Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

A Cassandra Miller moment

If anyone in these disenchanting days is writing music more brazenly beautiful than Cassandra Miller's, I do not know the name. Perfect Offering, its title taken from Leonard Cohen, is based on a recording of bells in rural France, finding instrumental analogues for the bells' rich acoustical properties. The Explore Ensemble, seen above at Wigmore Hall, features the work on a recent Huddersfield Contemporary Records release that also contains pieces by Lisa Illean, Lawrence Dunn, and Rebecca Saunders. Meanwhile, the Black Truffle label has a new Miller album pairing Traveller Song and Thanksong, with performances by the composer, members of London's Plus-Minus Ensemble, and the Quatuor Bozzini. I wrote about Miller's dumbfounding viola concerto I cannot love without trembling earlier this year.

A Robert Fayrfax moment

One more pricey NYC venue

PAC NYC, a $500-million performance space at the World Trade Center, opens tonight. Since classical music plays a fairly minimal role in its programming, I won't be covering it. I do wonder, though, what purpose the venue really serves, aside from giving billionaires another opportunity to congratulate themselves on their largesse. Does PAC NYC fill a need not already satisfied by Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Park Avenue Armory, the Shed, etc.? Might the half-billion dollars have better been invested in extant performing-arts organizations? Laurie Anderson, who is performing during the opening week, struck an appropriately skeptical tone in an interview with the New York Times: “Sometimes a place opens and it never finds its audience. I always like it when it’s opened up to the people who live in the neighborhood, but nobody lives in that neighborhood — it’s mostly abandoned offices now. So how do you make a community out of a bunch of empty offices? We’ll see. Maybe you make it by bringing music that’s just so incredible that everybody wants to get on the subway and go down there. That would be great.” Whether a revival of Cats will meet that standard remains to be seen.

The decline of Lincoln Center

I received an unusually large quantity of responses to my recent column about the demise of Mostly Mozart. All of them agreed that something has gone woefully wrong at Lincoln Center. Some of the notes came from musicians and administrators who have had negative experiences with Lincoln Center's new leadership. I also heard from people who live in the Lincoln Center area, affirming that the noise levels from summer events have become hellish. I'd like to highlight a letter that is printed in this week's issue of The New Yorker, from Sol Gaitán, of Cliffside Park NJ. It reads in part: "The implication of 'Summer for the City' ’s programming appears to be that people from particular backgrounds primarily want to be exposed to what they’re already familiar with: that Black people only want hip-hop, Latinos only want salsa, and young people only want standup and 'games spaces.' I feel disrespected. I am Colombian, but I don’t want to hear cumbia all the time. I want to learn about and be acquainted with the unfamiliar. Minorities are complex, and are as prepared as anyone else for 'an encounter with something radically other—a world distant in time or space,' as Ross characterizes classical music. It is depriving people of an opportunity for such encounters, not the performance of this music, that is paternalistic and élitist."

Photo: The Nike World Basketball Festival at Lincoln Center. "#JustDoIt," tweeted Lincoln Center's president and CEO.

A Herrmann moment

From a superb new recording of Bernard Herrmann's scores for The Man Who Knew Too Much and On Dangerous Ground, with William Stromberg conducting the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, on Intrada. "The Winter Walk" comes toward the end of the Dangerous Ground score, which heralds in many ways the hypnotic post-impressionism of Herrmann's masterpiece, Vertigo. As it happens, the RSNO made a glorious recording of that score back in 1996.

In praise of BIS

This week, Robert von Bahr, the founder and chief of the Swedish label BIS, announced that he had sold his company and its huge catalogue to Apple Music Classical. Setting aside my doubts about the latter entity, I want to take the opportunity to salute von Bahr's monumental contributions to the classical record business over the past fifty years. BIS is quite simply one of the finest labels that have ever existed. Far from merely replicating the standard repertory — though it offers magnificent documents thereof, from Masaaki Suzuki's Bach cantata survey to Osmo Vänskä's Beethoven cycle with the Minnesota Orchestra — BIS has vastly expanded listeners' horizons, particularly when it comes to twentieth- and twenty-first-century Nordic music. I think first and foremost of Neeme Järvi's traversal of the symphonies of Eduard Tubin, which stirred my teenaged soul when I encountered it in the mid-eighties. (As I've recounted often, the second movement of Tubin's Sixth was the theme music to my college-radio show, Music Since 1900. Like so many BIS recordings, it made a mighty, visceral sonic impact.) Surveys of Stenhammar, Leifs, Holmboe, and Sæverud also proved revelatory, not to mention crucial documentation of late-Soviet repertory, especially Schnittke and Gubaidulina. But the label's most titanic achievement was its 69-CD edition of the complete Sibelius, with the Lahti Symphony serving as the ensemble of choice. The Lahti cycle of the Sibelius symphonies, under Vänskä's direction, is, to my taste, the one that goes deepest into the composer's fathomless world. BIS has hardly lost energy in recent years: notable releases in 2022 and 2023 have included the staggering British pianist Paul Wee playing the Beethoven-Liszt "Eroica"; the Helsinki Chamber Choir singing Saariaho; and a Missy Mazzoli compilation titled Dark with Excessive Bright. I could go on for many more paragraphs. To cut it short: thank you, Robert von Bahr, for making our lives musically richer, even if, in the early days, we became financially poorer in the process. Who needs dinner when you can devour the chaotic early symphonies of Arvo Pärt?

Marsalis at the White House

The 2023 winners of the Praemium Imperiale, the Japanese arts prizes, were announced on Tuesday: Wynton Marsalis, for music; Diébédo Francis Kéré, for architecture; Robert Wilson, for theater; Vija Celmins, for painting; and Olafur Eliasson, for sculpture. Marsalis, Wilson, and Celmins were present for a ceremony in the East Wing of the White House, with Jill Biden hosting. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the chairperson of the American Nomination Committee (there are various nominating committees), presented the winners. I was honored to receive an invitation to attend. Although I grew up in Washington, DC, I'd only once been inside the White House, and not under such lofty circumstances. After the ceremony, Marsalis jammed with a jazz combo drawn from the élite U.S. Marine Band. The pianist, Christopher Schmitt, is a graduate of the New England Conservatory and Juilliard; you can also catch him playing Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time.

Travis & Emery discoveries

Whenever I'm in London, I drop by the legendary music shop Travis & Emery, on the historic secondhand-bookstore block of Cecil Court. Over the years I've picked up all manner of interesting books and scores there, including items signed by Charles Groves, Alan Civil, Anthony Milner, and Howard Ferguson. The discovery I made on my last visit trumps all others. It's a signed copy of A Virgil Thomson Reader, sent to my incomparable predecessor Andrew Porter, at The New Yorker. Andrew saved the mailing label and tucked it into the book. This will be by my desk for the indefinite future.

Last Night of the Proms

Sibelius Hall, Lahti

Lahti

I am in Lahti, Finland, to give a talk at the Lahti Symphony's Sibelius Festival. I've been wanting to visit since I encountered Osmo Vänskä's revelatory BIS recordings with this orchestra in the early nineties — the original version of the Violin Concerto, the complete Tempest music, the first installments of what turned out to be a near-definitive cycle of the symphonies. I covered a Lahti chamber-ensemble concert for the New York Times in 1994 and later heard the full orchestra twice at Avery Fisher Hall. That a city with a population of under 120,000 has produced an orchestra of such quality is fairly stupendous. My topic here is "Sibelius in America," with emphasis on the somewhat extreme Nordic-he-man rhetoric of early supporters like Henry Taylor Parker, Olin Downes, and Lucien Price. Opposing that strain will be the cosmopolitan fandom of Morton Feldman, who, in a lecture at Darmstadt in 1984, famously prefaced a vocalization of the Fifth Symphony's swan theme with the remark: "The people who you think are radicals might really be conservatives. The people who you think are conservative might really be radical."

Nightafternight playlist

New and recent releases of interest.

Monteverdi, Vespro della beata Vergine; Renaud Brès, Emiliano Gonzalez Toro, Céline Scheen, Adrien Mabire, Perrine Devillers, Zachary Wilder, Marouan Mankar-Bennis, Antonin Rondepierre, Pierre Gallon, Raphaël Pichon leading the Ensemble Pygmalion (Harmonia Mundi)

Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 5, Schulhoff, Five Pieces for String Quartet (orch. Manfred Honeck and Tomáš Ille); Honeck conducting the Pittsburgh Symphony (Reference)

George Walker, Sinfonias Nos. 1-5; Gianandrea Noseda conducting the National Symphony, with Shana Oshiro, DeMarcus Bolds, Daniel J. Smith, V Savoy McIlwain, and Kevin Thompson (National Symphony)

It Floats Away from You: works of Alexandre Lunsqui, Beth Wiemann, Li Qi, Lei Liang, Vid Smooke, Jeffrey Gavett, Christian Carey, and Chris Cresswell; Byrne:Kozar:Duo (New Focus)

Il concerto segreto; works of Luzzasco Luzzaschi and Francesca Caccini; La Néréide (Ricercar)

Franck, Hulda; Jennifer Holloway, François Rougier, Véronique Gens, Ludivine Gombert, Matthieu Lécroart, Christian Helmer, Marie Gautrot, Artavazd Sargsyan, Edgaras Montvidas, Judith van Wanroij, Sébastien Droy, Guilhem Worms, Matthieu Toulouse, Gergely Madaras conducting the Chœur de Chambre de Namur and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Liège (Bru Zane)

Nørgård, Three Nocturnal Movements, Symphony No. 8, Lysning; John Storgårds conducting the Bergen Philharmonic (BIS)

Liszt

The Greatest Showman. The New Yorker, Sept. 11, 2023.

Dream mattress

A Reinhard Febel moment

Reinhard Febel · slumberland

I recently revisited a 1988 Wergo disc devoted to the now seventy-one-year-old German composer Reinhard Febel, who emerged in the nineteen-eighties as the practitioner of a quizzical, deconstructive approach to traditional musical materials — a mode of composing "with" rather than "in" tonality, he called it. At the time, I was particularly fascinated by his vocal-orchestral piece Das Unendliche, which I featured on my college radio show, Music Since 1900. Wanting to catch up on what Febel has been doing lately, I found Slumberland, premiered in 2019. It's in quite a different vein from Febel's quasi-tonal early works. The dominant texture is one of pointillistic clouds of piano sound — six pianos are the core of the ensemble — from which more defined figures gradually emerge. The title is taken from Winsor McCay’s comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, which ran in the New York Herald from 1905 to 1911, although the composer also had in mind the venerable Berlin bar of the same name, over which he happens to live. Score and notes can be found here here. Also of note: the 2007 orchestral piece Berceuse avec cauchemar, which meditates ominously on the Chopin Berceuse.

Notes on the Wagner Group

Photo: Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times.

A Cultural Comment at the New Yorker website.

Revisiting Olin Downes

Continuing to catch up on recent issues of American Music, I read with great interest Carol A. Hess's article "'If That Be Treason, Let Them Make the Most of It!': Olin Downes, the Spanish Civil War, and Civil Liberties," in the Summer 2022 issue. Downes, the chief critic of the New York Times from 1924 until his death in 1955, is not generally seen as one of the titans of the profession: he lacked the stiletto-sharp style of Virgil Thomson, his chief rival, and his judgments on contemporary composers bordered on the philistine. In my book The Rest Is Noise I had a certain amount of fun at his expense, noting how his worshipful attitude toward Sibelius may actually have facilitated that composer's creative block, particularly when Downes was badgering the composer to finish his Eighth Symphony. In one letter, Downes sent along urgings from his mother, who said that Sibelius must move on from the Eighth to write a Ninth equaling Beethoven's.

There is, however, much to be said in Downes's favor. At a time of rising snobbery, elitism, and high-mindedness in classical-music discourse, he was an unabashed populist, speaking for the "common man." He was a vigorous opponent of the "No Applause Rule," arguing that audiences should applaud whenever they felt like it. And — this is the core of Hess's research — he was a formidable voice on the American left, organizing fundraisers and speaking at meetings. As the Cold War stoked repressive measures against leftist artists, Downes spoke up in the pages of the Times. In 1947, he protested the deportation of Hanns Eisler, and the following year, in an essay titled "Composing by Fiat," he gave a prickly response to reports of Zhdanov-era persecution of composers in the Soviet Union, observing that political oppression was also taking place on American soil, notably in Hollywood. He wrote: "Great nations, including our own, do lip-service to democracy while clearly showing that they do not believe in democracy at all, but only in power politics and force." Hess has uncovered correspondence and memos revealing tensions between Downes and Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who, to his credit, ultimately supported his critic's independence. Hess concludes:

In often timid times, Downes took risks. As a result he suffered financial loss, endured the hassle of mindless paperwork and interrogation, and was the object of both hyperbole and downright falsehood. With his fundraising (which often yielded large sums of money) and his stature as an orator, Downes effectively lived a double life, balancing his career in music with activism. He walked a similar tightrope in explaining himself to Sulzberger, whom he seems ultimately to have respected, whatever their differences of principle, rhetoric, and tone.

To compare Downes and Thomson is an interesting exercise. The latter cannily shifted with the political tides, switching from New Deal-ish writings in the thirties to a sterner, anti-populist line after 1945. He spoke unswervingly for an élite musical community and mocked crowd-pleasing musicians such as Toscanini, Heifetz, and Horowitz. Downes, it might be said, was a lesser critic but a better musical citizen.

Image from the Oregon Historical Society.

A Catherine Lamb moment

The price of Price

In "Capitalism and the Future of American Classical Music Scholarship," an article for the Winter 2022 issue of American Music, musicologist Douglas Shadle writes about the challenges of performing Florence Price's music in the wake of an acquisition of her work by the firm of G. Schirmer:

According to my understanding of current U.S. copyright law, Price’s unpublished manuscripts will enter the public domain in January 2024. At the time of the acquisition, Schirmer therefore had five years to extract as much profit as possible from the Price catalog before others could freely pursue their own projects. Indeed, the cost of renting Price’s orchestral works is prohibitively expensive for smaller organizations, thus limiting its accessibility despite the promise of global availability. In October 2021, a staff member at a moderately sized orchestra in the South publicly disclosed that the rental fee for Price’s piano concerto cost the ensemble $2,200, or over $100 per minute of this relatively brief work. A standard rental agreement obliges the orchestra to return the scores and parts without keeping a copy with bowings and other interpretive markings in the orchestra’s library for future use. Schirmer also charges a per-measure fee for music examples published in books or journals, as is their right. Yet the fee dissuades analytical scholarship in the near term since it will no longer be necessary for writers who can create their own examples from the unpublished manuscripts after 2023.

Shadle talks more about these issues on Will Robin's Sound Expertise podcast. Also worth heeding is Mary Jane Leach's commentary on tensions surrounding the performance and discussion of Julius Eastman. In both cases, there's a troubling tendency toward opportunism, as various parties rush either to profit off the work or to make an exclusive claim on it.

The end of Mostly Mozart

Requiem for a Festival. The New Yorker, Aug. 28, 2023.