Sounds & Fury

An Apologia For Serious Critics And Criticism

If there exists a finer, more compelling argument for the need, necessity, and value of dedicated (i.e., professional), serious, deeply informed and literate critics and criticism in the arts and literature than the one written for The New Yorker titled "A Critic’s Manifesto" by Daniel Mendelsohn we've never encountered it.

An excerpt:

By dramatizing their own thinking on the page, by revealing the basis of their judgments and letting you glimpse the mechanisms by which they exercised their (individual, personal, quirky) taste, all these [professional] critics were, necessarily, implying that you could arrive at your own, quite different judgments—that a given work could operate on your own sensibility in a different way. What I was really learning from those critics each week was how to think. How to think (we use the term so often that we barely realize what we’re saying) critically — which is to say, how to think like a critic, how to judge things for myself. To think is to make judgments based on knowledge: period.

[...]

And so the fact is that (to invoke the popular saying) everyone is not a critic. This, in the end, may be the crux of the problem, and may help explain the unusual degree of violence in the reaction to the stridently negative reviews that appeared in the Times Book Review earlier this summer, triggering the heated debate about critics. In an essay about phony memoirs that I wrote a few years ago, I argued that great anger expressed against authors and publishers when traditionally published memoirs turn out to be phony was a kind of cultural displacement: what has made us all anxious about truth and accuracy in personal narrative is not so much the published memoirs that turn out to be false or exaggerated, which has often been the case, historically, but rather the unprecedented explosion of personal writing (and inaccuracy and falsehood) online, in Web sites and blogs and anonymous commentary—forums where there are no editors and fact-checkers and publishers to point an accusing finger at.

Similarly, I wonder whether the recent storm of discussion about criticism, the flurry of anxiety and debate about the proper place of positive and negative reviewing in the literary world, isn’t a by-product of the fact that criticism, in a way unimaginable even twenty years ago, has been taken out of the hands of the people who should be practicing it: true critics, people who, on the whole, know precisely how to wield a deadly zinger, and to what uses it is properly put. When, after hearing about them, I first read the reviews of Peck’s and Ohlin’s works, I had to laugh. Even the worst of the disparagements wielded by the reviewers in question paled in comparison to the groundless vituperation and ad hominem abuse you regularly encounter in Amazon.com reviews or the “comments” sections of literary publications. Yes, we’re all a bit sensitive to negative reviewing these days; but if you’re going to sit in judgment on anyone, it shouldn’t be the critics.

RTWT here.

Now, THIS Is REAL Electronic Music

Listen up! you avant-garde New Music types. Stop messing about with all that girlie stuff and take your chances with electronic music for Real Men — all 500,000 volts worth.

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

On Musical Masterpieces

So you, a musically well-educated musician, hear a piece of music new to you, are gobsmacked by it and passionately declare it a masterpiece. Your companion, an equally musically well-educated musician, disagrees. He says it's merely a pleasing, well-made piece of music. Do you imagine you could successfully defend your assessment of the piece as a masterpiece?

If you answered Yes, we suggest you think again and reflect on what the legendary teacher of composition Nadia Boulanger (and we here use the word "legendary" most advisedly) had to say on the matter:

I can distinguish music that is well-made and music that isn't. Yet, what distinguishes well-made music and a masterpiece, that I cannot tell. I won't say that [an objective criterion to distinguish the two] doesn't exist, but I don't know what it is. It all comes down to faith. As I accept God, I accept beauty, I accept emotion. I also accept masterpieces. There are conditions without which masterpieces cannot be achieved, but what defines a masterpiece cannot be pinned down.

Just so.

(The above quote was transcribed from a lovely film on Mademoiselle Boulanger by Bruno Monsaingeon which can be viewed here.)

Early Warning

We've always been contra Republicans generally (that party has more loony tunes and idiots per congressional district than does Byberry state mental hospital and a positively delusional fairytale economic ideology that's resulted ultimately in catastrophe of one sort or another wherever and whenever it's been freely implemented), but here's a more current specific reason to be contra Republicans this presidential election year.

From a leaked transcript of an upcoming cover story in Fortune magazine by Andy Serwer in New York and David Whitford in Boston, Politico reports the following gem from the lips of presumed Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney:

“[F]irst there are programs I would eliminate [on becoming president]. Obamacare being one of them but also various subsidy programs — the Amtrak subsidy, the PBS subsidy, the subsidy for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities. Some of these things, like those endowment efforts and PBS I very much appreciate and like what they do in many cases, but I just think they have to stand on their own rather than receiving money borrowed from other countries, as our government does on their behalf. [emphasis ours]

So, not only delusional loony tunes and idiots, but woodenheaded philistines as well (does Mr. Romney actually imagine a meaningful savings of money would result from such cuts?).

Make certain y'all vote this coming November to ensure that not only are Republicans kept out of the White House, but that the Congress is cleansed of as many Republicans as possible.

Sad

Now out of bankruptcy, the Philadelphia Orchestra, our "native" orchestra so to put it, under the leadership of its new music director-designate Yannick Nézet-Séguin, is holding this Thursday through Saturday (21 June-23 June) at the orchestra's old home, Philadelphia's Academy of Music, a centennial celebration of the orchestra's beginnings as an internationally recognized ensemble under the leadership of the flamboyant Leopold Stokowski, the brilliant but eccentric conductor responsible for the orchestra's world-famous signature "Philadelphia sound" (which, alas, we fear is no more) and for raising the then young and decidedly provincial orchestra to world-class status (Stokowski was the orchestra's sole conductor from 1912-1936).

We're of course far too young to have heard the orchestra live under Stokowski's direction during those years, but we did hear the orchestra live with Stokowski on the podium once: at a 1962 concert by the orchestra at its admission-free Philadelphia outdoor summer performance venue, the famed Robin Hood Dell (renamed Robin Hood Dell East in the '70s and no longer a summer venue for the orchestra or for classical music performance). Stokowski had been invited there to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of his assumption of the orchestra’s leadership in 1912, and it would be the first time he'd stood in front of the orchestra since 1939 or so. Needless to say, the Dell was packed and not so much as a square foot of unoccupied ground could be seen. When the 80-year-old Stokowski walked onstage and mounted the podium the greeting from both audience and orchestra, all on their feet, was long, vocal, and thunderous. When things finally quieted down, Stoki addressed all assembled beginning with the words, "As I was saying when I last stood here...."

The crowd — orchestra included — went crazy.

When things again finally quieted down, Stoki briefly but graciously thanked everyone and then abruptly turned his attention to the opening number: Debussy's La Mer, if we remember correctly. He hadn't gotten through more than the first twenty or so pages of the score when the raucous sound of a low-flying military helicopter rent the air. Stoki calmly stopped the performance in mid-paragraph, waited until all was silent, then began again — from the top. He had to do that three times during that concert, each time beginning again from the top of whatever piece was interrupted and the audience — and, mirabile dictu!, the orchestra — loved him for it.

Today in America, no conductor could get away with that. Today in America, no conductor would even dare try. But this was Stoki and this was Philadelphia and this was the early 1960s when classical music was still of cultural importance to educated-class Americans. Today, along with Stoki, those long-past days are gone forever and we suspect their like will never again be seen — not in our lifetime at any rate.

Sad.

The 12 Commandments

We've just come across a posting by theater critic, playwright, and author George Hunka on his blog Superfluities Redux titled "The Complete Critic’s Qualifications" wherein he reiterates theater and drama critic Harold Clurman’s 1964 list of the so-called "12 commandments" for theatre and drama critics and comments on same. It struck us that those 12 commandments are equally valid for classical music critics (classical music including opera of course) and so herewith reprint that list below, mutatis mutandis.

Besides having cultivated taste, feeling and a talent for clear observation of all classical musics:

1. The critic should know the greater part of historical and contemporary classical music as written and performed. Added to this, he must be conversant with general literature: novels, poetry, essays of wide scope.
2. He should know the history of classical music from its origins to the present.
3. He should have a long and broad concert- and opera-going experience — of native and foreign ensembles.
4. He should possess an interest in and a familiarity with the arts: painting, theater, architecture and the dance.
5. He should have worked in classical music organizations in some capacity (apart from criticism).
6. He should know the history of his country and world history: the social thinking of past and present.
7. He should have something like a philosophy, an attitude toward life.
8. He should write lucidly, and, if possible, gracefully.
9. He should respect his readers by upholding high standards and encourage his readers to cultivate the same.
10. He should be aware of his prejudices and blind spots.
11. He should err on the side of generosity rather than an opposite zeal.
12. He should seek to enlighten rather than carp or puff.

Mr. Hunka remarks of the original list that "of contemporary critics, and judging only by what they publish under the guise of criticism, I can count the number of both online and print reviewers who meet [these] qualifications on the fingers of one hand."

Word!, re, the above list.

New Outbreak Of An Old Argument

We've begun to detect in the classical music blogosphere the beginnings of a new outbreak of a very old argument concerning attracting new and younger persons to the audience for classical music to take the place of classical music's now graying and diminishing present audience. The cause of classical music's current problem in this regard and the solution offered are the same-old-same-old: our culture has changed radically from times past where classical music, although never of popular interest (contrary to what one reputed expert bewilderingly claims), was nevertheless one of our culture's mainstream interests and in order for classical music to be rescued from its present position deep in the bowels of our culture's cultural margins and once again become one of our culture's mainstream interests it must "adapt" — to use the insidious codeword used repeatedly by one reputed expert — to the new cultural realities. Invariably, and no matter how high-minded the language used, that solution always translates into pandering, to some meaningful measure or degree, to the tastes and sensibilities of the Great Unwashed; a strategy that, by its very nature, will always result in meaningfully diminishing or outright destroying the very thing it's attempting to rescue. To this reality these well-meaning and well-intentioned champions of "adaptation" seem willfully deaf and blind. It's quick fixes these champions are seeking and it's a circle-squaring exercise. There are NO quick fixes for this particular problem and it’s a failure of recognition and acknowledgement of that fact that will continue to keep the problem intractable and devoid of any meaningful, lasting, and satisfactory solution.

No, we refuse to here again argue for the umpteenth time the particulars involved, and refuse as well to link to the instances of this new outbreak of a same-old-same-old argument as doing so will serve only to encourage the perpetrators who we also refuse to name for the same reason. We here make note of the matter only by way of a heads-up and a caution.

As you were.

Bach, Gould, Dope, And Another Dose

Mark Edmundson, a university professor of English at the University of Virginia, had published in The Chronicle of Higher Education last week an interesting article titled "Can Music Save Your Life?" wherein he concluded:

My wonderful former teacher, Geoffrey Hartman, said that most reading was vague and lazy, like girl watching. Feminists gave him the bastinado for that, but he was right. Something similar is true about listening to music. Usually it's about getting your emotions packaged for you, quieting the static inside, fabricating an exciting identity ... to counteract one's commitment to a life of secure banality.

Most music listening, like most reading, is passive. It's about girl watching rather than woman wooing, which is a tougher game. Schopenhauer says that most reading is letting other people think your thoughts for you. I'd add that most music listening is about letting other people feel your feelings for you.

While I take Dr. Edmundson's point, I think he's rather missed the mark. Music listening can go far deeper than that.

A personal experience:

I've been on serious dope for a period of time but once in my life: during a one-year recovery from a particularly nasty and should-have-been-fatal motorcycle accident in the early '70s. That experience with dope was an eye-opening and consciousness-raising one which to this day remains unforgettable. The dope was administered intravenously by medical personnel for the first month or so and self-administered orally thereafter for a period of another few months. That first warm rush and the immediately ensuing feeling of transcendent wellbeing after each dose simply has no equal in ordinary life — at least not in my ordinary life.

Needless to say, I became hooked on that feeling and slipped into the habit of checking my watch repeatedly to see whether it was permissible to administer another dose without exceeding the safe limit. One day I caught myself actually doing that and it scared me straight. On the spot and cold turkey I ceased taking the stuff and depended thereafter on aspirin alone for whatever pain relief it could offer.

While it's not quite the same thing, I today, in the closing years of my life (I've passed the biblically allotted three-score-and-ten and so figure I'm now living on borrowed time), experience much that same feeling of transcendent wellbeing and when the music's over the need for "another dose" every time I listen to a Glenn Gould performance of a Bach keyboard work; the Partitas, the Goldberg, and Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier most especially. Once the CD gets going in the player with the repeat set to ALL, it requires a substantial effort of will on my part to stop it going no matter how long it's been going which at times could be an entire day without break.

I've of course attempted many times to analyze and explain this phenomenon to myself, a phenomenon I experience with no other music and performer, and of course always come up with an answer. But in the end, that answer, no matter how well-thought-out and detailed, always turns out to be woefully inadequate and no explanation at all. I know the phenomenon has something to do with Gould's unique and uncanny ability to delineate each voice in the music's dense polyphonic texture with perfect clarity as if he had a separate hand devoted to each yet maintain at all times a perfect horizontal (melodic) and vertical (harmonic) contrapuntal coherence in the gestalt and in so doing seems to be inhabiting and giving voice to the very mind of Bach himself which, in turn, seems, in this one respect, the very mind of God. No other so-called "absolute" music and no other keyboardist of my experience comes even close to being able to accomplish that in my case. But, by itself, that's no real explanation either.

Am I merely "getting [my] emotions packaged for [me], quieting the static inside [me], fabricating an exciting identity [for myself] ... to counteract [my] commitment to a life of secure banality" by "letting other people feel [my] feelings for [me]" as Dr. Edmundson suggests?

I seriously doubt it. But, then, there's always the possibility, no matter how disquieting, that I might be doing just that. If so, I'm content to let it be so — that is, as long as I can always get another dose.

Deeply Ashamed

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 11:54 AM Eastern on 11 Jun. See below.]

[NOTE: This entry has been edited as of 6:16 AM Eastern on 6 Jun to insert the inadvertently omitted critical qualifier "secular" in referring to Jewish law.]

As a general matter, this is the kind of thing we expect from a university under Sharia law within an Islamist state, not from a university under secular Jewish law within a Jewish state, especially where matters of high culture are concerned.

Tel Aviv University, the venue for a symposium on [Richard Wagner] on 18 June culminating in a musical performance, has cancelled the booking made by the Israel Wagner Society following a wave of protests.

[...]

"We have received complaints and angry protests calling for the cancellation of this controversial event, which crosses a red line and would deeply offend the Israeli public in general, and Holocaust survivors in particular," [said the university in a letter released to the media].

As a Jew, we are deeply ashamed.

RTWT here.

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Update (11:54 AM Eastern on 11 Jun): This is absolutely disgraceful!

The Israel Wagner Society is continuing in its efforts to find a venue for a concert of pieces by Richard Wagner, without much success.

Last week, the society found a venue in which to hold a concert this coming Saturday, the Tel Aviv Hilton Hotel. A few days later however, hotel ownership changed its mind and cancelled the show.

"Everything was agreed upon with the Hilton's management," said Jonathan Livni, founder of the Israel Wagner Society. "Even the type of chairs — we signed a detailed contract, including which pieces would be played," continued Livni. On Friday afternoon however, despite the signed contract, and after advertisements were posted in newspapers, the Hilton handed down the decision to cancel the show.

"We don’t know the reason for cancellation," said Livni.

RTWT here (registration (free) required).

Ave Atque Vale, Dietrich

The great, near-legendary German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau died today at his home in Bavaria at age 86. Celebrated worldwide as the foremost lieder singer of his generation and a world-class opera performer and first-rate musician, he was also an influential teacher and one of the 20th century's most prolific recording artists. We knew his work mostly through his recorded roles in the operas of Wagner and Mozart and through his recorded performances of Schubert's lieder and quickly came to appreciate his great artistry as both actor and singer. He was one of those rare performers who, over time, one comes to think of as living perpetually, the thought of his death at some point almost a thing beyond consideration. He immeasurably enriched the world of music and we should all be thankful that he lived at a time when his artistry could be faithfully preserved for us all and for unnumbered future generations to relish.

The New York Times obituary can be read here and a lovely tribute by tenor Ian Bostridge can be read here.

Atque in perpetuum, Dietrich, ave atque vale.

NPR's "Goldberg Week": Joining The Party

This week, NPR has been celebrating the birthday of the incomparably great Johann Sebastian Bach (born, 21 March 1685) with a series of posts on its blog Deceptive Cadence devoted to commentary on Bach's so-called Goldberg Variations, an astonishing set of 30 variations for the keyboard on the ground bass of a meltingly beautiful 32-measure sarabande (Aria) which set of variations is what we've conservatively called the "without-equal crown jewel of the entire Baroque keyboard repertoire." That commentary will be capped off tomorrow, 23 March, at 12:00 PM EDT, by a live "online listening party" featuring pianist Glenn Gould's seminal 1955 recording of the Goldberg with special guests Tim page and Anne Midgette, former and present Washington Post chief classical music critics, respectively, commenting. We herewith join the party in spirit, if somewhat prematurely, by way of reprinting below our 2004 S&F entry "Gould's Goldberg: Earlier or Later?", a commentary on Gould's two historic recordings of this great work: those of 1955 and 1981. The text follows instanter and without further comment.

*  *  *

Lovely Weekend Guest, a first-rate pianist and knowledgeable lover of Bach's keyboard works (she often refers to them by BWV number, for instance) spent part of her last weekend evening here in a friendly but, um, animated discussion with me of Glenn Gould's 1955 and 1981 recordings of Bach's Goldberg Variations (or BWV 988 as LWG calls it just to piss me off). On the whole, I rather prefer the earlier reading, she the later. The readings, both of them, are, of course, marvels, and display in equal measure Gould's trademark, irreproducible, and nonpareil Bach performance technique — the preternatural (horizontal) delineation of multiple contrapuntal lines while maintaining fully their interlaced (vertical) harmonic coherence; the uncanny rhythmic sense, perfectly precise but infinitely plastic; and the equally precise and plastic articulation which commentators and critics insist on referring to as détaché but which is rather a near-perfect pianistic analogue of the highly prized and near-impossible harpsichord legato — but are otherwise world's apart in spirit.

Rambunctious, LWG calls the earlier reading. Staid, I call the later, but only half mean it, using the term largely for reasons of symmetry with her rambunctious. About the only interpretive point on which we agree is that both Gould readings of this without-equal crown jewel of the entire Baroque keyboard repertoire blow away all other readings, truly excellent though some are.

I've had the recordings of both readings in my library almost since the day of their releases (both of which recordings survived the catastrophe that consumed most of the rest of my libraries several years ago), and though I listen to them often, I never really made the effort to nail down exactly why I preferred the one reading over the other. Better late than never, I decide, and so use the weekend's discussion with LWG as a spur.

Leaving aside the Aria (the ground bass of which is the unifying theme upon which the variations are built) which opens and closes the set of variations (and which I here leave aside mostly because I suspect I'm missing something important concerning it in the later reading as I simply cannot conceive a reasonable musical, aesthetic, or emotional justification for the funereal, almost structure-destroying tempo taken for it by Gould in that reading), I always vaguely imagined it was the generally slower — at times significantly slower — tempi of the later reading (i.e., slower as compared with the earlier reading) that provoked my antipathy for, even annoyance with, that reading. But I now see that's not it. Something else. And that something else is, I think, most clearly exemplified in Gould's two readings of Variation 25, dubbed "The Black Pearl" by the great harpsichordist and Bach scholar Wanda Landowska; an astonishing piece of music that enters the set of variations like some alien presence and at its departure leaves one slack-jawed with amazement and wonder.

With its frequent, expectation-subverting harmonic modulations, actual and implied, Variation 25's chromaticism is so extreme it makes the music of Tristan and Parsifal seem positively diatonic by comparison. Gould, in his liner notes for the 1955 release, refers to this variation in his typically provocative way as a "Chopinesque mood-piece," and elsewhere as a "Romantic effusion." It's neither of these, of course, but thoroughly and essentially Bachian throughout. It's simply that it seems to not belong to this set of variations, but seemingly magically still remains one with it while at the same time seeming to inhabit another world altogether.

In his earlier reading, Gould captures this another-world quality perfectly, largely by his circumspect and strategic use of rubato, an expressive device more identified with the Classical period and with Chopin and the Romantics than with Bach, but here used to brilliant effect. This variation is one of the few where the tempo of the earlier reading is taken slightly slower overall than the later (but only marginally so; 6'28" vs. 6'03"; a 6% difference in timings). The confluence of the marginally slower overall tempo and the strategic use of rubati in this earlier reading, however, make the progress of the melodic line and the movement of the astonishing harmonic shifts seem to play out on a scale cosmically slow the variation's internal pulse seemingly proceeding as do the slow wheeling of galaxies through the infinite eons of boundless space, the harmony's expectation-subverting modulations given point by the rubati and suggesting tonalities mystically strange and vastly remote.

As I said, music that leaves one slack-jawed with amazement and wonder — in the earlier reading, that is. In the later reading the rubati, while still present to some extent, are largely emasculated, the internal pulse and inflection of the melodic line and harmonic shifts spun out in deliberately and soberly considered fashion, the variation now seeming more at home with the set's other variations than in the earlier reading because more metrically and sensibly proportional to them. The expectation-subverting modulations are still there, of course, and still give this variation the feel of a vaguely alien presence within the set, but the another-world magic of the earlier reading has gone missing. Gould's deliberate and sober approach to the music bars such mysteries. One's amazement at the variation's harmonic inventiveness remains, of course, but the wonder has fled.

This stately, deliberate sobriety characterizes most (but not all) of Gould's later reading of the Goldberg; a sobriety achieved by various musical means, one of which is Gould's singling out of one of the contrapuntal voices (typically, the unifying element of the Aria's bass line) as if to say, "See? Here it is." In intent, the device is somewhat akin to that used in "Konzept" opera productions wherein the self-involved director insists on pushing his particular "vision" repeatedly in the audience's face lest they miss it. It's a device as annoying here as it is there.

The sheer audacity — the "rambunctious[ness]" — of Gould's earlier reading may be considered by some a mark against it, but for me it's that very audacity that gives revelatory life to that earlier reading, while the deliberately sober later reading largely (but, again, not entirely) eschews audacity as if to act as corrective of the implied youthful excesses of the earlier. While the later reading may achieve its end in that respect, it does so at a cost, and to my way of thinking (and hearing), the cost is simply too great.

Earworm

We first saw this brilliant and marvelously surreal commercial for The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, a Las Vegas resort and casino, last night and the music — a number by Austrian composer Marcus Füreder aka Parov Stelar titled, "Booty Swing"— keeps on playing in our head and refuses to leave.

An MP3 of the full three-minute number can be downloaded from Amazon for $0.99 here.

Smashingly Good Concept

Leave it to the Brits to come up with this smashingly good and perfectly apposite concept:

When Alex Ross started writing The Rest is Noise in 2000 he never expected that a book about 20th-century classical music would go on to sell 250,000 copies and win literary prizes around the world – including the Guardian First Book Award. Now the book's extraordinary success has scaled new heights with the announcement of a year-long festival at London's Southbank Centre which aims to bring it to life.

The Rest is Noise festival will take in almost 100 concerts, films and debates, starting on 19 January 2013 with a performance by the London Philharmonic. Conducted by Vladimir Jurowski, the orchestra will play a Richard Strauss programme including the final scene of Salome – the opera whose premiere in 1906 is the "year zero" moment of Ross's book

RTWT here.

Would that some NYC genius had come up with the concept first.

Our congratulations to Mr. Ross. An apropos and well-deserved tribute.

Ave Atque Vale, Gustav

Pioneer practitioner in and pillar of the then-called "Authentic Performance" movement (the forerunner of the present day Historically Informed Performance (HIP) movement), voluminously recorded Dutch harpsichordist, conductor, and organist Gustav Leonhardt has died at age 83 reports The Guardian. For many of our generation he was either a much-needed breath of fresh early-music air or the anti-Landowska academic and therefore, at the time, either praised or vilified, respectively. Either way, one never doubted his love of the early music to which he was devoted or his formidable harpsichord technique which was indeed impressive. His passing leaves the world of early music a little less rich. He will be missed.

Atque in perpetuum, Gustav, ave atque vale.

Fully Worthy

Here's the lede graf of a concert review by Fiona Maddocks of The Guardian fully worthy of the work described:

Double basses quiver and swirl on a note so murky it is hard to hear the pitch. A lone trumpet ascends in a three-note sunrise through an octave, followed by a cataclysm of thundering drumbeats. Add to that the evolution of the human race, man, superman, illness, death, transfiguration, a levitating Latvian maestro and a flying baton dropped somewhere amid the cellos and this was Symphony Hall, Birmingham last Thursday night, the CBSO's [City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra] first major concert of the year....

What's that? You don't know what work's being referred to?

You should be ashamed of yourself.

Our New Hero

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 3:29 PM Eastern on 11 Jan. See below.]

If this report is true as related, New York Philharmonic music director Alan Gilbert is our new hero.

Tuesday night's New York Philharmonic performance of the Mahler Ninth was stopped dead by an unusual instrument — the iPhone.

[...]

"Mr. Gilbert was visibly annoyed by the persistent ring-tone, so much that he quietly cut the orchestra," the concertgoer reports. She related how the orchestra's music director turned on the podium towards the offender. The pause lasted a good "three or four minutes. It might have been two. It seemed long."

Mr. Gilbert asked the man, sitting [in the audience] in front of the concertmaster: "Are you finished?"

RTWT here.

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Update (3:29 PM Eastern on 11 Jan): More from The New York Times.

Why Are We Surprised — Not!

In a double-blind test (i.e., neither testers nor testees knew which instrument was which until after completion of the test), could seventeen seasoned professional violinists, by playing the instruments effectively blindfolded, tell which of six violins — two Strads, one Guarneri, and three modern instruments (none of which three modern instruments was "the latest $50 lacquer from China" as reported by one perennially unreliable "professional music journalist") — were the old Italian instruments?

Apparently not, mostly. When the dust cleared, the scorecard read:

⚫ Couldn't identify which were the old instruments: 7
⚫ Misidentified which were the old instruments: 7
⚫ Identified the old instruments correctly: 3

We're not the least surprised. Over the past couple decades or so, we've heard live (but not handled) some modern fiddles that, aurally, were virtual paragons and in every way the equal of fiddles produced by the old masters. Please note, we said "the equal of", NOT, "the same as". Every fiddle worth the playing has its own special character aurally and it's not a matter of best but of personal preference.

Oh, and BTW, we guessed wrong on the two audio clips. We chose the one where the fiddle sounded best to our ear (the first clip) and assumed arbitrarily that was the old instrument.

Ethically Compromised Funding

British blogger Bob Shingleton of On An Overgrown Path has been running a series of posts that addresses what he calls the "ethically compromised funding" of classical music by which he means funding provided by "ethically compromised" companies such as cigarette manufacturers and greedy mega-financial institutions whose moneymaking practices are, in part, legally and ethically questionable. Despite his claim that it's his intention "to inform rather than condemn" and bring "transparency" to the practice, which claim, we feel bound to say, has about it more than a whiff of the disingenuous, it's clear this sort of funding is something of which Mr. Shingleton deeply disapproves.

We find Mr. Shingleton's position puzzling. Why disapprove? In our view, there's nothing of which to disapprove in such funding. We would go even further and say, if somewhat rhetorically, that, apart from funding by outright criminal agencies such as, for instance, the mafia, there is no such thing as "ethically compromised funding" in the sense that Mr. Shingleton uses the label. So what that tobacco companies such as British American Tobacco and Japan Tobacco International, "manufacturer[s] of the leading cause of preventable death," as Mr. Shingleton has it, support classical music organizations such as the Royal Opera House Covent Garden and the London Philharmonic? Even if one accepts Mr. Shingleton's characterization of these tobacco companies (which we do not), is their money thereby tainted and ought therefore to be refused, or is it more meet and does it make more sense to look upon the donation of that money to these classical music organizations as an effort on the part of the companies to partially compensate for the "evils" of the products they manufacture? Clearly, we favor the latter view.

Or put another way, there is no such thing as "dirty money" unless it be money earned through outright criminal activity. Any other view of the matter is the product of individual moral judgment on how the money was earned by the funder, and, by and large, moral judgments of this sort are notoriously and infamously arbitrary, not to mention tendentious.

Or put yet another way: stop whinging and take the money and run!

The Conductor's Prime Directive

New York magazine's classical music critic Justin Davidson tries his hand(s) out on the podium as a conductor and writes about it in an article for New York titled, What Does a Conductor Do?. In that article Mr. Davidson quotes trenchant advice to conductors from world-renowned Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink; advice that, laconic as it is, should be taken by every conductor as his(her) Prime Directive when standing in front of an orchestra in either rehearsal or performance. It says that conductors should always remember when waving their arms and hands about on the podium that "the musicians are very busy with playing. You should not distract them."

Sage advice indeed.

Well Worth Your Time

Here is a marvelous — and considering the venue (a major mainstream newspaper: The Philadelphia Inquirer), astonishing — multimedia feature on Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music, among the most demanding and exclusive music conservatories in the world and easily the most demanding and exclusive in the nation. The feature is entitled, "The Curtis Factor", and it can be read and viewed here.

Well worth your time.