it. My father ran a small rail terminal that served the DOD base.

You have to recall that this was before the internet. Indeed, in this place, not only was there no internet, there was also no television, no radio, no newspapers, no bookstores (no stores of any kind). The only place I have ever been that was more desolate was northern Vancouver Island when I worked as a tree-planter and while in one place there was not even a building, there was always the beauty of nature.

The first time I was in a place that had a library big enough to have books with aesthetic content I fell in love with Japanese art, specifically ukiyo-e:

Some of these, and some Chinese landscapes, looked a great deal like the landscapes of northern Vancouver Island.

To me, this art and music when I discovered it, offered what seemed to be the only door out of a drear and narrow life. I think this is the role of art: to beckon, to widen, to draw us out of the narrowness of our lives.

But in some ways, I regard my early life as being of immense benefit because it was free of the false appeal of the Internet, social, and mass media of today. It is hard to imagine what it is like for a child now. Instead of just some moss to play with, he has an iPad, with access to literally everything in the world. But 99% of what he sees is cacophonous drivel. Instead of silence and distance, the experience is of a million hucksters and a million diversions that may very well mean almost nothing. That's enough to make you long for a little moss! (By the way, after collecting different varieties of moss, I would take them home and install them into a large glass bowl, creating a little terrarium.)

But back to art: the benefits of real art in anyone's life are enormous. Even if you have little sensitivity to art you can still derive tranquillity and perhaps a bit of perspective from it. With more acquaintance it can give you access to a thousand worlds, a million points of view. But remember, real art always has a price of admission: you have to learn the context, the methods, the history, before you can understand and appreciate most artworks.

Well, enough preaching for today. Let's listen to some music by Toru Takemitsu, Folios, for guitar (that I played at Wigmore Hall in London at my debut concert there). It ends with a quotation from a chorale from Bach's St. Matthew Passion.