Sunday, March 17, 2024

Big Bodies of Work

As someone who has never had the slightest capacity to create one, I am fascinated with what I call "big bodies of work." That is, a substantial number of works all in the same genre or form where the composer confronts that same challenges over and over and solves them differently each time. It is rather like variation form taken to an entirely higher level.

Some examples:

  • the symphonies of Haydn and Mozart (Mozart around fifty and Haydn over one hundred--Beethoven with only nine really doesn't count)
  • an extreme example, the 555 harpsichord sonatas of Scarlatti
  • just making the grade on the low side, the fifteen symphonies and fifteen string quartets of Shostakovich
  • the thirty-two piano sonatas of Beethoven
  • a special example, the preludes and fugues of Bach: 48 in all
  • actually, we could keep citing examples from Bach: the cantatas, about three hundred of which survive; the keyboard suites (six English Suites, six French suites and six Partitas for a total of eighteen)
  • I'm forgetting one of the best, the roughly eighty string quartets of Haydn
Here's a fun project: buy a box of these (I recommend the Shostakovich string quartets by the Emerson Quartet) and listen to one or two every morning. Much better, not to mention cheaper, than psychotherapy.

Or, alternatively, the Beethoven piano sonatas. There is a new complete set by Igor Levit and an older one I like by Friedrich Gulda. Let's hear one of those. This is No. 32, op. 111:


Today's Listening

 Here is Yuja Wang with the Lindberg Piano Concerto No. 3. I really like the opening where the orchestra emerges out of the piano resonance like an image from smoke.


I wonder, though, how would it affect her career if she changed her concert garb?

Friday, March 15, 2024

Dark Academia

I haven't been part of academia for decades now, but it was where I spent close to half my life. I liked to brag (more like "humble-brag") that I entered university in 1971 but they didn't let me out until 1998. That's because, shortly after graduating with two degrees from McGill, I was hired by a conservatory and later another university to teach.

Since I left academia in 1998 I have heard more and more about "woke" academia and the Congressional Hearings with the presidents of MIT, University of Pennsylvania and Harvard were a pretty good indicator of what has been going on. "Woke" academia, at least from my perspective, has been infected with all sorts of ideological strains such as "settler-colonialism," "systematic racism," and just plain old antisemitism. I'm not going to bother dissecting any of these as it has been done elsewhere, plus I haven't heard any arguments that are worth responding to.

Recently I have heard a new phrase, "dark academia" which is, as far as I can tell, just the old academia before it got drive-byed by the woke. Here is a little clip about which fountain pen inks are suitable for dark academia pursuits:

Mind you, I'm not sure he entirely understands what is going on with dark academia, but hey, let a hundred flowers bloom, I say. We also seem to have something called "Dark Classical Music"

Of course they are going to start with the Moonlight Sonata. Oh god, there is even a fashion aesthetic:

But things are really going off the deep end:

Re the music, Erik Satie and Beethoven are NOT 18th century! But the mere fact that something called, however loosely, "Dark Academia" is trending seems, uh, interesting at least. So let me hasten to provide some real 18th century music to do whatever it is you are doing to:







UPDATE: From the other side of the room: British countryside can evoke ‘dark nationalist’ feelings in paintings, warns museum

A sign for the Nature gallery states: “Landscape paintings were also always entangled with national identity.

“The countryside was seen as a direct link to the past, and therefore a true reflection of the essence of a nation.

“Paintings showing rolling English hills or lush French fields reinforced loyalty and pride towards a homeland.

“The darker side of evoking this nationalist feeling is the implication that only those with a historical tie to the land have a right to belong.”

That a country even has a history and traditions seems deeply threatening to the progressive intelligentsia. 

Friday Miscellanea

"quid est ergo tempus? Si nemo ex me quaerat scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio."
("What, then, is time? If nobody asks me, I know well enough what it is; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled.")
--Augustine, Confessions XI.14

* * *

 Dr. Johnson refuting Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy of subjective
immaterialism by violently kicking a stone: “I refute it thus!”

You don't get many statues celebrating philosophical arguments, in fact this might the only one. Bishop Berkeley was an Anglo-Irish philosopher who put forth a theory that denied the existence of material substances, postulating instead that we don't have perceptions of anything, we just have perceptions. This is a surprisingly tricky position to refute and Dr. Johnson did so by simply kicking a stone.

* * *

I think of McGill University in Montreal as being a sober and respectable academic institution and not just because it is my alma mater. Pieces like this are one reason why: Mozart’s Music Doesn’t Make Baby Geniuses

There is an alchemy to science. Sometimes, when the conditions are just right, the results of tiny, preliminary studies are transformed into truisms that spread the world over. For example, everyone knows that you’re either left-brained or right-brained… except that that is false. What is true is that some brain functions tend to involve one half of the brain more than the other, but the idea that scientists are left-brained while artists are right-brained is nonsense. Yet, the belief endures. When science goes public, it can become magic.

The Mozart effect is a scientific legend. It’s the idea that playing Mozart’s music to a baby will make them smart. We know it isn’t true. But it started with a nugget of science back in 1993. What happened next is a cautionary tale for how these legends spread. The media half-remembers the study and twists its findings, and the story starts morphing in the telling until it finds a shape the public views as desirable.

This is a story of scientists hounded by the media, trying to evade death threats. It is also about how scientific studies are portrayed as sacred rituals when they fail to replicate.

And then the article gets really interesting! Yes, you have to read the whole thing if only to find out how minimalist composer Philip Glass’ music was unfairly demonized in an attempt to prove a theory. (The term "minimalist" is from the article and no, I don't really agree.) This is a brilliant piece of intellectual history.

* * *

 Here is how one UK student amuses himself: transcribing performances that do not already have a notation, like this cadenza to a Mozart piano concerto:


Hat tip to the New York Times.

* * *

While over at The Critic, Norman Lebrecht does a drive-by of the Chopin Competition: How to win at Chopin

Over three weeks, 40 contenders from around the world play Chopin all day and into the night for the benefit of a half-filled hall and large local television ratings. In the final, half a dozen survivors slug it out for the top slot, egged on by teachers, parents, bus drivers and their own damaged egos, trapped in a remorseless kind of Stockholm syndrome that makes them love their tormentors — the judges, and the contest itself.

One finalist, locked in a toilet with her teacher, is heard weeping hysterically and being ordered to stop if she wants to win. Another is watched over in sleep by his professor, herself a past contestant. A splendid Polish young man thinks he stands the best chance of winning if he has his hair done like Chopin’s; he winds up walking off stage in the middle of the second round, saying something like “I don’t want to do this any more.”

Three Italians maintain a modicum of sanity. One of them recommends, “I would say, whoever wins this competition should spend the €40,000 on a course of psychotherapy.”

My personal take on competitions: they are psychologically brutal and tend to produce generations of robotic virtuosos. Oh, and the best musician never wins.

* * * 

A CANADIAN UNIVERSITY SCRAPS MUSIC DEGREE

McMaster University, a public research university in Hamilton, Ontario, has abolished its music degrees.

The degree course began in 1965. The university administration underfunded Music programmes for 40 years, closing its MA program in 2006, according to Paul Rapoport, who taught there from 1977 to 2005 and was Chairman of the Music Department in 1994–95. Now the bachelor degree has also been abolished.

Just between us, I barely knew that McMaster even had a music department...

* * *

NYC’s Metropolitan Opera puts trigger warning on Puccini masterpiece ‘Turandot’ in bow to woke culture

New York City’s famed Metropolitan Opera added a website trigger warning for prospective ticket buyers to Giacomo Puccini’s “Turandot,” informing audiences that the 1926 masterpiece set in ancient China could be offensive.

“It is rife with contradictions, distortions, and racial stereotypes,” reads a program note promising “a discussion of the opera’s cultural insensitivities.”  

“It shouldn’t be surprising . . . that many audience members of Chinese descent find it difficult to watch as their own heritage is co-opted, fetishized, or painted as savage, bloodthirsty, or backward,” the note continues.

Trigger warnings are themselves rife with contradictions, historical distortions and intellectual fetishes. 

* * * 

AT LAST, LA WAKES UP TO SCHOENBERG

Arnold Schoenberg’s inventive approach to harmony left a lasting influence on the 20th century. Marking the 150th anniversary of his birth, the LA Phil explores the work of the Austrian-turned-Angeleno composer throughout the season highlighted by two performances of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder conducted by LA Phil Conductor Emeritus Zubin Mehta featuring soprano Christin Goerke (Tove), mezzo Violeta Urmana (Waldtaube), tenors Brandon Jovanovich (Waldemar) and Gerhard Siegel (Klaus-Narr), and speaker Dietrich Henschel (December 13 and 15).

I think it is safe to say that, despite the 150th anniversary of Schoenberg's birth, Los Angeles has not woken up very far. Gurrelieder is a lovely early work that resembles Wagner as much as anyone. Actually waking up to Schoenberg would probably involve programming some later works like the Piano and Violin Concertos, some string quartets, piano music and maybe his opera...

 * * *

Alex Ross swoops in with a big piece on Schoenberg: How Arnold Schoenberg Changed Hollywood

Of the thousands of German-speaking Jews who fled from Nazi-occupied Europe to the comparative paradise of Los Angeles, Arnold Schoenberg seemed especially unlikely to make himself at home. He was, after all, the most implacable modernist composer of the day—the progenitor of atonality, the codifier of twelve-tone music, a Viennese firebrand who relished polemics as a sport. He once wrote, “If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.” The prevailing attitude in the Hollywood film industry, the dominant cultural concern in Schoenberg’s adopted city, was the opposite: if it’s not for all, it’s worthless.

Yet there he was, the composer of “Transfigured Night” and “Pierrot Lunaire,” living in Brentwood, across the street from Shirley Temple. He took a liking to Jackie Robinson, the Marx Brothers, and the radio quiz show “Information Please.” He played tennis with George Gershwin, who idolized him. He delighted in the American habits of his children, who, to the alarm of other émigrés, ran all over the house. (Thomas Mann, after a visit, wrote in his diary, “Impertinent kids. Excellent Viennese coffee.”) He taught at U.S.C., at U.C.L.A., and at home, counting John Cage, Lou Harrison, and Oscar Levant among his students. Although he faced a degree of indifference and hostility from audiences, he had experienced worse in Austria and Germany. He made modest concessions to popular taste, writing a harmonically lush adaptation of the Kol Nidre for Rabbi Jacob Sonderling, of the Fairfax Temple. He died in Los Angeles in 1951, an eccentric but proud American.

Read the rest for more of Ross' charming and informative guide to Schoenberg and how his music is being celebrated this year.

* * *

In honor of the refractory Austrian, let's have a whole set of envois dedicated to Schoenberg. First, the Piano Pieces op. 11 from that fertile transitional stage when he was experimenting with atonality but had not yet organized it in 12-tone serialism:

The String Quartet No. 2 is also from this time:

Two later works are the Piano Concerto op 42:

And the Violin Concerto op. 36:



Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Today's Listening

These days a lot of young guitarists frankly sound a bit robotic in their quest for technical perfection. After listening to them we like to go and listen to some Andrés Segovia as a palate cleanser, someone who was a great artist and a pretty good technician. But here, for your delectation, is a true virtuoso who has a spectacular technique but never sounds like a robot: Pepe Romero and the Etude No. 1 by Villa-Lobos.



Friday, March 8, 2024

Friday Miscellanea

Here is a meaty piece from The New York Times: Composer, Uninterrupted: Christian Wolff at 90

Wolff, who turns 90 on Friday, is associated with a different pantheon. He is the last living representative of what’s known as the New York School of composition, a group that included John CageMorton FeldmanEarle Brown and David Tudor. Their tight-knit circle shifted midcentury American music away from classic European models. And it radiated out, intersecting with other arts and artists who were making New York a leading center of modernism: the choreographer Merce Cunningham, the poet John Ashbery, the painters Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and many others.

After an early period involving intense reduction of musical materials, like the proto-minimalist “Duo for Violins” (1950), Wolff sought to create structures that cultivated chance, and also required performers to pay close attention to one another, listening for aural cues to proceed. Or, conversely, to play similar material independently, in tandem. Increasingly, his goal was to allow players of differing abilities to work together.

Over the years, Wolff explored a variety of strategies: graphic scores, text pieces, geometric configurations in which clusters of standard notation hung suspended in expanses of white space. The results could be agitated, evanescent or surprisingly direct and tuneful.

Over the years a perennial interest of mine has been notation and recently I have been combining that with an interest in Wittgenstein's "picture theory" in which thoughts and propositions are seen as pictures of reality. And, of course, graphic notation is a picture of a piece of music. I'm going to see if I can develop this idea.

* * * 

I'm not surprised: Are TikTok and Instagram dulling your taste?

“Algorithmic recommendations are addictive because they are always subtly confirming your own cultural, political, and social biases, warping your surroundings into a mirror image of yourself while doing the same for everyone else,” Chayka writes. “This had made me anxious, the possibility that my view of my own life — lived through the Internet — was a fiction formed by the feeds.” So he went on an algorithm cleanse and quit social media...

That's been my solution.

If taste — aesthetic judgment — is a human skill cultivated by a lifetime of gazing, reading, listening and selecting, recommendation algorithms are like the new robots powering up to take over the assembly line of our intentionality. These mathematical helpers reduce selection time and boost the efficiency of seeing pictures, watching TV shows and hearing songs: more and faster.

Just no. 

* * *

A history of new music in Los Angeles: Old-World Culture Meets Hollywood: Monday Evening Concerts and the Development of L.A.’s New-Music Scene

Yet if the LA Phil is the jewel in the crown, there is also a long-established, vibrant, but much less publicized contemporary music scene in Los Angeles led by the venerable Monday Evening Concerts series, which began in the late 1930s. Those roots have branched into a number of current organizations that grew from the same network of players. 

At the height of the Great Depression, when America was reeling in despair, Hollywood thrived, attracting a remarkable community of artists, composers, musicians, writers, and dancer/choreographers from famous artistic scenes, from Vienna to Paris, London, and New York. There was work in the movies, and suddenly Los Angeles was a hub of artists with international recognition.

“It was a completely transplanted community, with the Hollywood film and recording industry as its nexus,” observes Ara Guzelimian, artistic and executive director of the Ojai Music Festival. “Together they kick-started the idea of cultural Los Angeles and at the same time fostered a new audience. It was a cultural jolt.”

In the 1930s Los Angeles was home to the two most important composers of the first half of the century: Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky. 

* * *

 Looking at this:  “Welcome to the Sound Wellness Revolution”: Endel’s AI-Generated Soundscapes and the Commodification of Passive Listening I wonder why there are not any positive trends?

Functional music is nothing new. From work songs to workout playlists, music is often used to influence listeners’ moods and behaviours. This is exemplified by the ubiquity of background music, which can be traced to the United States in the 1930s when the company Muzak first began piping easy-listening music into stores, workplaces, public transit, and other spaces. In the century since, recorded background music has spread throughout much of the world from Britain to Japan, designed to calm listeners, encourage customer spending, and increase worker efficiency. These effects reflect Anahid Kassabian’s concept of “ubiquitous listening,” which describes how even passive engagement with music can shape affect and subjectivity.

* * *

 Our first envoi is by Christian Wolff, Edges from 1968.


I recently re-watched one of my favorite movies, The Year of Living Dangerously by Peter Weir with Linda Hunt, Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver. In one scene we see Gibson's character simply listening to this song. I think Peter Weir uses music more skillfully than any other director I can think of.

The movie's title, by the way, comes from a speech by Indonesian President Sukarno. I'm thinking of naming this year The Year of Petulant Restraint.

Finally the Tombeau fait à Paris sur la mort de Monsieur Blancheroche by Johann Jakob Froberger


Sunday, March 3, 2024

Mumbling on Sunday

I see that the Dune, part 2 movie is out. I couldn't get through all of part 1 when it appeared on my streaming service last year. But I am tempted to have another go at the book which I read many decades ago. Like Benjamin Britten, who played through all the piano music of Brahms every year, just to remind himself how bad it was, I am tempted to re-read Dune for the same reason. However could such a loathsomely pretentious compendium of crap have become so popular? The earlier, extremely bad film of Dune was a quite accurate representation of how bad it is. Your milage may vary, of course...

* * *

There is an article in the Wall Street Journal titled: Can’t Get Things Done Without Background Noise? You’re Not Alone.

Music has long helped us focus while doing simple tasks. Now, though, listening to podcasts or watching TikTok, YouTube or other videos while we do other things—from cooking to working—is a reflex. Last year, Americans streamed 21 million years’ worth of video, up 21% from the previous year, according to Nielsen. 

These distractions in the form of a podcast or video clip can speed a task and stave off boredom, especially during more monotonous moments.

I guess I have to believe this is true, though it seems absurd on the face of it. Are the tasks most of us are engaged in so mindlessly repetitive that we can do them without actually thinking about them? That sounds like a huge problem in itself. I find I can't do any kind of mental work with background music of any kind, let alone video clips. Am I really in a minority? I find that my mind can wander off even without external distractions. I often have to read a sentence or paragraph over several times if it is conceptually difficult. I have always laughed at "speed-reading" courses. Good lord, the last thing on earth anyone needs is to read faster. But my hidden assumption there is, of course, that anything worth reading is worth reading slowly. Francis Bacon wrote in The Essays:

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few are to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

And, sad to say, much of what is written these days really needs to be hurled against the wall with great force! (Yes, someone already said a version of that, but who exactly seems unclear.)

* * * 

Economics Explained is a useful series of YouTube clips by an Australian economist. Here is the latest:

This actually leads into something I have noticed recently involving a hobby of mine: fountain pens. Many years ago in Canada I had a fountain pen that I quite enjoyed writing with, but it never made it to Mexico. Here fountain pens are very rare. I rediscovered them a few years ago and bought a few Chinese pens because they were very cheap. Once I grew more aware of quality differences I gravitated towards German and Japanese pens (and one Italian pen). It almost seems as if the path towards becoming a great source of fine fountain pens was to lose World War II! The thing is that these fine pens from Germany and Japan, often cost between $150 and $200. But in the last couple of months I have noticed reviews of some new Chinese pens and after trying them, I am very impressed. They are as good as the good German and Japanese pens but cost between $25 and $30. My favorite is this one from Jinhao with a German steel nib (that is still something they excel at) and a handmade body of sandalwood (also available with tigerwood and ebony). Gorgeous pen.

* * *

Since we were mean to Brahms earlier on, let's listen to his Symphony No. 2: