Slipped Disc announces that Alex Ross stepping down from his role at The New Yorker (which is presented as the last classical music critic in America steps down)--but now I'm realizing I kept coming back to Kyle Gann and Ethan Iverson more than Alex Ross' writing in the last 15-20 years

https://slippedisc.com/2026/06/americas-last-classical-music-critic-steps-down/

I haven't been reading The New Yorker in a while.  So this is sort of news to me but not exactly news.  I'd read Alex Ross and I enjoyed The Rest is Noise. Recognizing that styles outside the usual canonized placeholders in concert music exist doesn't make Ross a revisionist.  If anything it's a sign of his being a candidate for "the" classical music critic of the current American age that he could write about Sibelius and recognize that Bjork also exists.  And since I like Frank Martin's Mass for double chorus I hardly had a problem with Ross pointing out that the work exists.  There was a stretch in my life where I was soaking up Frank Martin's Mass and reading Emil Brunner, which could be jokingly presented as a dual pinnacle of Swiss Reformed Christian piety in the first half of the 20th century. 

Music critics inevitably soapbox and Ross had his favorites.  I still find Wagner's music annoying at best and the man himself to have been repellant.  But Wagner's influence is also inescapable and the music has stuck around in a way that has allowed for divergent readings and receptions of the work. Philip Ewell somewhat telegraphed this point in his book, but a big difference between a Richard Wagner and a Heinrich Schenker is simply in the fact that Wagner wrote music that can be "read" at a number of levels while Schenker promulgated a theory that dictated the rules of its reception as a matter of principle.  Scott Joplin could draw upon Wagnerian precedent when composing Treemonisha in a way he couldn't have if he were to have attempted to write a piano concerto based on some kind of Schenkerian ur-line. 

So Ross has had his ideas and interests but I don't think that automatically makes or breaks a critic.  Terry Teachout wrote a decade or two ago that a great critic can be more useful in being completely wrong than average or even good critics are in always being right (whatever that may mean).  

But ... most influential classical music critic of the last thirty years?  I mean ... influencing who?  Subscribers to The New Yorker?  No disrespect meant to Alex Ross at all but I realize as I'm typing this post that I read a whole lot more Kyle Gann in the last twenty years than I read Alex Ross.  Maybe for consumers of classical music Alex Ross was the bigger name but among composers (vocational or avocational) I wonder if the more widely-read classical music writer was Gann.  

You know ... Kyle Gann as composer and music critic could be interpreted as a throwback to the 19th century paradigm in which Hector Berlioz wrote music and music criticism.  The demise of the classical music critic as perceived by cultural gatekeepers and metacultural pundits in the late 20th and early 21st centuries might be explicable in light of a separation of tasks--if criticism is professionally separated from the actual production of music we won't get Berlioz or Wagner figures.  I mean I find Wagner repellant at many levels but he wrote music and he wrote about music.  

Which, as I'm idling about in a blog post on the eve of the Fourth of July, it gets me thinking about how I've read Ethan Iverson off and on over the last fifteen years.  I come back to people who write criticism and music side by side more consistently than I come back to critics who are "just" critics.  When Iverson wrote about having issues with Nikolai Kapustin I was able to intuit that the thing about Kapustin's piano sonatas that Iverson seemed to find wanting is the sense that Kapustin's piano sonatas are big on thematic presentation but fall short in the realm of thematic differentiation. I was later able to discuss Iverson's Clarinet Sonata and show that his own themes are clearly presented and clearly differentiated within his forms.  

And, of course, regular readers of Wenatchee The Hatchet know I have had a lot of fun interacting with the blogging of Ethan Hein.  So, I think it's a day to say that I did benefit from reading Alex Ross off and on over the years but that, in a way, maybe in a lot of ways, Ross' position at The New Yorker was symbolic for arbiters of what should or shouldn't count as "culture". That there are great rivers of populist and anti-populist sentiment among composers (Strauss and Mahler) is an interesting grand thesis ... but even in an allegedly post-Lyotardian era skeptical of grand narratives there's this penchant among culture writers for precisely the grand narratives that "we" are supposedly so skeptical about (a point I must credit to Andrew Bowie, who finds the whole Lyotardian claim that grand narratives are "over" to be absurd because Lyotard's own grand narrative is just that).

But if we recalibrate our perspective a bit and look back on the ways that jazz players mastered light classical music or how ragtime players would rag the classics during the early 20th century when composers would make a show of writing rags, it might be useful to consider that reconsidering the intra-critical super-myths established by the gatekeepers and scholars of the 20th century is just where we are at.  It's not just in classical music that the hoary received narratives of yore have come in for scrutiny and grilling, similarly revisionist work has been getting done in jazz and blues (I just finished two pretty good books by Adam Gussow on blues).  To the extent that Ross has played a part in recognizing that classical music in the last century has not only never existed in a vacuum but can be understood as co-existing alongside a panoply of styles then Alex Ross' contribution was to, well, this seems cheeky, the contribution was to simply recontextualize the observations of Leonard Meyer into the 21st century.  Democracy doesn't require that everyone like the same thing but that everyone is free to honestly like whatever they like, to paraphrase Meyer.  

Norman Lebrecht's lament that London is no longer a musical capital

https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/august-september-2023/requiem-for-londons-music/

 

It is a sad truth, widely acknowledged, that London is no longer a music capital. World orchestras that passed through once or twice a year no longer stop over. Headline artists save their signature concerts for Paris and Berlin. New music has dried up. There hasn’t been a premiere of world consequence since before Covid. London is falling off the music map.

 

Various reasons and excuses are attached to this decline, among them Brexit, Covid, the Ukraine war, economic woes and a government that is plundering funds from the capital and spreading it around the regions, going out of its way to penalise London orchestras while smiling upon pointless little minority start-ups that are barely above kindergarten level.

 

These are all contributory causes but the cumulation of factors does not begin to describe the loss of national purpose and fundamental incompetence that has relegated music in London to an all-time low. The economy has nothing to do with it.

 

London achieved its musical status in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, adding two new symphony orchestras and drawing a surprised endorsement from Arturo Toscanini that they ranked among the best. Today, star maestros shun London and one of its symphony orchestras came within a matter of days of being abolished.

...

 

Alvaro Company (1931-2022)

https://slippedisc.com/2022/06/italian-guitar-composer-dies-91/
https://www.volterraguitar.org/bio-alvaro-company.html

https://neuguitars.com/2020/09/07/tribute-to-alvaro-company-the-right-tribute-to-a-great-musician-on-neuguitars-blog/  

In the second edition of The Contemporary Guitar (ISBN 978-1-4422-3789-6) John Schneider wrote that 1963 can be thought of as Year Zero for the contemporary era of the guitar.  It was the year the world got Nocturnal after John Dowland by Benjamin Britten; Si le jour Parait ... by Maurice Ohana and Las seis cuerdas by Alvaro Company.  It might be good here to clarify that these were three landmark works that foretold the future of classical guitar music since, as many of us know, plenty of innovative and legendary works for guitar had been written before, during and since 1963.  But Schneider's point is well worth noting now that Alvaro Company has passed.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-U-U-O7ELI

I realize that for most people the passing of an Italian guitarist composer who pioneered extended techniques and post-tonal possibilities for the instrument won't mean too much but it's still a sad day for classical guitarists who keep tabs on guitarist composers. 

Props to Lebrecht for noting the news.  I occasionally tire of his scabrous moments and the commentary brawls but it's thanks to Lebrecht rants that I learned about Ethan Hein's work and in contrast to a lot of other classical mainstream journalism Lebrecht has, at least, paid attention enough to note the deaths of Roland Dyens, Julian Bream, Angelo Gilardino and Alvaro Company. 

Norman Lebrecht reports that Prof. Jackson has cleared Heinrich Schenker of Philip Ewell's charge of racism?

Now it may be as a guitarist who loves music by Haydn, Bach, Shostakovich, Stevie Wonder, Scott Joplin, Thelonious Monk, and Duke Ellington (among others) I ultimately can't be sure I care about these kinds of battles but when even legendary conservatives like Roger Scruton have wondered aloud for the record why people bother with Schenkerian analysis it's striking in 2021 to see that what Ewell started discussing awhile back has come up again.

https://slippedisc.com/2021/12/evidence-that-clears-heinrich-schenker-of-alleged-racism/

I finished John McWhorter's Woke Racism and will probably have some stuff to write about it, eventually, but I'm glad he was smart enough to steer clear of this music theory controversy with some help from his commenters at his Substack. 

I'm incubating some posts on preludes and fugues written for guitar but those posts will take some time.

There's also some unfinished posting on another more recent set of topics I might inevitably have to write through first.  Cosper has, to my befuddlement, said there's more bonus episodes. Episode 12 wasn't the end?  Anyway, so it goes. 

a peroration from Norman Lebrecht on the "sell by date" of Yuja Wang seems like a symptom, rather than a remedy for, what seems to ail classical music

https://slippedisc.com/2021/10/why-yuja-wang-cant-have-it-both-ways/

https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/november-2021/spare-us-the-skintight-sonata/

Onto a stage bounds a young woman in a backless gown slit up to the hip, or a micro-dress cut an inch below the butt. That’s right, I’ve turned into a fashion critic. And the moment these words appear I shall come under a social-media onslaught for committing the unforgivable male offence of reporting what a female artist wears, instead of how she plays.

My defence is that Yuja Wang does everything possible to draw attention to her appearance. She habitually changes costume in a concert interval to show more leg and she feeds the internet with a stream of selfies in halter tops and skimpy shorts.

...

Lebrecht has been fixated on Wang's attire for years.  She's not my favorite pianist but I'm a guitarist and so I don't exactly have a ton of favorite pianists.  I like Angela Hewitt's take on Bach. I am enjoying the piano music of Nikolai Kapustin.  A lot of composers I like played keyboard as a matter of course but I haven't listened to a ton of pianists as performers (Rachmaninoff, of course, was really good).

The Anxieties of Empires and decolonizing musicology, how Anglo-American musicology is having a debate about the primacy of German music, sort of

If the British Empire and it's spin-off the United States of America had not more or less continuously exerted world-defining influence and power across the entire planet we might not be seeing the back and forth debates we've been seeing about whether or not Anglo-American musicology needs to be "decolonized" by way of giving less emphasis to the would-be German empire we helped defeat in two wars inside the last century.

For reasons I admit I have not discerned, Norman Lebrecht has posted as an “exclusive” that J. P. E. Harper-Scott has decided to withdraw from academia in response to “woke” musicology.   A dutiful addition of a composer who “can’t be decolonized” was added that mentioned that Franz Liszt could not be decolonized.  

But how can the announcement have been an “exclusive” when it was sitting at Harper-Scott’s website for the whole world to read?

https://jpehs.co.uk/why-i-left-academia/

…

I would put the problem in this (Kantian) way: I wrongly supposed that universities would be critical places, but they are becoming increasingly dogmatic. Consider the following statement, which fairly well articulates an increasingly common view in musicology.

 

Nineteenth-century musical works were the product of an imperial society. The classical musical canon must be decolonised.

 

The statement, and the attitude that goes with it, are dogmatic by virtue of form, not content. It does not matter that the statement in the first sentence is one that I can assent to. It becomes dogmatic by virtue of the second sentence, which admits of no doubt, no criticism, no challenge.  …

So Harper-Scott has announced he has left academia.  This move seems indicative, writing as someone outside academia, like a small part of a set of conflicts between British leftists and American progressives in Anglo-American musicology.  Harper-Scott is hardly a political reactionary but Americans might get the idea that he is. The tricky thing about attempting to parse debates and battles through a left/right binary is that there’s no shortage of radical musicians in terms of politics who were traditionalist in their musical styles (Hans Eisler, for instance, or a raft of Soviet composers).  Ian Pace has been arguing for both leftist politics and against what he regards as the “deskilling” of musicology, as well as having a discussion about the hegemonic influence of Anglo-American popular musics.  Harper-Scott has, so far, not struck me as being nearly as specific as Pace.  That sort of thing was on my mind when I wrote “hegemony may be in the eye of the complainer “ years ago. British musicologists being concerned about the hegemonic influence of American popular music can sincerely think that in terms of market presence Anglo-American pop has ruled the world and that Anglo-American pop could and has included blues and jazz.

Norman Lebrecht reviews a CD of violin/piano sonatas by Copland, Poulenc and Prokofiev who, he says, wrote works in 1942 that were escapism related to the war

https://www.ludwig-van.com/toronto/2021/04/23/lebrecht-listens-expect-oracles-composers-ominous-times/

In the year 1942, while millions were being slaughtered on battlefields and in German extermination camps, three composers in different countries wrote sonatas for violin and piano. Nothing connects these works to contemporary events or to each other. They are acts of escapism by expert musicians who chose not to engage with the worst time in human history.…

[reviews violin sonatas composed by Copland, Poulenc and Prokofiev] 

We expect oracles from composers in ominous times. Here are three composers who preferred to bury their heads in scores. It is the interpreters, Benjamin Baker and Daniel Lebhardt, who bring out the terrors and anxieties that rumble beneath these works. Both are brilliant artists of independent mind and prodigious technique, one a New Zealander, the other Hungarian. Their Edinburgh recital was recorded last summer in the thick of the COVID pandemic. Different time, different crisis. This is a wonderfully timely album.

So musical acts of escapism are great if you're Aaron Copland, Francis Poulenc or Sergei Prokofiev?  I'm not really a Copland fan.  His whole Americana thing always sounded contrived to me.  Poulenc, on the other hand, I love his penitential motet settings and his Mass is one of the better 20th century masses I've heard.  I also enjoy Prokofiev (Piano Sonata No. 5, for instance)  

But escapism?  Maybe Lebrecht holds to some idea that artistic output is supposed to be both a reflection of the times and the psychological journey of the composers but not everyone has thought or composed in such a way.  One of my music teachers said that if Beethoven was in a bad mood you saw it in his scores whereas if Haydn or Mozart were ever in a bad mood you could not glean that from studying their scores.  

John Dowland was always sad and said so.  He was probably one of the goth/emo dudes of Renaissance music and also, of course, a legendarily skilled lutenist and songwriter.  But ... Lebrecht's surmise that "we expect oracles from composers in ominous times" sounds like something, 

If we need escapism now and then could that be why Godzilla vs Kong is doing okay at the box office? What kind of escapism does Lebrecht really have in mind?  Probably not Godzilla vs Kong the movie and most definitely not the send-up via trailer that is "Godzilla vs Cat (Owlkitty Parody)"

If Lebrecht likes the music already then the escapism he hears in it is "just what we need".  

on double standards from music journalists: Norman Lebrecht's riff on Stravinsky as over-hyped would seem more witty if he didn't get livid last year at Philip Ewell's proposal that we say Beethoven was above-average and just leave it at that

There are a number of music theorists I only know about because of the ranting of Norman Lebrecht to the effect that smart and decent people shouldn’t be reading anything they have to say.  Ethan Hein is one and Philip Ewell is another.  Even if Lebrecht is taking a Swiftian hand at satire with his recent “myth of Igor Stravinsky as great composer” it is, I’m afraid it must be said, the kind of satire that’s made in bad faith. 

That Stravinsky turned out to be a significant and influential composer seems hard to contest, whether you enjoy his music or not.  I enjoy a fairly sizable chunk of it but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Stravinsky towers over Bartok or Shostakovich or Messiaen or Ellington or even Scott Joplin so much as to claim that Stravinsky’s influence is unassailably “top drawer”.  He was an above-average composer and let’s leave it at that. ;) 

Will Classical Music see a Renaissance? Bryan Townsend asks and it's a topic I've thought about for a while .... it depends on what we mean by classical music

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2021/01/will-classical-music-see-renaissance.html

Like many of you  I've been watching some of the streaming concerts from Europe and North America and I've started to wonder what the classical music world will look like after this pandemic crisis is over. And when will it be over? These are questions that are difficult if not impossible to answer at present, but we can do a little speculating.

I have read in a few places that perhaps 30% of professional musicians have simply left the business as there was no work for them. If the current crisis lasts another year or a good part of the year as it seems it might, then wouldn't it be likely that another 30% or more might leave the business?

We might also ask ourselves which musicians in particular are least likely to survive the crisis? It seems obvious that it would be the ones that are most vulnerable: the part-time musicians, the players in the smaller regional orchestras, the musicians that were already struggling to start or sustain a solo career, and most of all, the local musicians.

...

Reading, say, ArtsJournal or SlippedDisc on a weekly basis it could be easy to get a sense that classical music as we've known it has been in peril for some time.  Yet there was last year's debate about Philip Ewell's comments about the white racial frame of music theory in United States music theory, too. 

In comments at The Music Salon it got mentioned that album sales are dipping, even in the realm of digital download albums.  That got me thinking about how a musician friend of mine tried putting together a program for an album and discovered the licensing costs were more than he could tackle for the repertoire he wanted to record.  That, right there, might account for why there is a more robust indie rock scene than an indie classical scene in terms of recorded music.  At the risk of putting it too simply and briskly, what's the Bandcamp scene for new chamber music for string quartet compared to someone with a guitar and a band?  

One of the things that seems to be the default assumption in questions about the future of classical music is its future as a profession, the future of classical music as a form of cultural and participatory activity that people get paid to make.  The idea that classical music might continue in an avocational or amateur form doesn't seem to come up in "serious" conversations about "serious" music yet it seems as though, despite or in having to deal with the reality of arts funding and cultural policies in the United States, for instance, that's something we might want to keep in mind.  "a renaissance for classical music means a renaissance for humanity" wouldn't require that renaissance to be one of jobs in classical music.

But as Ted Gioia put it in Music: A Subversive History, the powers that be (they, etc) have pivoted from classical music to pop music in the last sixty odd years. The elites may have favored classical music a century ago but since the Jazz Age and the emergence of rock `n roll the elites have favored American popular styles. There are, of course, some folks who have felt that classical music must be allowed to die at spots like NewMusicBox but there's an element of bad faith to that proclamation inasmuch as the call was to contemporary composers and musicians to create alternative communities who would not be bound by established conventions ... and that's just the Romantics and Wagner all over again and, as Charles Rosen has put it, breaking free of the real or perceived strictures of "tradition" is as much a part of how traditions get renewed as the ostensibly "rigid" aspects of traditions.  

To put this aphoristically, every new generation has a temptation to think that we have seen things clearly in a way that nobody before us has and there's always a seed of accuracy to it along with some significant delusions of grandeur.

But, as is also so often said, it's easy to imagine things have always been getting worse when they're staying the same. I am skeptical about that approach to things now, too, because I find much wrong with Gioia's parade of dualisms to the effect that music history has "always" been about cycles of dualisms that can never be reconciled since before there even was music history as anyone can functionally know it. Adorno was right to snipe that the more modern the sensibility the more ancient it insists on being--the Enlightenment built on the Renaissance; the Romantics looked back to medieval eras for cohesion and then the ancient Greeks and Romans; and via Stravinsky's Rite of Spring ancient or pre-historic humanity became the new reference point. Gioia distills that general trend by going all the way back to a "rupture" allegedly caused by Pythagoras (and Confucius, too, even if the latter is basically only useful as a reference point for the kind of top-down totalitarianism in cultural norms that was more indicative of "our" era than many an earlier era).  Things can get worse in real world terms because if they weren't nobody would be worried about whether orchestras can survive the era of covid-19 if concert life is gutted via medical restrictions over the next two or three years.

Maury's comment at The Music Salon about how music has been devolving to an individual rather than a social activity is a fair concern. I hope that doesn't mean that a whole bunch of musicians are going to be home studio types who turn into Jacob Colliers!  On the other hand, perhaps that's not something that should surprise us if that's something that does happen.  

Owing to the curious history in the United States of post Cold War arts policies (or lack thereof) and the persistence of our military adventures abroad I have floated a theory that in the United States the arts might have something like a Thirty Years War situation in which arts policy wasn't and isn't a concern where "highbrow" is concerned.  I mention the Thirty Years War as a Heinrich Schutz fan to suggest that like Schutz composers and musicians might want to take as given the reduced possibilities and resources and compose for the resources we have rather than the ones we wish we had.  

It's why, in a nutshell, this guitarist composer hobbyist composes primarily for guitar now.  I like the idea of a cycle of chamber sonata pairing the guitar up with woodwinds, strings and brass, for instance, but in the era of covid-19 finding chamber musicians able and willing to tackle chamber music is challenging and people may find you rather than you finding them.  Whereas in the era of lockdown you can find out what you can do just you and your guitar.  The irony of that being cosmetically similar to the lone Romantic solitary art-bro-genius is not lost on me and I find it loathesome!  But we may find this to be the situation we're stuck with in classical music or postclassic music in the second decade of the 21st century. These don't promise to be another Roaring Twenties like the Roaring Twenties that featured the creation of so much music I admire form the last century.

I was reading Composing Capital by Marianna Ritchie in the last few months and although reading about gentrification and theories about neoliberalism and fumbling attempts to imagine musical life apart from capitalism was, well, sort of interesting it was also sort of predictable and I have noticed that within the confines of classical music criticism and scholarship right alongside popular music criticism and scholarship there's a tendency to stay in one's lane.  The possibility that what could revitalize the ruts that both classical music and popular music have lapsed into since, let me just make this polemical point unavoidably clear, the rise of the commercial music industries is a synergistic interaction of the classical and pop traditions is not something that tends to come up among academics, perhaps for reasons so obvious they don't even need to be written out on the page.  

I agree with Richard Taruskin's observation that since Rachmaninoff's time there has been an increasing gap between the academic canon in classical music and the repertoire canon, a gap between what scholars say you have to study and what concertgoers pay money to hear because they want to hear X in a concert. Yet the gap between the repertoire canon and the academic canon is probably not as wide as the gap between the repertoire canon and the pop musical canon even though the repertoire canon of classical music can overlap with the pop musical canon in pops concerts.  I have heard, for instance, The Pink Panther theme at pops concerts and why not? It's a fun theme.  Just because I listen to choral music by Xenakis or Messiaen or Tallis or Byrd doesn't mean I can't turn around and enjoy what Shirley Walker did composing soundtracks for Batman: the animated series or notice the probable influence of Theolonious Monk on musical cues in Blue's Clues.

One of many reasons I wrote Ragtime and Sonata Forms last year was to show that we have available the theoretical and conceptual tools in music theory and formal analysis to melt down the boundaries that supposedly exist between American popular or vernacular styles and "classical" music. It is possible, and I would argue desirable, to find out how much classical and popular styles can synergistically revitalize each other as compositional and performance traditions. If people want a renaissance of their preferred musical style it's hard to see how that's going to happen during pandemic years but after twenty years of feeling like both the classical and popular sides of Western music have had some ruts I think dispensing with a bunch of counter-productive dualisms is more likely to help things than to stick to them. 

That is why the post-Idealist German art-religious impulse is something I regard as ridiculous and as something that needs to be dispensed with.  I don't view the arts as sacramental, however much I love the arts.  Taruskin has been right to point out that George Steiner was wrong to imagine that the humanities would humanize.  I am, alternatively, skeptical that a renaissance for classical music will mean a renaissance for humanity. I'm too Reformed to take that view seriously.  If sacralizing highbrow art and music keeps people from imagining that it is possible or desirable to compose ragtime sonatas or to write a fugue that could draw inspiration from Wilson Pickett or Thelonious Monk then sacralizing highbrow music has to go, alongside sacralizing musical canons.  I can appreciate what Ethan Hein wrote a few years ago when he said he's not against canons as such but against canonism and by "canonism" I venture a guess that the legacy of German Idealism in which the arts are the new true religion is as good a working definition as any.  

I've been revisiting the Swiss Reformed theologian Emil Brunner's books The Mediator and Man in Conflict (Jim West says Man in Contradiction is a better translation). You don't have to be a neo-orthodox Swiss Reformer theologian to appreciate that Brunner's take-down of how the German Idealists re-engineered religious ideas from Christendom into a kind of panentheistic self-congratulatory cultural project could be a useful reference point for anyone who wants to take the Matthew Arnold style art-religion down a few pegs.  Brunner's work isn't going to be interesting for most, maybe, but I found his description of how liberal white Germans in the 18th and 19th century basically reverse engineered their idea of transcendence to kind of fit themselves to be an interesting polemic.  It might be germane to more recent American scholastic criticisms of the arts that were canonized in the proverbial long 19th century as a theological critique of the metaphysical confidence of European philosophers during the times when Beethoven was transformed into a god.  But that might have to be a post for some other time, maybe in tandem with a discussion of Mark Evan Bonds on The Beethoven Syndrome.

At Slipped Disc Norman Lebrecht links to an excerpt from an Estonian composers "quasi Beatles" piano sonata, and takes some shots at Dave Molk in the same week

https://slippedisc.com/2021/01/the-slipped-disc-daily-comfort-zone-281-the-beatles-piano-sonata/

It’s a crafty, copyright-avoiding conconction by the Estonian composer Jaan Rääts who died last week, aged 88. ... So cool, Jaan.

Lebrecht links to just the second movement.  The whole sonata is so short, however, why not let’s just link to the whole thing? It's at most seven minutes of your time. 

On an Overgrown Path, The Music Salon, and recent blog posts on the scam of "big break" label deals for classical and an admission by Norman Lebrecht he chucks a lot of those solo recital releases ...

 Okay, so I am technically trying to take a vacation from blogging to stockpile writing for future projects but I still read blogs and news online ... and between On an Overgrown Path and The Music Salon blogs some stuff has jumped out at me that cross references with other stuff I've been reading this last week.  I'll start with pliable's post.

Norman Lebrecht trolls Wagner fans by saying "remove Wagner and the rest of music continues ... " as though music history was all about composers and nobody else

 https://slippedisc.com/2020/10/the-hole-in-the-heart-of-wagnerism/

https://thecritic.co.uk/wagner-restless-provocateur/

Wagner brings out the worst in power-seekers. The German word for megalomania is Grossenwahn, or grand delusion. That’s what Wagner does, a reckless reordering of normality. He named his own house Wahnfried, which means peace after madness. He’s a menace.

Ross has an intriguing chapter on Wagner’s gay side. His patron, the homosexual and half-mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, was besotted in every way and Wagner only encouraged his arousal if their letters are anything to go by, forever trying to be all things to all men and women.

“Throughout his life,” writes Ross, “Wagner pursued an ideal of androgyny, a spiritual merger of the sexes.” Although a dominant male to his wives, he sought sexlessness in Parsifal, “androgyny elevated to the level of religion”, in which “the Saviour redeems the world by overcoming the duality of gender.”

His sexual ambiguity spoke powerfully to Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and Thomas Mann, whose novella Death in Venice is both an evocation and a validation of Wagnerian themes, “pederasty made acceptable for the cultural middle classes”, as the Berlin critic Alfred Kerr acridly put it.

My impression is that minorities, be they sexual or religious, are drawn to Wagner by a perception of permissiveness and transgression. His operas breach Biblical taboos of adultery and incest. He wants to destroy the world that prejudices those who differ from the norm. He speaks for those who have no voice, hurling their missiles in the face of a worshipful establishment, making the elites at grand opera houses humbly submissive to his art.

While Alex Ross enumerates his conquests among the creative classes, I am not sure he has fully grasped his appeal to our subversive unconscious. He is not alone in this reluctance. Freud, who knew the Wagner operas, was strangely muted in his analysis.

At the risk of undermining his own thesis, Ross quotes Nietzsche in advocating that no statement should ever be made about Wagner without the word “perhaps”. I am well past 600 pages before I see the flaw in his case. Ross states that Wagner is — perhaps — the most influential figure in the history of music. He isn’t. Remove Bach and there is no history. Take out Beethoven and everything grinds to a halt. Eliminate Verdi and there is no Italian opera. Without Stravinsky, no twentieth century.

Remove Wagner, however, and the rest of music continues regardless. Wagner is a one-off, an ego, a restless provocateur. To Wagnerites, he’s the fusion of all arts. To Wagner-sceptics like me, he’s a genetic anomaly, a genius without anxiety.

Norman Lebrecht's piece that is sort of about Alex Ross' book Wagnerism and more about Lebrecht's dislike of Wagner is ... fairly typical for a piece about Wagner.

"The Arts Have Failed Us" by way of The Critic, by way of Norman Lebrecht, but if the arts decorate life rather than give it purpose what kinds of decorations can this era afford?

 https://slippedisc.com/2020/09/editorial-the-arts-have-failed-us/

https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/october-2020/the-silence-of-the-arts/

...

Too much can be expected of art. The cliché that art has become a substitute — or even actual — religion for too many civilised people is a commonplace for a reason: they have mistaken what art is there to do. Which, more often than not, is to decorate life, not fulfil it. Art serves purposes, it doesn’t provide them.

...

On the one hand, such a claim is the ultimate bullet to the head of "autonomous music" anyone could have written, for popular magazine standards.  On the other hand ... there's Lebrecht's reaction to suggestions that Beethoven represents a racist and elitist standard ... .

If art decorates life rather than fulfills it then who can afford and would also find suitable to buy the "decoration" of another Beethoven box set?  I love Beethoven's last piano sonata.   Just because I generally hate Beethoven's choral music and think he had a penchant for being a bloviating blowhard in some of his works doesn't mean I don't admire Beethoven!  Mozart and Haydn wrote better choral music because they sang in choirs and anyone who has sung and sung choral literature can feel that two of the Big Three had actually bothered to sing in vocal ensembles!  All the same, since the folks at The Critic made a point of saying art decorates life ... 

Norman Lebrecht on the loss of personality in contemporary violinists, the fault lies with the nature of music education, of course, and the nature of the industries

It is not really a surprise if an older music critic concludes that kids these days have no personality compared to the old greats.  It's been happening in rock music and jazz criticism and it would, of course, be expected in classical music criticism. Thus ...
https://slippedisc.com/2020/09/why-do-most-violinists-now-sound-the-same/

https://thecritic.co.uk/a-worthy-heiress-to-princess-ida/...
The kaleidoscopic art of violin playing had lost its flavour, like chewing-gum, in the pop song, on the bedpost overnight. 

It was not hard to see why. There were two nurseries for violinists — the Russian, which turned out competition winners whom nobody wanted to hear again, and the American, which ran a conveyor belt from Dorothy DeLay’s teaching room at Juilliard to Isaac Stern’s secretary’s agency across the road.
...

Norman Lebrecht gets Phil Ewell on my radar by ranting about him, reminds me why I'm glad I didn't go to grad school in music

Well ... it's as though Norman Lebrecht has this penchant for introducing me to musicologists by ranting about them that, had he not ranted about them, I might never have heard of them.  Whereas I think Haydn is the bee's knees and that both Beethoven and Mozart were above average but terribly over-hyped, Lebrecht seems to treat it as actually blasphemy against art-religion to say Beethoven was a better than average composer who benefited from fitting into the mainstream of his time and place (i.e. by being a white guy).

Norman Lebrecht relays concerns that UK orchestras are in critical condition which is yet another reason I doubt that the future of "classical music" is likely to take a symphonic form now that a pandemic is gutting concert life as we've known it in the classical scene

via Slipped Disc
https://slippedisc.com/2020/04/british-orchestras-are-in-critical-position/

relaying the following:
https://www.musicweek.com/opinion/read/viewpoint-association-of-british-orchestras-director-mark-pemberton-on-why-classical-musicians-need-more-support/079416

With the global pandemic situation gutting concert life it's not a surprise that Bachtrack has closed shop
https://slippedisc.com/2020/04/backtrack-shuts-up-shop/

Sympathetic as I am to the cause of continuing what's generally called "classical music" I have had my doubts, and posted them here at my blog, over the last year or so that whatever the future of classical music is that it will necessarily take the form of the symphony.

I.e. the name Future Symphony Institute might put too much stock in there being symphonies in the future.  I don't think for a second that "a renaissance for classical music means a renaissance for humanity".  That seems like the kind of "fine art makes you a fine person" kind of manifesto that Richard Taruskin has spent his entire professional career, more or less, arguing emphatically against.

On the other hand, per some pieces by Jay Nordlinger at the Future Symphony Institute website, that were published in The New Criterion (back when I bothered to even read that magazine, come to think of it), mentioned way back circa 2004 some points raised more recently at On an Overgrown Path back in 2014 (there's too much classical music in terms of market saturation):
https://www.futuresymphony.org/tending-the-gardens-of-music-part-ii/
...
We have a glut problem, however. Horne recalls saying fully twenty-five years ago, “We should close all the conservatories for five years,” just to give the job market a break. And “now the situation is worse!” For woodwind and brass players, life has always been tricky: Zarin Mehta tells me that, for a recent tuba opening in the Philharmonic, over 120 people applied. [Editor’s note: A current tuba opening at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra has over 180 applicants.] One result of all this redundant talent is that players tend to be quite good, everywhere. David Delta Gier, a conductor with wide experience both in America and abroad, says, “You should hear some of the players in Sioux Falls!” (The orchestra there is the South Dakota Symphony.) The sad part of our cornucopia is that many musicians wind up disappointed. Gier knows many fellow conductors – or would-be conductors – who have not had careers, or satisfying ones, simply because of the number of podiums available (versus all those who want to stand on them). “You get into a great school, you study with a great teacher, you work hard, you do everything right, and you think you ought to be rewarded. But a lot of people have been made to realize that that’s not necessarily the case.”

In a pandemic scenario even an orchestral conductor has pointed out the obvious, that symphonic music is not necessarily "what we need" these days.  Chamber music may be better able to withstand the current tide of policies that have curtailed concert life.  

Actually, that kind of gets me back to why I think Douglas Shadle is basically wrong about the idea of canceling the nineteenth century.  In a global pandemic we might want to actually revisit the Biedermeier era of in-house music-making.  I'm a classical guitarist interested in solo guitar music and particularly chamber music that includes the guitar so, of course, I don't see any reason we should "cancel the nineteenth century" when it was during the 1810 to 1845 period or thereabouts that guitarists were writing the kind of DIY music for amateurs playing solo and chamber music of the sort that we could learn from if the global covid-19 pandemic situation has led to policies that may 
permanently damage concert life at the orchestral and symphonic levels.  You can still play Chopin or even Beethoven (or Dussek or Hummel) in the privacy of your home, just like you can play blues, jazz standards or ragtime.  

When the Thirty Years War raged along Heinrich Schutz didn't make a point of staying at the production level of the grander larger-scale works he did in his earlier career.  He stripped everything down to little sacred concert music pieces.  His Passion settings shifted into voices-only for liturgical but also practical reasons.  

The guitar music of Mauro Giuliani is still fun to play even if snooty classical music critics at The Guardian have referred to it as silly trifling music.  Frankly, as a guitarist I find it easier to bridge the gap between American popular styles (i.e. ragtime from a century ago) and classical music by way of having studied Carulli, Giuliani or Legnani.  For that matter a Bohemian guitarist composer like Matiegka also wrote works that have given me inspiration to bridge the gap between American vernacular styles and sonata forms but Italian and Bohemian and Spanish guitarist composers are generally so far off the radar for mainstream musicology it's never been a surprise to me if in the turf wars of academic music studies pop vs orchestra or salon traditions have persisted.  If there's something we guitarists could potentially do the world over, it could be to develop ways of thinking and composing and writing about music that could potentially bridge this chasm, which musicology-as-usual in the last century and a half, even including New Musicology, has rarely seemed to be interested in remedying.   If a string quartet from Haydn might even seem hard to stage these days Haydn is public domain, try transcribing.  There are ways to learn from and to continue what we find beautiful in the old even if the received ways of playing that music can be kept from us due to the exigencies of dealing with a pandemic.  

Some ideas for consideration.