Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

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Pianos with attitude

Published by peter on 2023-03-11 in Concerts, Hands and Music. Closed

On 23 January 2023, I was fortunate to see a concert at the Wigmore Hall in London of four piano hands, those of Lucas Jussen and Arthur Jussen. The programme of the Jussen brothers comprised:

  • Mozart: Sonata in D for 2 pianos, K448 (LJ on left-side piano, AJ on right-side piano, from the audience perspective)
  • Schubert: Rondo in A, D951 (4 hands on 1 piano, LJ in upper register)
  • Ravel: La Valse (AJ on left-side piano, LJ on right-side piano)
  • Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring (2-piano reduction) (LJ on left-side piano, AJ on right-side piano)
  • (Encore) Bach: Chorale from Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit, BWV 106 (4 hands on 1 piano, LJ in upper register).

Before the encore, Lucas Jussen spoke briefly from the stage to thank the audience for our applause and our attention. He called The Rite of Spring, “the greatest piece of music of the 20th Century, and perhaps the greatest of all time.” Stravinsky’s 2-piano version required, he said, intense concentration from the performers, and also from the audience. The Wigmore audience (a full house, some 550 people) had provided this concentration, and he and his brother could feel it throughout the performance. Arthur Jussen then introduced the encore, a sublime Bach chorale.

The concert overall was superb, and The Rite overpowering. This is music that starts by recalling Debussy’s Faun and goes on to anticipate Xenakis. Famously bitonal (Eb Major and E Major chords played together) and polyrhythmic – although I don’t think most of us hear multiple rhythms playing against each other; rather we hear a single, syncopated rhythm. This performance of The Rite was one of the handful of outstanding and mind-shaking classical music performances I have been lucky to experience in my life. Afterwards, in Russell’s words, “I came away bewildered and unable to find my way among ordinary affairs.”

I resolved to hear the Jussens play The Rite again. I was fortunate to catch them in Paris on 5 March 2023, at the Theatre des Champs Elysées, the hall where the first performance had taken place on 29 May 1913, causing a riot. In a hall that seats about 1900 people, perhaps 1500 people were present on a Sunday morning. (Only the top tier was not full.) The doors opened about 50 minutes before the scheduled time, and all present were seated by some 30 minutes before. The programme was:

  • Mozart: Sonata in D for 2 pianos, K448 (LJ on left-side piano, AJ on right-side piano)
  • Schubert: Lebenssturme Allego in A minor, D947 (4 hands on 1 piano, LJ in upper register)
  • Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring (2-piano reduction) (LJ on left-side piano, AJ on right-side piano)
  • (Encore) Bach: Chorale from Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit, BWV 106.

Again, an earth-shattering performance which transported us. As in London, the entire performance was from memory.
Afterwards in Paris, the Jussens stood generously and patiently in the lobby for an hour signing autographs, taking selfies, and shaking hands with people. Perhaps 100 people waited patiently to meet them. How often the two must have heard the same comments, yet their smiles and enthusiasm did not flag.

Experiencing the Jussens’ forceful performance of the Stravinsky at their London concert, I finally understood why I had abandoned the piano in my twenties. THIS was the music I wanted to play, what I wanted to express through the medium of the piano. Despite the intellectual and emotional sustenance I obtain from the quietude and complexity of Bach and Mendelssohn and Chopin and Debussy and Feldman, I had really wanted to play (I suddenly realized) music that was loud, raucous, energetic, brash, provocative, and percussive. To express the thought that I had come to live out loud.

Growing up, my piano teachers were nuns, and, although intelligent and some self-confident, they were all very polite: none were loud or raucous people. The music they themselves liked and taught was sometimes complex (such as that of Bach) but always gentle, expressing a cosy domesticity, and often effete. None wished to listen to, let alone play or teach, jazz or stride piano, or Shostakovich’s preludes or fugues, or even the more bumptious Beethoven sonatas (eg, Op. 2 No. 1 in F minor). I think now that these pieces involved, for them, the expression of too much emotion. Of course, in a music-school devoted to teaching keyboard instruments, we did not play orchestral or even chamber music, but I do not recall ever playing a piano reduction of anything, except for Myra Hess’s famous Bach chorale. We could often have done, had our teachers been interested. I could never reconcile myself to what I wanted to do with and through the piano and the music that my education had led me to associate the piano with.

Concert Halls

Published by peter on 2022-04-16 in Concats, Concerts and Music. Closed

Herewith a list of concert halls in which I have been fortunate to experience concerts and musical performances.

  • The Barbican Concert Hall, London
  • Bridgewater Hall, Manchester
  • Cadogan Hall, London
  • Casino Civic Hall, Casino, NSW
  • City Recital Hall, Sydney
  • Sir John Clancy Auditorium, University of New South Wales, Sydney
  • Salle de Flagey, Brussels
  • Salle Gaveau, Paris
  • Hamburgische Staatsoper, Hamburg
  • Hamer Concert Hall, Melbourne
  • Ipswich Civic Hall, Ipswich, QLD
  • Chapel, King’s College London, London
  • King’s Place, London
  • Leggate Theatre, University of Liverpool, Liverpool
  • City Hall, Lismore, NSW
  • Llewellyn Hall, Canberra School of Music, Canberra, ACT
  • Little Oratory Chapel, London
  • LSO St Luke’s, London
  • Auditorium, Maison de la Radio et de la Musique, Paris
  • Melba Hall, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, Melbourne
  • Milton Court Concert Hall, Guildhall School of Music, London
  • Purcell Room, South Bank Centre, London
  • Duke’s Hall, Royal Academy of Music, London
  • Royal Albert Hall, London
  • Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool
  • Concert Hall, Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester
  • Golden Concert Room, St George’s Hall, Liverpool
  • Seymour Centre, University of Sydney, Sydney
  • Concert Hall, South Bank Centre, London
  • Sydney Opera House Concert Hall
  • Sydney Opera House Opera Theatre
  • Tanglewood, MA
  • Theatre des Champs Elysees, Paris
  • Sydney Town Hall, Sydney
  • Tyalgum Literary Institute Hall, Tyalgum, NSW
  • Verbrugghen Hall, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Sydney
  • Wigmore Hall, London

Recent Reading 18: Copeland Family Edition

Published by peter on 2022-01-13 in History, Intelligence and Espionage, Literature, Music and Recent Reading. Closed

The latest in a sequence of lists of recently-read books, listed in reverse chronological order. In this edition, the books include several written by Miles Copeland II and his sons, Miles III, Ian and Stewart Copeland, or about them.

  • Ian Copeland [1999]: Wild Thing: The Backstage – on the Road -in the Studio – Off the Charts: Memoirs of Ian Copeland. Simon and Schuster.
  • Miles Copeland II [1989]: The Game Player: Confessions of the CIA’s Original Political Operative. Aurum Press. A well-written and fascinating, but often unreliable, account of Miles Copeland’s life. I admire the great intellectual heft and subtlety of political analysis Copeland demonstrates, something he shared with his contemporaries among the founders of CIA. These features stands in great contrast to the simple-minded nature of many of the attacks on intelligence, both from the State Department and the Pentagon in the 1950s, and from the left in the years since.It is interesting that a book published in 1989, in a chapter about his work in the US intelligence community in the late 1940s, argues that the main thrust of Soviet aggression towards the West was expected even then by Copeland and some of his intelligence community colleagues to be disinformation campaigns (dezinformatzia) directed against the West (page 74). It was unexpected but very heartening to see how much he despised the Moral Re-Armament (MRA) movement.

    • Continue reading ‘Recent Reading 18: Copeland Family Edition’

Musical influence

Published by peter on 2017-12-23 in Argumentation, Mendelssohn and Music. 0 Comments

Listening to the string quarters of Luigi Cherubini (1760-1842), his Basque composition student Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga (1806-1826), and those of Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847), we can hear the influence of musical ideas. I thought it interesting to list their quartets in the order they were composed. (In the list below, each quartet is prefaced by the composer’s initials.). Arriaga’s three quartets were published in 1824, but may have been written well before.  It is interesting that Cherubini had only written one string quartet before meeting Arriaga, while after Arriaga’s three were written, Cherubini then wrote another five.
1814: LC Quartet No. 1 in Eb major
1822 October: Arriaga moved to Paris from Bilbao
1824: JA Quartet No.1 in D minor
1824: JA Quartet No. 2 in A major
1824: JA Quartet No.3 in Eb major
1825 Spring: Mendelssohn’s father took his son to Paris to visit with Cherubini, and while there Mendelssohn may also have met with Arriaga
1825: FM Octet in Eb major, Op. 20
1826: Death of Arriaga
1827: FM Quartet No. 2 in A minor, Op. 13
1829: LC Quartet No. 2 in C major
1829: FM Quartet No. 1 in E-flat major, Op. 12
1834: LC Quartet No. 3 in D minor
1835: LC Quartet No. 4 in E
1835: LC Quartet No. 5 in F
1837: LC Quartet No. 6 in A minor
1837/9: FM Quartet No. 4 in E minor, Op. 44, No. 2
1838: FM Quartet No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 44, No. 3,
1838: FM Quartet No. 3 in D major, Op. 44, No. 1
1842: Death of Cherubini
1847: FM Quartet No. 6 in F minor, Op. 80
1847: Death of Mendelssohn.

Wowsers

Published by peter on 2016-12-23 in Art, Minimalism and Music. 0 Comments

The views of philosopher Peter Singer have always struck me as humourless and puritanical.  Confirmation of a conflict in our respective values comes today in a quotation from his latest book in a review in the NYT by Dwight Garner:

Writing about the sale of paintings by artists like Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and Andy Warhol for obscene sums at Christie’s, he declares: “Why would anyone want to pay tens of millions of dollars for works like these? They are not beautiful, nor do they display great artistic skill. They are not even unusual within the artist’s oeuvres. Do an image search for ‘Barnett Newman’ and you will see many paintings with vertical color bars, usually divided by a thin line. Once Newman had an idea, it seems, he liked to work out all the variations.”

Well, others may see these art works as beautiful, so it takes some arrogance to assert the contrary subjective opinion as if it were objective fact. As well as learning how much he values his own aesthetic judgment over anyone else’s, from this we also learn that Singer does not like modern art; he apparently also lacks the capability of seeing the beauty inherent in subtle variations of a single, simple theme. The first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth must also not be to his taste, for working out all the variations of the one idea is all that movement is. And let us not mention the minimalist works of JS Bach, where there may be even fewer ideas than one.

Even when his works of art are considered individually, some of Newman’s art is sublime, for example, the painting “Midnight Blue,” (pictured), currently on display at the Royal Academy in London, as part of the RA’s Abstract Expressionism Exhibition.    In my experience, to appreciate the sublime, one needs to disengage one’s left-brain (for right-handed people) – the verbal, rational, sequential side – and seek to appreciate the work with one’s right-brain – the intuitive, holistic side;  in other words:  don’t think about the painting, just feel it.  Most English-language philosophers, in my experience, are all left-brain, all the time. (George Santayana, who wrote poetry as well as philosophy, was perhaps an exception.)

And to mention only the beauty of an art work, or the supposed artistic skill needed for its creation, would seem to indicate an impoverished view of the many purposes and functions of art.  At least one purpose of painting, and a common motivation for people who paint, is not to produce beautiful (or indeed, ugly) objects, but to express oneself through the act of painting. This was famously the purpose of the artists who came to be called abstract expressionists, of whom Newman is one.  Closely related, one  may  also paint in order to express the feelings one has while engaged in the act of painting.  (See here for a discussion of this purpose, and here for lists of reasons why people may draw or make music. Beauty is not the half of it.)  Nothing in Singer’s words indicates that he has any appreciation of these other purposes, or that he has even read or reflected on the extensive literature in philosophy, history, theology, and anthropology on art and aesthetics.   Of course, one can be a famous philosopher without knowing much of anything except one’s own special topic and being blind to non-verbal ways of knowing and understanding, as the humourless Bertrand Russell showed.
 

Bush violins

Published by peter on 2016-08-21 in Culture, Music and Violin. 0 Comments

Bernard O’Reilly (1903-1975), of Green Mountains fame, writing about his bush childhood in the Kanimbla Valley, NSW:

That music! – accordians and concertinas [page break]- low brow, but who is so high brow or blasé that he doesn’t secretly enjoy such music?  But best were the violins and they were played by men to whom violin playing had come as legacies from father to son and on to grandson. Their music was a thing apart, it had the quality of antiquity which is only possible where father had taught son and no outside influence or technique had been allowed to creep in.  Thinking back now it is impossible for me to say whether or not they played well from a technical point of view – you wouldn’t even think of that whilst you listened.  The violin became a live thing in their hands; it didn’t merely express their moods and feelings, but it commanded and all who listened followed as they would the Piper of Hamelin through moods of tenderness, through sorrow and through wild joy.
Are they all gone, these men? No, there is one left. Our old neighbour, Pat Cullen, of Long Swamp, has lived beyond his four score years, but in his hands, that old brown violin can still make you dance or laugh or cry.” (pages 37-38)

 
Reference:
Bernard O’Reilly [1944]: Cullenbenbong. Brisbane: WR Smith and Paterson Pty Ltd.  My copy was purchased in 1945 by Burl Ives.

Female composers

Published by peter on 2016-05-08 in Books, Concerts, Mendelssohn and Music. 0 Comments

Several newspapers have recently carried reviews of a new book presented short biographies of 8 female composers (Beer 2016).  It is certainly true that female composers have suffered from misogyny, and probably still do. But the situation is more subtle than it may appear at first.  The discrimination may arise because composers such as Fanny Hensel (neé Mendelssohn) wrote mostly for small-scale, intimate forms, such as lieder and solo piano.  Hensel wrote no operas or concertos or symphonies, as far as I know.   Since the industrial revolution our society, one could argue, has favoured the grand and the grandiose, so anyone who writes only in small forms is ignored.   This is true even of male composers:  Hugo Wolf, who wrote art song, is unjustly overlooked, for instance.   (This bias for the big and bombastic could also be a strongly male one.)  Against this argument that composers need to go large or be ignored, one could cite the case of nineteenth century French composer Louise Farrenc (pictured), who wrote symphonies and full-length chamber works (indeed, very good ones), yet still was ignored by the musical establishment.  Despite her music being as good as Schumann’s or Mendelssohn’s, she still is ignored.  Even Beer does not, apparently, profile her.
Hensel’s brother, Felix, was a symphonist and composer of overtures who audibly honed his technical craft writing a dozen string symphonies for the pick-up orchestra his mother assembled for the family’s weekly salon concerts each Sunday afternoon in Berlin.  Very few women composers have had such an advantage, which perhaps explains something of Felix Mendelssohn’s comparative abilities.   But Fanny Mendelssohn certainly had access to this resource.  What explains her failure to write for it? Was it some pressure in the family, or just in herself?  Did their parents, perhaps unconsciously and subtly, expect Felix to write pieces for the family salons, but not expect Fanny to do so? Was it a matter of social and class expectations of gender roles which the family had internalised? Or was Fanny simply lacking in confidence?   She once wrote a song to secretly communicate her love for the man who later became her husband at a time when her parents refused to allow the pair to meet or write letters, so it seems she could disobey the spirit of any explicit family imposition, if not the letter.
Or are we looking in the wrong place entirely here?  The Mendelssohns’ father and his brothers were bankers.  Felix’s father took him to Paris as a teenager to meet Cherubini explicitly to assess whether the boy had a future as a composer.  It is easy to imagine that his father wanted him to follow in the family bank, so perhaps Felix had to fight to get to be a composer. It was not, perhaps, that the family discouraged Fanny in particular from a career as a composer but that both children were thus discouraged, but only Felix resisted this pressure.  To be honest, however, Felix’s published letters do not reveal any such discouragement from their parents.
Reference:
Anna Beer [2016]: Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Forgotten Women of Classical Music. Oneworld, London, auK.

Metaphorical weathermen

Published by peter on 2016-01-02 in Communism, History, Music and Terrorism. 0 Comments

On 14 January 1965 in New York City, Bob Dylan recorded the song “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, and the single was released on 8 March 1965.  The song includes the lines:

You don’t need a weatherman
To know which way the wind blows.

The metaphor expressed in these lines was very influential.  For instance, the main left-wing armed terrorist movement in the USA, formed in 1969, called itself Weatherman, or The Weathermen, later calling itself The Weather Underground.
Was the metaphor originally due to Dylan?  We can answer NO to that question.   On 18 March 1957, Time magazine reported on political events in Poland, where the ruling Polish United Workers Party had recently seen some liberalization of its earlier Stalinism (and the return to power of reformist communist Wladyslaw Gomulka), followed by something of a reversal back to hard-line policies.  The Time article began:

There is usually one Communist who knows the way the wind is blowing long before the official weather vanes swing into line. In stormy Poland he is a longtime Stalinist timeserver named Jerzy Putrament. When Wladyslaw Gomulka broke with Moscow last October, Comrade Putrament was so enthusiastic in Gomulka’s support that Pravda publicly rebuked him for saying that he preferred “imperialist Coca-Cola to the best home-distilled vodka.” Last month Weatherman Putrament held up a moist forefinger and got the feel of a new breeze blowing through Poland.

Continue reading ‘Metaphorical weathermen’

Transitions 2015

Published by peter on 2015-12-27 in Communism, Heroes, Intelligence and Espionage, Jazz, Music, Obituaries and Politics. 0 Comments

People who have passed on during 2015, whose life or works have influenced me:

  • Yogi Berra (1925-2015), American baseball player
  • Ornette Coleman (1930-2015), American jazz musician
  • Robert Conquest (1917-2015), British kremlinologist
  • Malcolm Fraser (1930-2015), Australian politician
  • Jaako Hintikka (1929-2015), Finnish philosopher and logician
  • Lisa Jardine (1944-2015), British historian
  • Joan Kirner (1938-2015), Australian politician, aka “Mother Russia”
  • Kurt Masur (1927-2015), East German conductor
  • John Forbes Nash (1928-2015), American mathematician
  • Boris Nemtsov (1959-2015), Russian politician
  • Oliver Sacks (1933-2015), British-American neurologist and writer
  • Gunter Schabowski (1929-2015), East German politician
  • Alex Schalck-Golodkowski (1932-2015), East German politician
  • Gunther Schuller (1925-2015), American composer and musician (and French horn player on Miles Davis’ 1959 album, Porgy and Bess).
  • Brian Stewart (1922-2015), British intelligence agent.
  • Ward Swingle (1927-2015), American singer and jazz musician.

Last year’s post is here.

Musical Instrument Museums

Published by peter on 2015-09-06 in Art, Concats, Culture and Music. 0 Comments

For reasons of record, here is a list of musical instrument museums, ordered by their location:

  • Athens, Greece: Museum of Popular Musical Instruments
  • Berlin, Germany: Musikinstrumenten Museum
  • Brussels, Belgium: Musical Instrument Museum
  • Monte Estoril, Portugal: Museum of Portuguese Music, Casa Verdades de Faria
  • New York, NY, USA: Metropolitan Museum of Art
  • Phoenix, AZ, USA: Musical Instrument Museum
  • Rome, Italy: Museo di Strumenti Musicali dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia
  • Vermillion, SD, USA: National Music Museum, University of South Dakota
  • Vienna, Austria: Collection of Historic Musical Instruments, Kunsthistorisches Museum