July 29, 2009
I know you can hear my thoughts, too, boy
Schonberg op. 11—performed entirely by cats. An approximation distilled from 170 YouTube videos and mapped onto Glenn Gould's recording. If that doesn't make your day, go back to bed. (Via.)
July 28, 2009
The statue got me high
Reviewing the Tanglewood Music Center's Don Giovanni.
Boston Globe, July 29, 2009.
Boston Globe, July 29, 2009.
A mazurka in jazz
Composer, arranger, and guru of the Lydian scale George Russell has died at the age of 86.
July 25, 2009
July 23, 2009
With a little Alp from my friends
Today in Intellectual Property news: copyright law invades the domain of Bavarian beer-hall yodeling.
The money-spinning power of "horlla-rü-di-ri, di-ri, di-ri", the famous chorus of the Kufsteinlied, which is capable of making even the hardiest of lederhosen-clad Germans go weak at the knees, has been keenly felt this week in a Munich courtroom battle over who owns the copyright.The most famous version of the "Kufsteinlied" was recorded in 1968 by Franzl Lang, the Jodlerkönig. Here he is singing it in 1991. Now I'm thirsty.
The heirs of Karl Ganzer, the Austrian composer of the 63-year-old beer-hall hit which is said to be Europe's most-played folk song, were yesterday successful in their attempts to sue the music publisher Egon Frauenberger, who claimed he had written the song's refrain and therefore had a right to a twelfth of the royalties.
July 18, 2009
In the ballpark
Reading that the Boston Symphony Orchestra management and players have agreed to freeze salaries at their current minimum of $128,180, Thomas Garvey asks—more to the point, asks why my Globe colleague Geoff Edgers isn't asking, "Why is the BSO so overpaid?" The answer? Because they're not. Here are the starting salaries for either the last or the coming season for the traditional Big Five, plus San Francisco and Los Angeles:
Back in 2006, BSO freelancers got the short end of the stick, which was reported with due skepticism; I'm assuming that inequity continues in this extension. But the full-time players are earning pretty much what every other comparable market is paying. Is the Boston Symphony Orchestra a sweet gig? Hell, yeah. But overpaid? Not according to the going rates.
- New York Philharmonic: $129,740 (2009-10)
- San Francisco Orchestra: $129,740 (2009-10)
- Los Angeles Philharmonic: $129,585 (2008-09)
- Boston Symphony Orchestra: $128,180 (2009-10)
- Chicago Symphony Orchestra: $127,637 (2009-10)
- Philadelphia Orchestra: $124,800 (2009-10)
- Cleveland Orchestra: $115,440 (2008-09)
Back in 2006, BSO freelancers got the short end of the stick, which was reported with due skepticism; I'm assuming that inequity continues in this extension. But the full-time players are earning pretty much what every other comparable market is paying. Is the Boston Symphony Orchestra a sweet gig? Hell, yeah. But overpaid? Not according to the going rates.
July 17, 2009
July 15, 2009
July 14, 2009
No cowbell, either
Kyle Gann, choosing an alternate reality:
The Aardvarks' Parade is a lot of fun, though.
the reason Beethoven was so successful is that there are no subtleties in his musicMy God, I've fallen into an alternative universe where Beethoven died immediately after his heroic period! I hope this doesn't mean food is going to start to taste funny.
The Aardvarks' Parade is a lot of fun, though.
July 13, 2009
Mixing domains
I was at my in-laws' for dinner last night, after which we watched some Korean TV, including, mostly because it happened to be on, some competitive ballroom dancing. (The show in question was "Shall We Dance," on MBC-ESPN.) The dancers—who, according to my translating parents, were all high school kids—were pretty damn good. But what was really fun (as it always is with Korean TV) was the music they were dancing to.
I've taken enough dance lessons to expect familiar songs in goofy, step-specific cover versions. But this stuff was going a step further—almost deliberately blurring cultural boundaries, just for fun. The jive numbers, far from the retro swing common in the US, were pretty near hip-hop across the board. (Not surprising.) A tango version of the them from "The Godfather"? Why not? The waltz spun to "Memory" from Cats, shoehorned into three-quarter time; the Viennese waltz then crossed the Alps into Italy, with the Brindisi from La Traviata slowed to a Straussian lilt.
It put me in mind of those culinary categories for which the term "fusion" is a little too facile, the ones where the melting pot has been simmering so long that the stew takes on an identity of its own. (Argentinian-Italian food is a good example, actually.) This sort of thing goes on under the hood of music all the time, of course, but it's fun to occasionally see the engine on the outside, hot-rod style.
I've taken enough dance lessons to expect familiar songs in goofy, step-specific cover versions. But this stuff was going a step further—almost deliberately blurring cultural boundaries, just for fun. The jive numbers, far from the retro swing common in the US, were pretty near hip-hop across the board. (Not surprising.) A tango version of the them from "The Godfather"? Why not? The waltz spun to "Memory" from Cats, shoehorned into three-quarter time; the Viennese waltz then crossed the Alps into Italy, with the Brindisi from La Traviata slowed to a Straussian lilt.
It put me in mind of those culinary categories for which the term "fusion" is a little too facile, the ones where the melting pot has been simmering so long that the stew takes on an identity of its own. (Argentinian-Italian food is a good example, actually.) This sort of thing goes on under the hood of music all the time, of course, but it's fun to occasionally see the engine on the outside, hot-rod style.
Wagner? I just met her!
Reviewing James Levine and the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra.
Boston Globe, July 13, 2009.
Concert opera is always a touch surreal—hey, all those Meistersinger are in James Bond tuxedos!—but Morris and Botha had the inspired idea to put their on-stage drinking water in old-fashioned beer steins.
Update (7/13): Lisa Hirsch noticed that I called baritone Hans-Joachim Ketelsen a tenor, which is the sort of thing that happens when I move clauses around one too many times. (For those of you keeping score at home, that's two embarrassing slips so far this year—giving me a fielding average of .926.)
Further update: now fixed.
Boston Globe, July 13, 2009.
Concert opera is always a touch surreal—hey, all those Meistersinger are in James Bond tuxedos!—but Morris and Botha had the inspired idea to put their on-stage drinking water in old-fashioned beer steins.
Update (7/13): Lisa Hirsch noticed that I called baritone Hans-Joachim Ketelsen a tenor, which is the sort of thing that happens when I move clauses around one too many times. (For those of you keeping score at home, that's two embarrassing slips so far this year—giving me a fielding average of .926.)
Further update: now fixed.
July 09, 2009
Du Doppelgänger! Du bleicher Geselle!
As of today, you can now experience me in two places at once. Bilocation! Just like Padre Pio! (A special joke for anyone who paid attention in Catholic school during the 70s.) I'll be dividing my blogging between this space and my new gig as Classical Music Correspondent (capital letters make everything Seem More Important than it Really Is) for The Faster Times. You can read more about the enterprise here, and then kill of the rest of today's productivity via all the excellent people who I get to share a masthead with.
July 06, 2009
Small wonder
OK, Molly, I did it, I went over and checked out Musoc.org, the latest is-this-really-serious pop-is-bad-classical-is-good manifesto website. Whether or not it's a joke (A.C. Douglas—O tempora! O mores!—thinks it is), it's an intellectual mess. Announce a campaign against "the idiocy of cultural relativism" and you'd better duck—that's pretty much the philosophical equivalent of a hanging curve out over the plate. And sure enough, the stated criteria for music (as opposed to "Pop 'Musics' or non-music"—if scare quotes had mass, this site would collapse into a black hole) immediately run into trouble.
Ah, but our arbiter no doubt knows music when he/she hears it. So I'm guessing that my love of Brian Wilson (despite that music being transcendent, complex, sophisticated, and—the funniest phrase of the day—"susceptible to detailed theoretical analysis", as if musicologists haven't repeatedly demonstrated the possibility of theoretically analyzing anything vaguely musical to within an inch of its life), my aesthetic opinion that Pet Sounds is a masterpiece of Western music, brands me as having been brainwashed by corporate media. For our arbiter, it turns out, has read Adorno.
So we're left with an anti-relativism argument that traffics in relativism, an anti-corporate argument framed in corporate terms, and an Adorno/Horkheimer name-drop without enough self-realization to notice that the exclusionary schema it's propping up is a mirror-image recapitulation of what Adorno and Horkheimer were warning against. (What's that, Theodor and Max? "When the outsider is excluded from the concern, he can only too easily be accused of incompetence"? That's what I thought you said.) I've said it before: the persistence of classical music (sorry, "'Art' music") in spite of a society that repeatedly proclaims it dead is the interesting story, not the typography of the spurious proclamation. Can you please stop trying to define music as one thing or another? Trust me—it's bigger and more generous than any of us can imagine.
To count as Art Music, a work must meet ALL* the following criteria:Oh, come on—I thought you were going to draw a line in the sand, not vaguely gesture at some dunes in the distance. It's not art music, except when it is, as judged relative to the rest of the composer's repertoire? Even better:
...
* For argument's sake, a work not satisfying one of these conditions may also be considered Art Music if a majority of other works by the same composer do.
It must stand on, or peer over, the shoulders of giants, i.e. acknowledge, build on or work from 1000 years of fundamentally accumulative history from the so-called Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic and Modern (see right) eras (or their equivalents in non-Western cultures)Leaving aside the hilariously clueless cultural imperialism (some of my best friends are equivalents in non-Western cultures!), if you're going to allow equivalents from non-Western cultures, why not equivalents within Western culture? Slippery slope! Does this person really think that jazz, rock, hip-hop doesn't have a fundamentally accumulative history? So what if it's not 1000 years long? In 1000 years, it will be. Of course, then our arbiter would fall back on that whole must-be-notated thing. Wait, big band charts are notated. But then there's this universal safety valve:
It must aspire to provide the listener with emotional and intellectual enjoyment and satisfaction, by communicating through musical complexity, sophistication and coherence exceptional and/or transcendent reflections on the human conditionHave any two people in history ever exactly agreed as to what that might practically mean? Isn't that criterion pretty much an open invitation to fuzzy relativism?
Ah, but our arbiter no doubt knows music when he/she hears it. So I'm guessing that my love of Brian Wilson (despite that music being transcendent, complex, sophisticated, and—the funniest phrase of the day—"susceptible to detailed theoretical analysis", as if musicologists haven't repeatedly demonstrated the possibility of theoretically analyzing anything vaguely musical to within an inch of its life), my aesthetic opinion that Pet Sounds is a masterpiece of Western music, brands me as having been brainwashed by corporate media. For our arbiter, it turns out, has read Adorno.
Musoc.org agrees (broadly) with Adorno and Horkheimer's theory of mass culture (set out in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, enlarged later by Marcuse in One Dimensional Man), that the products of the entertainment and information industries — not necessarily mass-produced in the Marxist sense — promote a materialistic, superficial way of life that militates against political change.Am I really in unconscious thrall to the values of neoliberal market society? That's OK—so is our arbiter. "Virtually all music that isn't popular is elitist by definition," we're told, "in the sense that it's a minority interest." How exactly are you figuring that minority status there? Oh, yeah—the market. "[M]usoc.org encourages exclusive support of smaller [record] companies and individuals," because "[t]he labels of the multinational media groups, on the other hand, exist to make profits for shareholders." So I'm supposed to stop listening to my recording of Maurizio Pollini playing the Boulez Second Sonata because it was recorded for DG, which is owned by Universal, which also markets recordings by Ludacris? I would categorize that as letting the corporate structure of society determine what I can and can't listen to. (Of course, our arbiter classifies Boulez's scare-quoted "total serialism" as evil "Postmodernism" while considering non-scare-quoted serialism as progressively "Modern," which is rather like considering pork chops meat but bacon a vegetable.) Our arbiter misses the point that promoting the inverse of market values still promotes market structure, since how else are you to know when you're genuinely moved or merely corporately conditioned? Our arbiter has crafted the criteria such that my love of Puccini is considered an acknowledgement of Puccini's aspirations towards transcendence, but my love of the Sex Pistols is relegated to corporate toolhood—a distinction that can be made only via an assumption that the market is a more powerful determinant than my own aesthetic judgement. Welcome to the capitalist hegemony! Enjoy your stay.
So we're left with an anti-relativism argument that traffics in relativism, an anti-corporate argument framed in corporate terms, and an Adorno/Horkheimer name-drop without enough self-realization to notice that the exclusionary schema it's propping up is a mirror-image recapitulation of what Adorno and Horkheimer were warning against. (What's that, Theodor and Max? "When the outsider is excluded from the concern, he can only too easily be accused of incompetence"? That's what I thought you said.) I've said it before: the persistence of classical music (sorry, "'Art' music") in spite of a society that repeatedly proclaims it dead is the interesting story, not the typography of the spurious proclamation. Can you please stop trying to define music as one thing or another? Trust me—it's bigger and more generous than any of us can imagine.
July 04, 2009
Its society offers infinite variety
Happy Independence Day! I love the fact that our nation commemorates the anniversary of the day we decided we were mad as hell and weren't going to take it anymore, rather than the day we actually won the war, or ratified the Constitution, or any of that practical stuff. Very American. Here's a holiday rerun: a ramble I wrote a couple summers ago for Geoff Edgers' "Exhibitionist" blog at the Boston Globe on the subject of that seemingly incongruous 4th of July favorite, Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, which holds up better than many of my rambles.
I think the 1812 Overture has to be the most underrated-because-overplayed piece in the classical canon; it is, in fact, a remarkably subversive piece in terms of musical form. Tchaikovsky fashions almost the rhetorical inverse of sonata-allegro: instead of generating drama by making us wait for the expected recapitulation, he generates drama by covering up any sense of structure at all. Themes come and go without transition, key relationships deliberately avoid the navigable points of tonic and dominant (mediants abound), and the scraps of La Marseillaise are used almost as a magician's misdirection. The lead-in to the return of the hymn goes on for so long that the hymn's actual return is a surprise in spite of itself, as is the cannon-blaring coda—on a theme that the normally prolix Tchaikovsky has only established for a fragmentary sixteen bars.
It's almost as if Tchaikovsky has managed with a bit of a temporal warp, the near-ametrical hymn and tentative tattoo at the beginning literally showing up too soon; the satisfaction of the ending comes less from the thematic recapitulation than from a sense that time is no longer out of joint. I guess that sort of clean-slate ingenuity is something else America has claimed for itself as time goes on; no wonder Pyotr Ilyich is a perennial honored guest. Give that Russian another burger!
I think the 1812 Overture has to be the most underrated-because-overplayed piece in the classical canon; it is, in fact, a remarkably subversive piece in terms of musical form. Tchaikovsky fashions almost the rhetorical inverse of sonata-allegro: instead of generating drama by making us wait for the expected recapitulation, he generates drama by covering up any sense of structure at all. Themes come and go without transition, key relationships deliberately avoid the navigable points of tonic and dominant (mediants abound), and the scraps of La Marseillaise are used almost as a magician's misdirection. The lead-in to the return of the hymn goes on for so long that the hymn's actual return is a surprise in spite of itself, as is the cannon-blaring coda—on a theme that the normally prolix Tchaikovsky has only established for a fragmentary sixteen bars.
It's almost as if Tchaikovsky has managed with a bit of a temporal warp, the near-ametrical hymn and tentative tattoo at the beginning literally showing up too soon; the satisfaction of the ending comes less from the thematic recapitulation than from a sense that time is no longer out of joint. I guess that sort of clean-slate ingenuity is something else America has claimed for itself as time goes on; no wonder Pyotr Ilyich is a perennial honored guest. Give that Russian another burger!
July 02, 2009
The In Crowd
Mr. Glass agrees that there is a growing willingness to fund new music. "...The real thing about commissions is to be in a cycle of demand and supply."Do you think Frederic Jameson would be a good ice-breaker with the hedge-fund managers?
Mr. Asia advises young composers to get in the habit of talking to people outside the music world -- to lawyers, doctors and hedge-fund managers -- to foster a culture of patronage.
July 01, 2009
Up and Down
Too much Grau und Drang for proper blogging today. Here's a story instead:
Jean Martinon, spare, white-haired conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, last week tried to explain his two favorite sports—skiing and mountain climbing—to his ancient counterpart, Conductor Charles Munch. "In both," he said, "You are in the mountains, where you become a freer man. But, psychologically, skiing is a sport in which you must go downhill. Mountain climbing is a sport of ascent. In skiing there is much more competition, which spoils something of it for me. In mountain climbing nobody praises you for what you do well. You do it well for the beauty of the thing."
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