This is the Wrigey’s chewing-gum version of the Turkish rondo.
From a new essay by Chicago psychoanalyst Gerald Stein.
… (Simon) Rattle’s mentor Berthold Goldschmidt said to him, “Will you please remember what the phrase “ohne hast” (without haste) means in a time when there were no automobiles.” Nor the sounds from such motor cars, he might have added.
Amplified sound became like floor-to-ceiling audio wallpaper over the course of the twentieth century. Civilization capitulated to its growth.
At first, Western society sought realistic prerecorded melodies. Who among us realized we would pay for this miracle, not just in money spent on phonographs, discs, and streaming services?
Convenience and ubiquity leached away some of the thrills of performances created in our presence. The novel sense of a special occasion diminished. The sonorities we loved became routine.
For music to produce its intended effect, the airborne notes must grow out of silence….
Read on here.
The death has been announced, at 91, of David Guggenheim, principal cellist of the Pennsylvania Ballet Orchestra for decades until his retirement in 2000.
He was also a founder member of the Philadelphia Little Symphony and a much sought-after teacher.
The paper has been accused repeatedly in recent months of negative reporting from the UK. Its latest dispatch on the cancellation of a new concert hall is singularly prejudiced.
The best ‘independent’ quote it can find is from an artists’ agent, whose interests are scarcely the same as the public interest:
‘It’s a further confirmation of the parochialization of British music and the arts,’ said Jasper Parrott, a co-founder of HarrisonParrott, a classical music agency, in a telephone interview. The mood among musicians was low, Parrott said, especially because of changes to the rules governing European tours that came about because of Brexit.
Oh, really.
The mood among musicians I spoke to outside London was one of widespread satisfaction at the adjustment of a looming imbalance in the nation’s music provision. Within London there was a mood of relief that the wrong hall in the wrong place at the wrong time was not going to be built, and a billion pounds was not about to be wasted. All in all, a good decision.
Just don’t go to the NY Times for balanced reporting of Britain. Or to an agent for an unbiased view.
Read Fiona Maddocks in the Obs for a balanced and informed view.
Meet Nicholas Gold.
Not one of your pampered cellists.
View this post on Instagram
Nick tells Slipped Disc: I originally was thinking I’d just send the video to a few friends and family and it would be funny because I was wild enough to bring a cello out into a snowstorm. But it totally morphed into something else. I amused myself when I said “Peg Slip” in the middle. I didn’t realize the sense of peace that would be conveyed through the performance and video. It’s by no means perfect playing… I haven’t played that cello in years. It was just a cheap instrument that I bought for $850.
Scherzo reports that the Palau de la Música Catalana de Barcelona was stoned last night by protesters angry at the arrest of a rapper. Windows were smashed.
There was a concert being given by the violinist Lina Tur Bonet and the group Vespres d’Arnadi. Nearly three hundred concert goers had to shelter inside the building until the rioters were dispersed.
More here.
Philip Ewell of Hunter College, a public university in New York, has been chasing headlines by calling for the decolonisation of classical music and denouncing any scholar he doesn’t like as a racist. Beethoven, in Ewell’s view, is just another over-promoted white male.
This might be harmless and amusing were it not for the mob that follows Ewell and tries to cancel honest scholars who disagree with him.
Ewell himself is hands-off in the mov violence so much so that he refuses to answer questions from Slipped Disc and the New York Times, hiding behind a gown of academic privilege – we use the word advisedly – that really needs to be pulled down.
Others arestarting to question the substance of his musical knowledge and musicianship. The attached polemic by David P Goldman sheds some light on Ewell’s gifts as a cellist.
Goldman writes:
It’s all about envy.
My childhood piano teacher kept a recording of Florence Foster Jenkins, the deluded society lady portrayed by Meryl Streep in a 2016 comedy, as a horrible example for youth. Her voice would de-feather a screech-owl, but no-one was allowed to tell her she couldn’t sing. The only classical musician still active who bears comparison to Ms. Jenkins is a certain Philip Ewell, now a professor of music theory at Hunter College, who posts videos of himself torturing a cello until it squeals in pain. Prof. Ewell is African-American and has won his fifteen minutes of fame by denouncing whiteness in classical music….
Read on and listen here.
Any questions?
The UK Supreme Court issued a historic ruling on Friday against the Uber car company, deciding that its drivers have to be treated as salaried workers rather than self-employed contractors.
The ruling has potentially devastating effects for the four main London orchestras, where players are considered freelance.
If the Uber decision is binding, musicians at the London Symphony Orchestra will be able to claim 20 days’ holiday pay for each of the past two years, along with other benefits. Players who are no longer hired can seek compensation for wrongful dismissal.
The financial consequences for the orchestras could be catastrophic.
M’learned friends will doubtless be consulted.
The much-loved broadcaster Claude Carrière has died at 81. He was an authority on Duke Ellington and a friend to hundreds of musicians.
He was jazz producer on France Music from 1974 to 2008 and a very capable pianist.
The former headmaster of York Minster School and Chamberlain of York Minster Richard Shephard has died after a long illness.
He was a prolific composer of liturgical and secular choral music and a member of the Archbishop’s Commission on Church Music.
The pianist and Wagner expert Stefan Mickisch, who used to give introductory lectures before the operas at Bayreuth, has been found dead in his home town of Schwandorf. He was 58 years old; no cause of death has been given.
Mikisch is survived by his wife, Carla Hernandez, whom he married two years ago.
He was banished from Bayreuth two months ago after referring to ‘Corona fascism’ and comparing Covid sceptics to anti-Hitler resistants.
UPDATE: He was about to take up a remote professorship at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, with a brief to popularise Wagner in Finland.