books

inside early music
(oxford university press)

"Excellent . . .a great achievement." -The Times Literary Supplement

"I can't imagine a better book of its kind... readers will profit greatly, and they are addressed considerately and without condescension." - Richard Taruskin

performing brahms
(cambridge university press)
Winner, Association for Recorded Sound Collections "Award for Excellence: Best Research in Recorded Classical Music"

"As all-embracing as you could imagine...I predict [it] will never be surpassed or superseded." - Sir Charles Mackerras

''[encourages] interpretive freedom...One of [the book's] virtues lies in its variety of perspectives...[collated] into a satisfying whole." - Roger Moseley. Journal of the Royal Musical Association

notable on the web

MUSIC

NEW March 2010: That article from last November - on the state of period-instrument Brahms, for Diapason France - I finally have an English-language version up, at this link. ["Mûrissements d'époque" and "Brahms et le cor" - were published in the October issue of Diapason France (Diapason, Octobre 2009, pp. 34 - 37. This is the first of the two. The second appears in triply-expanded form in Early Music America, Spring 2010, as "Brahms, the Horn, and History")]

NEW March 2010: Andras Schiff's ECM recording of the Goldberg Variations (2003): glorious performance, amazingly recorded live. And how cool is it to get Vikram Seth to write an acrostic verse (in rhyming couplets) for the booklet? Reason by itself to buy the CD. I'll churlishly but sheepishly note that Seth mixes up "Goldberg" and "Keyserlingk" ("How could I, like poor Goldberg, hope to sleep? / I laugh, surprised by pleasure, and I weep"). It does not detract in the least from the awesomeness of Seth, and the coup of having him in the liner notes. And for all his playfulness, Seth homes in on one key to Schiff's genius: "Dear Andras, in your natural art, one thing/ Rings through the varied air - the urge to sing." Exactly; you hear it immediately; every voice sings. Also, Schiff writes a fine essay, which casts the necessary doubt on the Goldberg/ Keyserlingk anecdote. Still, he says, Se non è vero, è ben trovato - loosely, if it's not true, it's a damn good story.

NEW February 2010: From the Top did a show in Iowa City; for some reason they interviewed me to get a laugh line. Apparently it worked: listen in to the May 31 broadcast.

NEW February 2010: Bruno Walter did not like modern flutes, and he did not like the power of postwar clarinet playing. Martin Mayer, in 1960, quotes him: "Think what the flute has gained up top of the range," he says, "but it has lost its beauty. Jean Paul wrote of 'the moonshine of the flute.' Who would now say, 'the moonshine of the flute"? [The flutes of Walter's early career in Germany and Austria were still made of wood; German flutists resisted metal flutes and the Boehm key system precisely because the French had adopted them].... As for the playing: "That is just a gentle clarinet," he said [of a clarinet solo in the Schumann Piano Concerto]. "But today they all play trumpet." Quoted in the excellent biography, Bruno Walter: A World Elsewhere, by Erik Ryding and Rebecca Pechefsky, p. 404.

NEW February 2010: My article "Brahms, the Horn, and History" is coming out in this month's Early Music America. I was interviewed [at this link] about the topic by Jonathan Ahl on Iowa Public Radio's "Talk at 10"

(November 2009): My articles on Brahms and period instruments - "Mûrissements d'époque" and "Brahms et le cor" - were published in the October issue of Diapason France (Diapason, Octobre 2009, pp. 34 - 37). A note said that the original English text would be posted at this Web site, with footnotes. It was, but no longer is. Let me just say that I am stunned by the beauty of the graphic design of the magazine; would it be Chantal Vilaire who is responsible? Many thanks also to Gaetan Nalleau, the editor who asked me to write the piece. I am honored to be there! And to Nicolas Southon for his excellent translation.

April 2009: Good Times for Big Think What happened in music in the 20th Century? To have any idea, it helps to be in the 21st. And to be very smart. Consider: Alex Ross's masterful The Rest Is Noise, which has changed how we think about classical music's 20th C. Here are two other carefully researched, intellectually daring reconsiderations, both released in 2009.
1) Elijah Wald's history of what actually happened in American pop music in the 20th Century (misleadingly titled "How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll") - I endorse the review in the New York Times book review and recommend the book highly.
2) Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's book on what actually happened in 20th-century classical music performance: The Changing Sound of Music: He's brought research methodology to new levels of accuracy, and is intellectually fearless and original. And his book is available free online at http://www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/studies/chapters/intro.html

NEW: February 15, 2009 - My interview with Stephen Paulus and Michael Dennis Browne, the composer and librettist of a new oratorio-meditation on the Shoah, To Be Certain of the Dawn. A group of Iowa community choruses are coming together to perform it (twice) with the SE Iowa Symphony Orchestra, led by Jamie Spillane, the director of choruses at Iowa Wesleyan. They are performing it today at Indian Hills in Ottumwa at 3 PM. Here are some interview clips: (1) First, I asked Michael Dennis Browne about the origins of the work. He said it was commissioned by his family priest in St. Paul, Minnesota, Father Michael O'Connell, for the following reasons (2) I asked Browne how he and Paulus approached such a project once it was commissioned, (3) I asked Paulus and Browne about the work's multimedia use of photos.

NEW: January 24th, 2009 - This Is How People Listen to Classical Radio - in terms not of the "importance" of the piece, but of the emotional effect. Kudos to Greg Sandow for being able to put himself in the ear-space of a listener. This is how it's heard. I also appreciate that my failure to program high-dissonance modernism could be seen not as a lack of responsibility, but a quest for "a fuller view of life than screams alone can give." I also appreciated the comments by radio professional William Lang. Like him, I'm constantly looking for new music that will not drive listeners away. Observation: such music is far more likely to come from West of the Atlantic than East, probably for reasons involving funding and peer pressure.

NEW: January 14th, 2009 - You have been reading Greg's five-part posts on where Classical Music is in 2009, right? Read it: http://www.artsjournal.com/sandow/ RE: post 1: I wrote the following comment to Greg: "Just a loose thought about yet another possible reason why the [classical-music] audience has aged [over the last half of the 20th c, relative to the population as a whole - Greg demonstrates it carefully and has some excellent ideas on why. I suggested adding one:} "(1) music became more and more a marker of group membership - it had been that for centuries, but became more so; (2) people had increasing numbers of options about which group to become a member of: more mobility; (3) crucially- "the young" increasingly became a group you could identify yourself as a member of. Having one's own music (to mark off "us," the young, from "them," the old) became increasingly important (4) having lots of different "musics" to choose among became increasingly possible (recording being a big part of this? And prosperity/leisure?)...... None of this is to replace anything you [Greg] said - it'd be just one more element."

January 14th, 2009 - Instructions for Puck: - oxytocin for Helena and Hermia; vasopressin for Lysander and Demetrius. [re "Anti-love drug may be ticket to bliss" - John Tierney's angle, in the New York Times]

December - So... year-end roundup time. Entry #1: the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in music, David Lang's The Little Matchgirl Passion. Beautiful. The committee is no longer in an uptown ivory tower. It's also telling that no CD is out - the piece was distributed free online here. No waiting. The age of Youtube.

December - Entry # 2 Newspapers are dying and music-critic gigs disappearing, but I'm struck by how good the critics in the USA are in 2008. Having Anne Midgette on the staff of the WaPo is a prime example.

November - I gotta get back into this - haven't touched this site since April. Wanna think about 2 things: (1) why we like the music we like; (2) the question of music affecting life/personality/behavior. The latter strikes me as politically fraught, complex, nuanced, easy to get wrong. But it's what jumped out about me in this story from NPR. (3) Felix Mendelssohn. Strongly recommended background reading: Deborah Hertz's brilliant How Jews Became Germans.

April: Officer, he had a strong jaw, slight underbite, and furrowed brow: Forensic anthropologist Carolyn Wilkinson reconstructs the wigless head of J. S. Bach from a cast of his skull and other evidence. How he might have looked when he was not in full dress and you had just hired him to play for a wedding. - March, 2008

It's scientifically designed to be the most unpopular song ever written. Naturally, I love it. Especially the rapping opera singer - April 2008

Clap Your Hands Say Bravo! The above reminds me of a previous question about whether It's OK to Applaud between movements at a classical concert. The proscription against that sure chimed with the proscription against "histrionics." Anyway, I hold with those who say Express yourself! See: Alex's short essay and Greg's post .

. Essential: the 2nd edition of Lydia Goehr's The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (published in 2007). Our core sense of what music IS (at least for classical fans) turns out to be about 200 years old.

Why not just give Alex Ross his Pulitzer right now and be done with it? (for The Rest Is Noise.) So I wrote in October. I'm delighted that the NY Times has since put it on its "10 Best Books of 2007" list and that the Washingon Post, LA Times, Economist, Time, Newsweek, and Slate put it on their best-of-year lists. His writing has by itself improved the future of music.- Jan 1, 2008

. The tone of moral outrage sounds Leon-Wieseltierian, and he bullies the defenseless, but Richard Taruskin on the state of classical music is not to be missed. (Much more essential, though, is his Oxford History of Western Music. There he had to seek the tone of the balanced observer - although his difficulties with that role are part of what make the book so utterly compelling.)- Nov. 2007

 

Recordings on my mind these days: here

 

.  some notable online radio/ lecture sources: NPR's Planet Money often succeeds in making the arcane intuitive. authors@google - amazing series of invited lectures at the corporate campus. Thinking Allowed with Laurie Taylor on the BBC - great title, eh? Great show, too; listen online. WGBH's "Forum" trove -huge collection of lectures and interviews from the Boston area. bloggingheads.tv - political argument on a higher level than the Sunday talk shows. Thoughtcast with Jenny Attiyeh - master interviewer at work.

. recordings I liked at the time (been a long while since i updated this)-

. Why do people still record Bach's Goldberg Variations ? Because they are Zhu Xiao-Mei, that's why: http://www.amazon.com/J-S-Bach-Variations-Goldberg/dp/B001IL0PDM/ref=pd_rhf_p_t_4 .

. Why do people still record Bach's solo cello suites? Because they are Jean-Guihen Queyras, that's why. (I also love Bylsma - both of his - and Yo-Yo Ma, especially the first time around. I'd like to hear Isserlis if I were a rich man, but Hyperion charges $50. For now Queras is my go-to recording.)
Why? I want performances of these suites to live. I admire Taruskin's famous review of the pioneering Casals recording: Casals was striving to make them heroic and marmoreal - Bach from the age of Wagner. Anner Bylsma was going for a radically different ideal - rooting them in Baroque dances the style of Baroque lute improvisers.Queyras? He's one of those young artists who has all of history before him (he actually studied with Bylsma); but he's moved beyond the oppositions and examples and has made the music his own. He uses a modern cello, but you might not be able to tell. So natural while being so informed. Glorious, too, to hear such cello playing - intonation, tone, bowing.

. I love The Shins. I like the way James Mercer's lyrics play with cliches - evoking them then subverting them. (E.g., in Saint Simon, "Mercy's eyes are blue [evoking cliche, but then.... ]/ when she places them in front of you [were you expecting that image?]/ Nothing holds a Roman candle to ["Roman" transforms the "holds a candle to" cliche, making it resonate with the song] etc... ) I like how the music works with the words - sometimes by opposition. (Try A Comet Appears - the line "let's carve my aging face off/ fetch us a knife/ start with the eyes/ till all that's left is a grimacing smile "- such a violent image, such tender music. And the two adjectives earn their keep; the verbs, like "carve" and "fetch," do more of the work. As they should.) I like how he undermines the potential repetiveness of the strophic song by meaningfully varying the returns [Australia: "damned to be one of us, girl/ faced with the dodo's conundrum/ i felt like I could just fly/ but nothing happened every time I tried" --- later in the song becomes "dare to be one us, girl/ facing the android's conundrum/ i felt like I should just cry/ but nothing happens every time I take one on the chin..." - with a beautiful, surprising new harmony at "take one on the chin..".]
I like his control of metaphor (in the same song - Australia - early on, the line "keep your wick in the air and your feet in the fetters" is a striking set of verbal sounds, but seems obscure; but much later in the song it connects to "you don't know how long I've been/ watching the lantern dim/ starved of oxygen..." And the last line: "so give me your hand and we'll jump out the window.." -- that chimes with the dodo's conundrum, maybe?) Above all the music... the man has always been known for his ability to write a hook, and his music is inventive way after the hook. Australia uses a polka rhythm, begins with a hook full of syncopation, and then has the melody start in the same non-tonic harmony that the hook reached up to. Similar invention right through to the end. Here's an interview with Mercer on the craft of songwriting: http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/40237-interview-the-shins My top-10 Shins list, in alphabetical order: Australia; A Comet Appears; Kissing the Lipless; New Slang; The Past and Pending; Phantom Limb; Pink Bullets; Saint Simon; Sleeping Lessons; Those to Come.

. I love Ravel. I'm into his piano trio anrd piano concertos (notably, Krystian Zimerman). On Youtube you can watch the Beaux Arts Trio playing this Trio and Leon Fleisher play the Left-hand Concerto and Martha Argerich play the G Major! And Rattle/Berlin in La Valse ! - a You Tube not to be missed.

. Isabelle Georges and the Sirba Octet, Du Shtetl a New York, a joy. Check this Youtube out: Bei mir bist du scheyn.

. Barenboim on Beethoven - a 6-DVD set from EMI, On Discs 5 and 6 Barenboim gives masterclasses to young pianists, including Alessio Bax, Jonathan Biss, and Lang Lang. Sample this Youtube excerpt. E.g., the part about a piano crescendoing on a single note.

. Sufjan Stevens's Bring on Da Illinoise is quite something. So is Coltrane's A Love Supreme.

. Ludwig won't roll over: In fact, he's never had it better. Yes, I love golden-agers like Schnabel, Arrau, Kempff, Adolf Busch and co., Klemperer, Furtwaengler, Annie Fischer, Ernst von Dohnanyi, the Quartetto Italiano, etc. But not the lead-age concept that nobody can play it like they used to, and that younger artists all sound so cookie-cutter. My view: so many of my fellow oxygen-consuming types devote so much of their lives to this music that we shdn't be surprised that some of their playing is from the top. Examples: Mitsuko Uchida's op. 101; Andras Schiff's Op. 109; Garrick Ohlsson's op. 2 no 3; Paul Lewis's Op. 10 no 2; Jonathan Biss in op. 13; Peter Serkin in op. 27 no 1; the Takacs quartet cycle; the Vanska symphony cycle; Angela Hewitt's Op. 7 and her cellos sonatas with Daniel Muller-Schott;; .... more to come as I think of them. [BTW, I oppose Vanska's extreme literalism in principle, but the results shut me up.]

As of April 2008 I was excited about: Stephen Hough playing Chopin Ballades and Scherzos on Hyperion; in fact, anything by Stephen Hough, come to think of it; Trevor Pinnock's return to the Brandenburgs on Avie; Peter Watchorn's WTC book 1 on his own Musica Omnia label; Rene Jacobs in Don Giovanni on Harmonia mundi; Marc-Andre Hamelin's Haydn sonatas on Hyperion: the the the Shahams playing Prokofiev on their own label; Yevgeni Sudbin playing Scarlatti; Hausmusik playing Mendelssohn; Pierre Hantai playing Scarlatti. [I'll update this one of these days.]

Handelian bliss, part 1: Andrew Manze and the Academy of Ancient Music's recording of Handel's Op. 6 concertos - and btw, this opus is not just another set of Baroque concertos, but a cornucopia of invention (some of which is plagiarized, but who cares?) And this is not just another recording. Try the effortlessly overdotted rhythms at the beginning of op. 6 no 10; you can hear how to these players this style has become a natural language. And try the unhurried Allegro Moderato in the same concerto - the vitality comes from within, not from mindless briskness, and the performance makes you feel the music's almost childlike delight. The group plays with tons of character throughout. And you can download it.

Handelian bliss, part 2: Don't hold Gramophone's enthusiasm against it: the Messiah by the Dunedin Consort and John Butt really is inspired. Ideal for those who've heard the thing way too often and don't care if they ever hear it again (because it's the first attempt to record the Dublin premiere version, and it makes the "small-chorus" ideal so intimate); just as ideal for someone coming to it for the first time.

.If you like the idea of Ira Gershwin and Kurt Weill performing "The Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria" et al., you gotta hear them. Available at emusic.com and on a CD, "Tryout." (Also: don't miss their musical/ operetta Lady in the Dark.)

. I love Ben Folds. If Sasha Frere-Jones hates it, it's probably for me.Contrary to John McWhorter, of whom I'm a big fan, there is a kind of verbal intelligence available in the pop world even now. More on this later.

. Nigunim by Frank London, Lorin Sklamberg, and Uri Caine - moving, beautifu, (Thank you, LK.). Even though I don't romanticize the Chassidim as they seem to. Also: Srul Irving Glick's A Night at Heaven's Gate And, in a different vein, the Klezmatic's Woody Guthrie CDs.

. I love Rene Jacobs in Haydn's symphonies 91 & 92 on Harmonia mundi - check out 92's opening . What is more beautiful than a string section playing superbly and perfectly in tune? - Which brings us to....

. ...another exclusive! - sample Simon Rattle and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in the Brahms Tragic Overture. Rattle, who's often dissed as superficial, proves otherwise. I've heard other conductors project these inner voices but make them sound like too-precious detail. Here they are meaningful - and moving. Beautiful phrasing. (also: the strings in Rattle's new Berlin Mahler 9th on EMI. Phew!)

. Eric Ewazen's Down a River of Time is heartfelt. I like so much of what I hear from this unabashedly neo-romantic composer.

. When old means new: the Debussy release from Andante.com (early recordings, e.g., Coppola's La mer) . And at emusic, Sibelius bud Robert Kajanus conducting the Sibelius Fifth. Kajanus and Coppola bring a lightness, volatility and spontaneity to the music that would be hard to regain once the works became Classics.

. Mozart - Benjamin Britten and Sviatoslav Richter playing the first movement of the duo sonata in C, K. 521 (iTunes) strikes me as a mind-blowing synthesis of imagination, finesse, and wild energy. The musical equivalent of the right stage of hypomania. And Rene Jacob's recordings of Mozart's Don Giovanni (at youtube, here's a documentary), and Figaro and Cosi - no "hypo" to this mania!

. What's on my iTunes? Aside from the above?: Ray Charles, I Don't Need No Doctor; Martha and the Vandellas, Jimmy Mack (the stereo version), Miriam Makeba's The Click Song, Mahler Adagietto by Bruno Walter with the New York Phil,. (and his Mahler Fourth from Vienna in 1955, from the Andante set); Paul Robeson (anything I can get my hands on, but above all Balm in Gilead); Louis Jordan (Look out, sister, look out!); Neal Young's Harvest Moon; Death Cab for Cutie's Plans; Joni Mitchell's Hejira, Paul Simon's Only Living Boy in New York City; and lots of Handel and Bach (two opposites, really). And a lot of Bob Dylan (notably Blood on the Tracks, and John Wesley Harding, and Modern Times, and odd songs like Isis, and Tears of Rage, and Visions of Johanna, and It's All Over Now Baby Blue and and...) and of the Beatles.

.  Some Blogs I Like:
I) Music:
. Alex Ross (www.therestisnoise.com)
. Greg Sandow (www.artsjournal.com/Sandow)
. Dial "M" for musicology (http://musicology.typepad.com/dialm/)
. Think Denk (http://jeremydenk.net/blog/)
. http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/
. http://www.gfhandel.org/