Sounds & Fury

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Two updates of interest have been made to this S&F post.

Don't Forget Those Good-Quality Headphones

[Note: This post has been updated (3) as of 9:26 PM Eastern on 29 Mar. See below.]

Following a link the other day, we came upon this challenge on a blog devoted to classical music:

Please listen to this audio file and answer the question below. The file ... contains three versions of the same 1'15" excerpt of Mozart’s Piano Concerto K.491. One is the original uncompressed CD-quality audio, the other two are compressed, like you’d download from iTunes or Amazon. Can you tell which is which?

Responding in the comments section of the post, we wrote, in part:

[I]t depends on the audio system you’re using to audition the clips. If you’re using the ordinary MP3 audio system like, say, the audio system on your computer or an iPod, you probably won’t notice any difference between the clips. If, however, you’re using a high-priced, high-quality audio system (the two aren’t necessarily the same thing), you’ll notice the difference immediately. Given the ubiquitousness of the iPod and other crap audio systems, you’d be pretty stupid to pay out more bucks and give up more storage space for a CD-quality MP3.

The blog author's response to this was both unexpected and, on further thought, thoroughly dismaying:

I can’t believe that you have used an iPod to play back any of the lossless formats it supports through good-quality headphones and still think it is a “crap audio system”. I worry that if your idea of “mediocre” starts somewhere beyond this, then you’re hardly typical of even classical music purchasers — indeed it may well be that your idea of “good” surpasses the quality of the electronics used to record most classical albums in the first place.

Our first thought was that the writer was simply pissed at us for dissing what's become something of an icon and de rigueur accessory for the under-thirty crowd, and we responded in kind with a snarky quip. But on giving further thought to that blog author's response, we, with a quick thrill of horror, began to suspect that this guy was simply expressing what he and his generation of classical music aficionados really feel to be the case; viz., that the iPod, with "good-quality headphones" attached, is actually a respectable audio system for the serious listening of recorded classical music.

If that, in fact, is truly the feeling of most of today's young classical music aficionados, and their ears have really become that appallingly desensitized to the inaccurate reproduction of classical music, then classical music is in far deeper trouble than even its most pessimistic doomsayers imagine. For, as we've here written previously, unlike recorded pop music, with recorded classical music,

...dynamic nuance, nuance of timbre, and acoustic accuracy, among other such matters, are sine qua non, and even the very best existing CD format is incompetent to capture all that needs to be captured.

And then there's the problem of playback. Even given the very best existing CD format, hearing the playback of classical music so recorded through the earbuds of, say, the ubiquitous iPod is simply a joke. An insidious joke. A most insidious joke indeed. And the joke is on us — all of us. It's no mere bon mot to say, "You can get used to awful" P.D.Q., most especially when one has no point of live reference or too infrequent experience of it as is the unhappy case today overwhelmingly where classical music is concerned.

But perhaps we're being just a tad alarmist concerning this blog post author's response. Perhaps he really was merely pissed at us for dissing one of his icons.

One can but hope.

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Update (3:37 PM Eastern on 28 Mar): We should have added that listening to the clip on the two 3" wonders that are our computer's satellite speakers, we guessed at which was the "CD quality" excerpt NOT because it sounded better than the other two (the other two, which two sounded the same, actually sounded better), but because it had a "whompy" bass which indicated to us that the dynamic range and frequency response of that one excerpt were wider than on the other two excerpts. No, we're not going to disclose which excerpt that was as that would negatively impact the "blind" poll which is still open.

Update 2 (5:05 AM Eastern on 29 Mar): We just looked in on Proper Discord again to see whether the results of the Pepsi Challenge poll had been published, and sure enough, they have. The polling population numbered 100 (which may or may not be a fair random sample of the Internet-enabled population of classical music fans, but let's not go there), and of those 100 participants fully 73 (73%) either guessed wrong (57%) or voted they couldn't tell which of the three excerpts was the CD quality excerpt (16%), and only 27 (27%) guessed correctly. From this, Mr. Proper Discord concludes that his hypothesis that "most classical music fans can’t tell the difference between CD-quality downloads and the compressed kind you get from mainstream music stores" has been confirmed.

Not to throw too much cold water on that purported confirmation (well, to be perfectly frank, that's just what we're about to do), we would suggest that Mr. Proper Discord's hypothesis is not at all confirmed by those poll results, and any celebration of his hypothesis's triumph is, shall we say, premature. And the reason is that there was zero control of the playback systems used to audition the test file by the 100 participants, nor were playback systems even so much as considered. Had the playback system been standardized for all 100 participants, then, and only then, would the test have been a valid one and the results meaningful. Absent that standardization the test is anything but valid, and the results meaningless, confirming nothing.

Oh, and BTW (or, rather, not so BTW), auditioning the test file on our computer's 3" wonders as noted above, we guessed incorrectly, choosing the first excerpt as the probable CD quality excerpt solely for the reason adduced.

Update 3 (9:26 PM Eastern on 29 Mar): Mr. Proper Discord replies:

That’s not true [viz., our contention that the test was not valid as the playback systems used were not standardized or even considered]. This is market research. It’s not up to me to tell people how to use the product. Record stores don’t tell you that you’re not qualified to buy music based on your choice of CD player. Everybody was asked the same question.

It wouldn’t be very useful to know what people thought about music played back on equipment that they didn’t own, and it seems completely reasonable to assume that almost everybody bothering to take part in the experiment would listen on the same stuff they’d use for any other music download.

If we only asked people that own high-end stereo equipment, we’d only be asking people that already agreed with you. That would be like excluding sick people from a drug trial.

It’s not my fault that you got it wrong. If you’d spent two minutes going to fetch a pair of headphones instead of insulting me, you might have done better.

The aggrieved Mr. Proper Discord, who imagines that our pointing out the fundamental flaw in his test was intended by us as an insult directed at him personally, misses the point (surprise!). What we wrote simply said that the test results do not confirm his hypothesis that "most classical music fans can’t tell the difference between CD-quality downloads and the compressed kind you get from mainstream music stores" as he imagines they did. In order for that hypothesis to be confirmed, all conditions of the test would need to be standardized for all participants which they clearly were not. A key factor in such a test is the playback equipment used to audition the test file which playback equipment was not even considered much less standardized. It's our stated contention that when auditioned via the typical crap computer sound system or an iPod, no one would consistently be able to hear the difference between the test file's three excerpts, but if auditioned via a high-quality sound system, only the tone deaf would not be able to hear the difference. Beyond all that, it's a matter of continuing dismay to us that Mr. Proper Discord apparently still imagines that all that's required to transform a crap playback system into an acceptable one for the serious listening of recorded classical music is a pair of "good-quality headphones."

De Mortuis Nil Nisi Bonum

We sat down a few hours ago to make good our promise in our post announcing the death at 90 of longtime director of the Bayreuther Festspiele, Wolfgang Wagner, that there would be more on Herr Wagner to follow here on S&F, but almost immediately ran up hard against the ancient imperative, de mortuis nil nisi bonum, which stopped us dead in our tracks (NPI), so to speak. For beyond making note of the extraordinary courage, skill, and inventiveness in the face of appalling odds displayed by Wolfgang along with his brother, the brilliant theatrical director Wieland, in the postwar resurrection of the Bayreuther Festspiele in 1951, we could think of little positive to say about Wolfgang. Quite the contrary, we could think only of things of the most negative sort based entirely on the results of his work at the Festspiele during the long 40 years he maintained sole control of the festival following Wieland's untimely death in 1966 at the age of 49. And so we'll hold off expressing our thoughts on Wolfgang's career for the nonce, and wait for a more propitious and appropriate time to set them forth here. For the time being, we can say nothing better or more appropriate than to say what was said by Alex Ross, quoting from the Prologue of Götterdämmerung, in his notice of Wolfgang's death: Es riss!

Wolfgang Wagner Ist Tot

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 11:12 AM Eastern on 23 Mar. See below.]

Wolfgang Wagner, grandson of Richard Wagner and longtime director of the Bayreuther Festspiele, is dead at 90 reports Spiegel Online. The death was announced some two hours ago by Festspiele spokesman Peter Emmerich. Wolfgang's daughter, Katharina Wagner, since September 2008 co-director of the Festspiele with her half-sister Eva Wagner-Pasquier, said he died peacefully in his sleep late Sunday night at his home in Bayreuth. More on Wolfgang to follow on S&F (see here (added 3/22)).

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Update (10:54 AM Eastern on 22 Mar): For the essential background on Wolfgang, this Guardian obituary is better than most floating around out there. Nothing (yet) from The New York Times beyond the ubiquitous AP obit picked up by most U.S. dailies.

Update 2 (11:12 AM Eastern on 23 Mar): The New York Times obituary here. The (London) Times obituary here. This last is the best of the lot.

And Speaking Of Being As Mad As Hell... (An Off-Message Rant)

And speaking of being as mad as hell, the ferocious onslaught against the prime cultural demons du jour, tobacco and smoking, is fast reaching fever pitch, but mostly quietly so that its impact will hardly be felt except by those of us devoted to the pleasures of tobacco and smoking (and don't even think of substituting the pejorative, incendiary code word "addicted" in place of "devoted"; tobacco is NOT addictive in the only meaningful sense of the term; i.e., physically addictive as is, for instance, heroin, never mind the mountain of tendentious and massaged "scientific" studies to the contrary).

Ever since the early '90s, at long last empowered by the publication by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of a fraudulent, statistically "cooked" 1993 study that declared so-called "second-hand smoke" (Environmental Tobacco Smoke, or ETA) to be a public health hazard, the rabid anti-smoking zealots among lawmakers, local, state, and federal, have managed to do everything short of proposing a Constitutional amendment to prohibit smoking and the sale and use of tobacco products; something they would have done years ago had they not the gruesome example of the effects of the Eighteenth Amendment to dissuade them from embarking on such a rash and foolhardy enterprise. Yet they've managed to accomplish the very same ends by other, more surreptitious means, even to the extent of the passing of laws in some cities that prohibit apartment dwellers from smoking in their own homes.

And what's the lawmakers' most powerful weapon? Draconian taxation. You need money? Tax tobacco and smokers — punitively. No one other than the tobacco interests and smokers — a decided if fairly large minority — will object. In fact, people will think you're doing good and a good thing. Why, not only are you helping to protect the public from lethal second-hand smoke, you're actually helping to save the lives of smokers themselves who are simply too stupid or too trapped by their addiction to realize the dangers they're exposing themselves to, never mind the public.

And just how draconian are these punitive taxes?

As recently as ten years ago, we were paying $10.00 per 150g tin of roll-your-own cigarette tobacco (real, no-additive, 100% tobacco leaf, not the junk, adulterated tobacco scraps found in commercial cigarettes); enough to roll the equivalent of a full carton of commercial, manufactured cigarettes which was then selling for something on the order of $50.00 per carton. Today, that same 150g tin costs upwards of $25.00, and in some localities, as high as $46.00, 100% of the price increase due taxes imposed on the product and the sale. Our custom, English-blend pipe tobacco sold ten years ago for $23.00 a pound. Today, the price is $65.00, again, 100% of the increase due taxes imposed on the product and the sale.

And we smokers are helpless. There's absolutely nothing we can do to change any of this. Our best hope today is that a thriving illegal industry will emerge to significantly undersell the still legal market. Beyond that, all we can do is rant and rave in impotent rage against uninformed public opinion, public stupidity, and the rabid zealotry of the anti-smoking powers that be. Ergo, this rant.

That is all.

As you were.

Divertissement

A brilliant and iconic speech, from a brilliant and iconic film, brilliantly and iconically delivered — cum graphics.

(Our thanks to 3 Quarks Daily for the link.)

Of Interest

We typically give merely a quick daily glance at the Milan-based, American opera blogger Opera Chic's blog, Opera Chic (via its RSS feed), as it's concerned mostly with the Italian opera scene (in and out of Italy) and those who inhabit it, all of which is of little interest to us. Today, however, she has up an interview with conductor James Conlon that's hugely interesting, and something worth one's time reading.

An excerpt:

I’m against people who present [for instance] a Mozart symphony and say, “Okay, now I’m going to dissect this work and show you what it really is.” To me it’s a false point of departure. Our job as performers is to surrender our own egos and to completely open ourselves to the work itself and to transmit that work as if we’re not there. This is on the one hand a very easy and simple thing to do. On the other hand, we’re all crippled by our own egos. To me, I’m not interested in knowing what my interpretation is.

When I was studying at The Juilliard School, the big movement was objectivism vs. subjectivism and the popular methodology was, “You have to find your own feelings, your own voice, and you have to find yourself. What’s your take on this piece of music?” Well, I had an allergy to that type of conversation. I thought, “I know what my feelings are and I couldn’t care less what my own feelings are. I want to know what the object is.” Is that objectivism? Well, yes, that’s objectivism. I want to know who Haydn is. I want to know who Beethoven is. I want to know how their music works. How does it fit? Why is it this? And why is it that? And to me, the beauty of that method is that you can devote yourself to the other, and a byproduct of that is that you find yourself. However if you go from the other point of view -- the “find yourself” subjectivism -- you don’t find the other. It’s very simple -- so simple that we don’t do it enough.

RTWT here.

An Object Lesson

How to write a music review and still manage to get all the important stuff in, eloquently, when you're limited to a maximum of 350 words. And this guy manages to do it on a consistent basis.

A 103-word excerpt:

Stephen Sondheim, possibly the most sophisticated and least sentimental composer ever to write a show tune, celebrates his 80th birthday on March 22. New York is waxing ecstatic.

The first of several major celebrations took place on Monday amid much congratulating and fussing, whooping and hollering. The host turned out to be the underutilised New York Philharmonic, not exactly your average pit-band. The locale was Avery Fisher Hall, capacity 2,738 and essentially too large. The conductor was an old Broadway pro, Paul Gemignani. Lonny Price, the slick director, assembled a massive cast that actually honoured the tired label, “star studded.” TV cameras loomed.

RTW 339-word T here.

Oh Dear

Anne Midgette, The Washington Post's chief classical music critic, is being savaged ruthlessly in the comments section of her Washington Post blog, The Classical Beat, for her review of a performance of the Verdi Requiem by the National Symphony Orchestra and Washington Chorus, with soloists Twyla Robinson, Mihoko Fujimura, Nikolai Schukoff, and Evgeny Nikitin, all under the baton of the NSO's Music Director Designate, Christoph Eschenbach. Ms. Midgette was, shall we say, mightily displeased with, even offended by, the performance, and, quite refreshingly, pulled no punches in her assessment of that performance (that is, refreshing as compared with the oh-so-delicately worded negative comments found typically in classical music reviews in today's American classical music mainstream critical press, especially when the subject involves a city's cultural home team, so to speak). Just how displeased was Ms. Midgette? This displeased:

At the opening, [Eschenbach] kept the cellos hushed to the very edge of audibility (it's a tribute to the NSO cellists that they brought it off), which let him gradually build the volume and tension to great cresting breakers of sound. The orchestra responded by putting its heart into the music, and the Washington Chorus (which did its own Verdi Requiem last April) sang reliably and honorably.

But Eschenbach followed the piece's emotional contours at the expense of its structure. The performance was so spiritual that it sometimes floated off into the heavens, losing its anchor to the ground — that is, its rhythmic pulse. The phrases kept battering against the confines of their proper tempos, now fast, now slow, so that orchestra and soloists sometimes had trouble staying together. It would be nice to blame it all on the soloists, but it wasn't all their fault.

A lot was their fault, though. In this chorus-heavy city, the Requiem is usually done by somebody at least once a season. But even in an age that suffers a lack of good Verdi singers, the piece is seldom heard with such bad soloists. Evgeny Nikitin, the bass, was the least offensive. His voice was at least the right size for the part, but he sang with such unvaried color, squeezing out a harsh, flat sound, utterly disregarding the pronunciation of the Italian vowels, and coming in so often under the pitch, that he didn't give much enjoyment.

Nikolai Schukoff, the tenor, was described in his biography as a lyric tenor who "has since developed towards heavier roles"; he sounded (when one could hear him) like a lyric tenor who is in the process of pushing his voice toward strain and collapse.

Mihoko Fujimura offered a ramrod-straight, echoey mezzo-soprano with considerable range, but no legato line. That is, instead of playing her voice like a violin, she tended to break her phrases at ill-chosen moments (like the end of the otherwise successful opening of the "Lux aeterna"), or failed to support her sound.

Soprano Twyla Robinson, by contrast, coquetted shamelessly with her own lines, breaking the phrases where it pleased her, swooping up or hauling off to take aim at a high note that her voice was too slender to deliver adequately -- and showing blatant disregard for the written rhythms in what felt like defacement of the music rather than mere haplessness.

Reading the savage attacks launched by the commenters on Ms. Midgette's blog, one might be forgiven for imagining that the vitriol of their prose was provoked by the spiky, uncompromising, bluntly honest critique quoted above, but that's not it at all despite all appearances to the contrary. What subliminally provoked the vitriol of those savage attacks was the unfortunate, cringe-inducing wording of the simile that constituted Ms. Midgette's lede grafs. Wrote Ms. Midgette:

A bride who wants to look beautiful, they say, should pick ugly bridesmaids.

That adage worked for the conductor Christoph Eschenbach at the Kennedy Center on Thursday night. He led the National Symphony Orchestra in a Verdi Requiem that featured such an awful quartet of vocal soloists that he could only look better by comparison.

Ouch!

We know what Ms. Midgette meant to convey by that simile, but her careless wording made it sound as if she were suggesting that Eschenbach purposely and calculatedly hired a dreadful quartet of singers for the express purpose of making himself look better. The clear absurdity of such a suggestion (talk about a contradiction in terms!) — an absurdity not even a rank tyro would be guilty of perpetrating, infinitely less so a critic of Ms. Midgette's skill and erudition — should have alerted one and all that the wording of those unfortunate grafs was merely a rare and uncharacteristic lapsus calami on Ms. Midgette's part, and let it go at that with perhaps an amused smile.

No such common good sense. The loyal, devoted, and outraged NSO homies were out for blood, and would not be denied their full measure no matter the clear lapsus.

So much for the (typical) discernment of blog commenters.

Damn!

We totally forgot about the Met broadcast today, and so tuned-in in time to catch just the very tail end of Act II and all of Act III of Shostakovich's The Nose. We've no idea what was going on moment to moment (but of course knew the sense of the overall action), but it seemed to make no difference. The music is so marvelously expressive we felt we were missing nothing of real importance. We can't possibly be right about that, of course, and so we'll have to revisit this opera anew and in depth from the beginning. How we're going to manage to do that, however, is a question the answer to which we've not yet sussed out, but do it we will.

That Russian was (is) one helluva composer!

It's The Music, Stupid!

You want to read an epitome of perverse, wrongheaded thinking in proffering a solution to mitigate the problem facing the classical music concert today? Read this post (link taken from this post). That sort of pop-culture-contaminated thinking is becoming more common, more acceptable, and more widespread with each passing day, or so it seems, and it's beginning to sound very much like a death knell — not merely for the classical music concert as we know it, but for classical music itself. It's the kind of thinking that says that a classical music concert needs to be a show in order to attract a large enough audience to support the institution in much the same way that a rock "concert" is a show .

Well, there's a reason rock "concerts" are shows, and that's because the music is so slight, same-sounding, and simpleminded that it can't sustain interest over an extended period without a show of some sort behind it. Raw, ear-splitting, hard-driving rhythmic pulse goes only so far unless one is stoned out of one's mind.

None of that is true of classical music, and that's why even so much as a hint of extra-musical show at a classical music concert can serve only as a distraction. Even something as innocent as having the lights on in the auditorium during a performance is a distraction. The only lights remaining lit during a performance should be those onstage where they're needed so that performers can see and be seen (that is, be seen performing the music).

In short, it's the music, stupid! Where the classical music concert is concerned, it's all about that and that alone — first, foremost, and entirely.

See how that works?

No, on second thought, we don't suppose you do.

And Speaking Of Alex Ross...

[NOTE: This post has been edited as of 10:09 AM Eastern on 9 Mar to add a link, and correct an inadvertent omission of some text.]

And speaking of Alex Ross (here), we suppose we should comment on a piece he wrote for The Guardian which was published today, and which piece we suppose was taken from the text of the Royal Philharmonic Society lecture he delivered at the Wigmore Hall in London this evening (the transcript of which can now be downloaded here [added 3/9]). The piece dealt with the matter of audience applause in the concert hall, and with the "No Applause Rule", as Mr. Ross designates it, which tacitly governs just when and where applause is permissible. This is a very old discussion here on S&F, and one in which Mr. Ross himself participated via several cross-blog exchanges.

In a 2005 S&F post titled, "Another Voice", we wrote (and we quote at length):

Champions of the idea of a return to the concert etiquette of the 18th and 19th centuries where the "regulated" audience practice was, for instance, to show approval by clapping between movements, are forever citing examples of famous composers of the time seemingly showing their pleasure in, even approval of, the practice, the point of adducing the examples being to convince us that if the practice was approved by composers such as those, then we should have no objection to, ought to even encourage, such practice today.

But the examples adduced by these champions are totally specious, and citing them, the worst sort of sophistry. That, for instance, Brahms thought a new piano concerto of his a failure because instead of applause there was only silence after each of the first two movements, or that Mozart purposely wrote into a movement of a symphony certain passages calculated to provoke an audience to applause, and reveled in the success of that device, shows only that both composers were keenly aware of, and sensitive to, the prevailing concert etiquette of their respective times, and what was expected and when from an audience as a sign of its pleasure. The examples in no way demonstrate those composers' in-principle pleasure in, and approval of, that etiquette. It was simply a fact of musical life in those times, the consequence of largely musically ignorant and uncouth audiences, both aristocratic and bourgeois, and as working composers who depended on those audiences for their daily bread and cheese, Mozart and Brahms had little choice but to accept and play by the rules of that etiquette.

Classical music critics writing today who champion such changes in our present-day classical music concert etiquette for the express purpose of making the classical music concert more inviting to, and comfortable for, the masses ... are simply as wrongheaded about the matter as they could possibly be, notwithstanding how well-intentioned their championing, and seem oblivious of the wholesale damage that would obtain were their proposals put into actual practice.

One classical music critic [Mr. Ross, who was left unidentified in the original post] who champions such make-it-inviting-for-the-masses alterations to what he considers, generally, the ossified and elitist classical music promotion and concert practices of the present-day declares in hopeful metaphor, "When the age of the dinosaurs ends, the age of the mammals begins."

I suggest that a better metaphor for what would obtain were the practices this critic and his like-minded colleagues champion put into actual practice would be what obtained on the island of Guam when the alien common brown tree snake was by error introduced into the environment, whereupon their numbers rapidly multiplied. In fairly short order, all native bird species on the island disappeared, their song silenced forever. Today, only the squawking of chickens and the hum and clatter of modern-day commerce prevail there.

Mr. Ross's response to this (on his blog, The Rest Is Noise) and to others who joined the fray was,

There's [a] dark truth behind so-called concert etiquette. It lets audiences off the hook. Instead of delivering an informed, passionate reaction to each segment of the concert as it unfolds, they can sit in neutral silence until the end. A truly engaged audience would applaud warmly when it's called for, remain silent when applause is inappropriate, and boo when the performance falls obviously short.

And that's essentially the same position Mr. Ross takes in his above linked piece for The Guardian although somewhat attenuated and more circumspect. Our response to that position is the same today as it was back in 2005; viz.,

I must say I agree with [Mr. Ross's] sentiment, and would even welcome such a practice in the concert hall. Problem is, it works properly only when an audience is made up entirely of the musically informed and knowledgeable; i.e., genuine connoisseurs. It most certainly does not work — cannot work — with a "mixed" audience where some or many are largely ignorant of classical music, or whose exposure to classical music has been of the superficial, cultural/social obligation sort; ergo, the tacit "rules of conduct" for the classical music concert audience. It's simply the most sensible way to go about the thing today, and speaks to the reality of present-day classical music concert audiences.

More On Putting Young Butts In Concert Hall Seats

Last Thursday (4 March) The (London) Times ran a column titled, "How To Sell Classical Music To The Masses", wherein "the cream of British talent suggest how they would transform the traditional concert for a new audience." The Times solicited suggestions from a dozen of "Britain’s classical taste-makers," and what we found interesting (as well as encouraging and gratifying) is that not a single one of those British "classical taste-makers" even so much as hinted that the proper way to accomplish the goal intended was to adopt the absurd, even perverse, solution promoted by some well-intentioned but perversely wrongheaded souls in the States who advocate pairing rock bands (so-called "alt-classical" bands) with symphony orchestras or chamber groups on the same concert stage in order to draw a younger crowd and put younger butts in concert hall seats. (Just for the record, we're perfectly OK with suggestions that classical music concerts be given in venues less formal than the traditional concert hall as long as audiences are well-behaved and the acoustics aren't truly sucky.)

The column was by way of prelude to the annual Royal Philharmonic Society lecture to be delivered at Wigmore Hall in London this evening titled, "Inventing and Reinventing the Classical Concert", by none other than The New Yorker's own Alex Ross ("the world’s most influential classical music critic," as The Times put it), the full text of which lecture will be available online tomorrow at URL http://www.royalphilharmonicsociety.org.uk/?page=index.html&id=109.

We look forward with more than a modicum of interest to reading what Mr. Ross had to say on the subject.

Featured Past Post #94 (Administrative Note)

As the battle for health care reform is fast coming down to the wire, this August 2009 S&F post ("Caution! Off-Message Mini-Rant Ahead"), off-message for S&F though it may be, seems an appropriate choice for our new Featured Past Post which post can be accessed from our right sidebar.

An Exemplary Marriage

While we've (mostly) been an admirer of John Adams as a composer for some time now, it's only recently we've become familiar with and come to admire him as a writer as well, courtesy of his fairly new blog, Hell Mouth.

In several previous S&F posts, we've made clear our antagonism toward those who insist on writing about music in a relentlessly technical manner in critical pieces intended for general consumption, not only because it smacks of grandstanding, but because it ill-serves an understanding of the music except for a specialist audience. As we've written previously (here):

Notwithstanding my criticism, even excoriation, of "hardcore technical" analysis in such critical writing ... and my praise for "impressionistic" analysis ..., I agree there's room for both methods, and that a marriage of the two is desirable when handled in such a way as to serve a better understanding of the music under discussion rather than as things in themselves. It's just as egregious an error to wax over-the-top poetic in "impressionistic" analysis as it is to discourse in academic detail and at academic length in "hardcore technical" analysis of a piece of music, or to take the position, as did one academic musicologist, that the only way to analyze a piece of music is by means of "the dispassionate, the unbiased, the scientific, the musicological way."

And what exactly do I mean when I say that "a marriage of the two is desirable when handled in such a way as to serve a better understanding of the music under discussion"? I mean that only when the "hardcore technical" is used to provide clarifying or illuminating concrete example of an "impressionistic" point made in general critical writing on music (as opposed to, say, critical writing for use in music theory courses or other specialist venues) is it being used as it ought to be used, and that its use in any other capacity in such critical writing is decidedly out of place, and hugely counterproductive.

Given our clear antagonism toward technical critical writing about music for non-specialist audiences, why, then, did we find this by Mr. Adams on Sibelius’s Sixth Symphony so utterly engaging? Because it's an exemplary instance of that marriage we spoke of above.

Until I got serious and really learned the piece last year, I could at best say I “recognized” Sibelius Six but never had a handle on it. It is among the most elusive pieces ever written. Much is made of its Dorian modality, and some writers correctly point out the dubious habit of saying the work is “in D minor”, when at best we ought to say, as Lou Harrison did of one of his symphonies, that it is “on D” rather than “in D”.

But what no one I know has ever mentioned is how critical another chord is in this symphony — the half-diminished seventh (i.e. your fabled “Tristan chord”). It’s the composer’s special way of integrating the melancholy, resigned purity of the Dorian mode with the more emotionally dangerous and mercurial half-diminished chord that gives all late works of Sibelius their eerie moodiness. That is the case with the Seventh Symphony....

Arvo Pärt makes use of similar melancholy-saturated minor modes, but it’s Sibelius’s peculiar genius of mixing his with the more chromatically ambiguous diminished triads that makes his music both more evocative and less expressively monochrome.

The Sixth Symphony opens with a simple, sustained counterpoint for strings alone. The first notes are played by the second violins in divisi, marked mezzo forte. That dynamic itself presages the many interpretive problems lying ahead. It would be easier if it were pianissimo or forte — no problem there. But MEZZO forte is so…blegh! What does he mean? And so much of the following music lies in that “mezzo” zone, including the tempi. The first movement is “Allegro molto moderato,” (or “lively but only VERY moderately so). Many of the markings in this symphony are “poco,” or “moderato,” or “mezzo” this or “mezzo” that. The feeling is not unlike visiting a home where everyone talks in a grave, hushed whisper.

It's been a half-century since we left conservatory where we "studied" harmony (the scare quotes because we mostly spent our classroom time there playing cut-throat Monopoly at the local cafeteria which was our hangout), and what we learned has grown severely arthritic due a half-century of disuse, but, still, we understood fully the sense of what Mr. Adams wrote, and, further, imagine it would be understood by any regular concertgoer or devoted classical music listener whether he'd studied music formally or not.

But perhaps we imagine too much. RTWT here, and see what you think.

Progress Report

So, after almost a month, Dell finally sent us a new Studio 1558 laptop to replace our defective Studio 1558. OK, we thought. Now we're back in business again. Silly us. The replacement 1558 had exactly the same problems as our original 1558, and more. We were instantly (and angrily) back on the phone with Dell. Turns out, Dell has just determined that the Studio 1558 has fundamental design flaws having mostly to do with that critical bit of computer firmware known as the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) which sets up and controls all computer functions and absent which no PC computer can operate. Having made that determination, Dell has taken the Studio 1558 out of production altogether, at least for the nonce, and has graciously offered to replace our defective replacement Studio 1558 with a spanking new Studio 17, a larger, more powerful system with a 17.3" HiDef display (900p) in place of the 1558's 15.6" 720p display, and with a standard keyboard layout (Glorioski!). Problem is, the Studio 17 is significantly larger and not quite as easy to tote around, but more pertinently, we'll have to wait another three or four weeks or so before it arrives. In the meantime we'll work as best we can and to whatever extent our crippled 1558 will permit us to work. Good news is that our Studio 17 should arrive just in time to be a birthday present for us. We'll take that as a good omen.

Stay tuned.