Ludwig van Wotzefok

I can't be the only music lover to have had this experience: a performance of a well-known work - say, a Beethoven symphony - sounded all wrong, and yet there is not one reason I can think of that would convincingly explain my response.  The performance did not violate the score.  It did not suffer from technical defects of execution.  It was not sabotaged by noisy audience or unexpected headache. And yet it almost made me gag...

Not that I have some rigidly fixed idea of how a score - Beethoven's or otherwise - must be translated into sound.  I have no problem with Beethoven's music clad in heavy Teutonic armor, its structure buckling under the slow-moving extra weight.  I don't mind it being pumped full of steroids to give it restless tempos, cranky dynamics, and impatient transitions.[1]  Or when, medicated with Xanax, it sleepwalks lethargically [2] through what once were audacious modulations and startling dynamic contrasts.  My skin did not crawl when I was introduced to Beethoven the Foppish Metrosexual sporting skinny jeans, pointy shoes, and tight-fitting jacket, his expensively disheveled moussed hair cascading over designer eyeglasses.[3]   And if my blood boils at the thought of Beethoven the Circus Freak grotesquely disfigured by off-pitch amateurish playing of period-instrument bands [4], at least I understand clearly why I feel this way.

No, my problem is not with the variety of ways in which a composer's musical personality can be shaped by conductors and instrumentalists.  Rather the problem is that on rare occasions I find the results inexplicably repulsive.  My most recent experience of this kind was with Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony whose concert recording of the Eroica symphony still seems to me as perverse as a Netflix remake of Dirty Harry in which the title character is a bi-curious Asian-American detective who defends undocumented Mexican migrants from vicious Federal agents and, on his days off, distributes clean needles to cute heroin addicts in San Francisco's Tenderloin District.

Of course such experiences are not the only mystery of my musical life.  Those of the opposite kind - where I am awed by performances which violate the score [5] or suffer from defects of execution [6] - are no less mysterious.  It is just that people are not eager to scrutinize positive experiences.  After all, we don't pay psychoanalysts to help us understand why we have happy marriages, fulfilling careers, and well-behaved children.  Nor do we expect the pharmaceutical industry to develop drugs for treating cheerfulness and optimism.  So I suppose I am just being human here...
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1.  Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic.
2.  Frans Bruggen and the Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra.
3.  Yannick Nezet-Seguin and the Rotterdam Philharmonic.
4.  Academy of Ancient Music under Christopher Hogwood.
5.  Sergei Rachmaninov's recording of Chopin's Piano Sonata in B-flat minor.
6.  As heard in recordings of Wilhelm Furtwangler, Edwin Fischer, or Alfred Cortot.

Long before Tristan und Isolde...

If Domenico Scarlatti's contemporaries heard the B-theme of his sonata K.208 (L.238) as less than outrageously unstable with respect to its key, it is hard to see why the key instability of Wagner's Tristan (composed about a century later) should have been greeted with much more than 'big fucking deal'.
   
Here is Scarlatti's proto-Wagnerian harmonic pretzel in a performance by the Korean pianist Soo-Yeon Ham recorded live at the 2009 Cleveland International Piano Competition.

Servicing the debt...

... [I]n the early years of the twentieth century ... the Russians ... determined much of the direction of modern music...  We all owe a great debt to such composers as ... Prokofiev...
ELLIOTT CARTER [1]
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If Carter included himself among the "we all" composers indebted to Prokofiev, he never, as far as I know, discussed in print the specifics of his debt to the Russian composer.  Nor is this debt obvious in Carter's works, except perhaps for the short piano piece Catenaires published in 2006 when Carter was 98.  This music's motoric, relentless forward drive has always reminded me of Prokofiev's Toccata Op.11, but then someone else may just as well hear it as a tribute to Schumann's Toccata Op.7.  Or to the Gigue in Bach's B-flat major Partita BWV 825.  Or to some of Scarlatti's virtuosic sonatas.

Be that as it may, Catenaires can be a hugely exciting encore piece, which is why it is regrettable that the pianist for whom this piece was written (Pierre-Laurent Aimard) plays it in the same dour, matter-of-fact manner he plays everything else.  Fortunately there are other pianists who play Catenaires, and I doubt I will ever hear a more thrilling performance of this work than the one given by Vassilis Varvaresos at the 2009 Van Cliburn Piano Competition.
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1.  Carter, E., "Soviet Music", Collected Essays and Lectures, U. of Rochester Press, 1997, p.331.

Questions...

Baby Asian elephant born at upstate New York zoo

January 26, 2019

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Baby?  When has the world last witnessed the birth of an adult elephant?

How do such illiterate dimwits get writing (or editorial) jobs with major news outfits?  Have they been taught anything in their high school and college English classes besides their obligation to join the new Hitlerjugend cohorts clamoring for public executions of those who doubt the existence of white privilege, toxic masculinity, and global warming?

If the emergence of language was the most important development in our evolutionary history, perhaps its now on-going disintegration signals the approaching end of the human species?

Boom's MAGNIFICENT SEVEN

And then one day you find

ten years have got behind you.

ROGER WATERS, "Time", The Dark Side of the Moon

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And so they have, these ten years of grumpy, grouchy blogging.  Not a big deal, perhaps, but then one does not need much of a reason to write a blog post.  The question of what to write about, however, gave me a pause.  All too often anniversaries are treated as an excuse for self-congratulation or sentimentality, and I have never been fond of either.  Yet when I asked myself what was the first thing that came to my mind when I reflected on my ten years in the Dungeon, the answer turned out to be sentimental in the end.

Since I started this blog, the world has lost several people none of whom I knew personally, but whose work has enriched my life beyond measure.  Now that they are gone, the world has become a much colder and lonelier place for me to be in.  So, sentimental or not, I decided to use this anniversary post to mention these seven people - Boom's Magnificent Seven - as a way of reminding myself how incredibly lucky I feel to have been among their contemporaries.

ELLIOTT CARTER (1908 - 2012)

CHARLES ROSEN (1927 - 2012)

ROBERT HUGHES (1938 - 2012)

ROBIN WILLIAMS (1951 - 2014)

JERRY FODOR  (1935 - 2017)

OLIVER KNUSSEN (1952 - 2018)

PIERRE BOULEZ (1925 - 2016)

The company we keep...

Bad company
I can't deny
Bad, bad company
Till the day I die

PAUL ROGERS, SIMON KIRK, Bad Company 1974

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Buddhist monks, I'm told, are all good people.  Too bad I'm not interested in meditation, gardening, and other things with which they occupy themselves in their monasteries.  What I am interested in is what composers and musicians do.  Unlike Buddhist monks, however, musical artists are a checkered lot.  The ranks of even the most distinguished ones include murderers, supporters of totalitarian regimes, plagiarists, racists, pedophiles, fraudsters, pederasts, sadistic bullies, abusive husbands, habitual liars, and just plain assholes.  In short, with respect to variations in moral character, musical artists do not differ significantly from members of other professions, which is to say that, as a group, they are worse than Buddhist monks but better than convicted felons.

Despite its triviality, this sociological fact has given rise to countless hand-wringing think pieces by musicologists, historians, critics, and assorted cultural commentators, all asking if it is morally O.K. to enjoy musical works "when good art happens to bad people".  The need for such periodic soul-searching strikes me as strange.  After all, there have been no anguished think pieces about cases when, say, good plumbing happens to bad people.  And the reason there have been none is that no-one seems to think that the function of a plumbing installation has a moral dimension, or that one's use (appreciation, enjoyment) of a plumbing installation constitutes endorsement (if only implicit) of the plumber's private life.