The Memory Palace
May 10, 2012
When I was in eighth grade, our civics teacher informed us that we were responsible for memorizing all the departments of the Cabinet of the U.S. President and the names of the then-current holders of each office. We all groaned, at least inwardly, at the news. But then he proceeded to give us a whole series of utterly silly ways of remembering the entire list. My sense of the appropriate revolted at the outrageous images he used. But, to this day, I still remember almost all of that Administration’s secretaries of this or that.
I have been vaguely, but only vaguely, aware of the tradition of the memory palace, whereby what to most moderns appear to be great feats of memory are methodically — and even easily — mastered by use of spacial memory. The celebrated example of the 16th-century Jesuit Matteo Ricci, who used the same method whereby Cicero had memorized his orations to teach the Chinese about Christianity had a certain amount of recent currency because of a popular book published in 1983. But I had never considered pursuing the general methods of memorizing by means of spacial visualization until now.
The reason for my change of mind is this TED Talk, one of the most stimulating of the many I have watched. I highly recommend it.
A New, Nonprofit Record Label
May 10, 2012
Their own opening statement tells the remarkable story:
Odradek Records is not just a new record label. Odradek Records is the first wedge of a larger project, proposing a new way to produce and enjoy classical music. We think that the current model undermines the true essence and significance of music. We think that a model centered on just a few big names, the great concert halls, a limited repertoire that is necessarily restricted by the bonds of popularity a model that makes its selection of new young performers from the anti-musical system of competitions, the success of which is often obtained through extravagant histrionics rather than the correctness or subtlety of interpretation and finally, a model that is subject to the exploitation of the marketplace, and which obliges the majority of musicians to pay enormous sums to record CDs, for which the profits then go largely to the record company, thus depriving many very worthy but not wealthy musicians from the possibility of recording is not only a model that is far from art, but is a model that even itself is in crisis. Ideally, music just as other primary goods, should not fall subject to the markets. We know that in a strict sense, this is utopian, but it is precisely this tension towards an unreachable utopia that guides our project.Odradek Records is a non-profit seeking label. Once production and distribution expenses are recuperated, all of our proceeds go directly to the artist.
Odradek Records selects its artists solely through the criterion of utmost quality of the recording and the interest of the proposed program. We don’t want to exclude, but rather include: we are not interested if you have won important competitions or not, neither if you have performed in important halls or signed with major labels. We are not interested in your age or where you come from. The only thing that interests us is whether you play your instrument to a very high and professional level. With us you can record Chopin, but you can also record: Berio, Scelsi, Copland, Carter, Webern, Schönberg, Ligeti, Kurtag, Ives, and many others.
The first four releases flesh out exactly what they mean by all that.
Light Music
May 7, 2012
With the Titanic centenary still resounding, now comes the 75th anniversary of the Hindenburg disaster. Did you know that it was furnished with a piano made of aluminum and pigskin?
Art and Hype
May 3, 2012
I’m frequently in conversations with musicians — composers or performers — who bemoan the subordinate role that ability and quality of output may often play in their success or obscurity. It’s not only having a industrious and cunning publicist that makes the difference; it can be just one work that catches the imagination of the media or public and propels a career.
The whole subject has been on my mind since the news that The Scream by Edvard Munch sold for an astounding $120 million last night. Whatever determined that price, it was not the artistic quality of the work. As Clyde Haberman says, “If you’ve never seen a tacky facsimile of it, there’s a chance that you have also never seen a coffee mug, a T-shirt or a Macaulay Culkin poster.” If they weren’t paying for art, what were the buyers shelling out all that money for? An economist nails it: “Whatever was being bought, here, it wasn’t really art, in any pure sense. It was more the result of a century’s worth of marketing and hype.”
It’s not only in Hollywood or Washington that name-recognition rules.
Bellissimo Canto
May 2, 2012
Abraham Bloemaert: A Shepherdess Reading a Sonnet
When people think of opera, they often think too exclusively of huge orchestral sound above which massive vocal equipment is required even to be heard — a need to employ a term Luciano Pavarotti used to characterize his own art: “controlled screaming.” Who among us has not thrilled to some of that? But it’s refreshing to hear the kind of equally passionate expression that some of the early creators of opera were able to enable in smaller spaces, with quiet instruments, employing a varied palate and dynamic range, but a more personal intimate one. Herewith one of the greatest songs ever written, from 1601:
Amarilli, mia bella,
Non credi, o del mio cor dolce desio,
D’esser tu l’amor mio?
Credilo pur: e se timor t’assale,
Prendi questo mio strale.
Aprimi il petto e vedrai scritto in core:
Amarilli, Amarilli, Amarilli
è il mio amore.
Amaryllis, my lovely one,
Do you not believe, O my heart’s sweet desire,
That you are my love?
Believe it thus: and if fear assails you,
Doubt not its truth.
Take this arrow of mine.
Open my breast and see written on my heart:
Amaryllis, Amaryllis, Amaryllis,
Is my beloved.
The Mattila Case
April 28, 2012
Whether you admire the music or not (and I do) and whether you like her voice or not (and I do), you owe it to yourself to see Karita Mattila in The Makropulos Case at the Met. Rarely can anyone have owned that stage the way she did at tonight’s opening. There are four remaining performances.
4′ 33″
April 26, 2012
Maverick Concert Hall, Woodstock, New York
As long as I can remember, I’ve heard lots of sniggering over John Cage’s composition of that name. People often assume that it’s, at best, a joke or, at worst, an imposture. Not everyone is convinced by the composer’s explanation that, even in the most silent public space, there is going to be noise and that the truly sensitive listener should learn to be aware of all of it. If that noise is only the sounds of respiration or seat-creaking or the subway going by, it may take an exceptional person to find them rewarding.
But look at the photograph above. That‘s where the premiere of 4’33” took place in a summer night surrounded by the sounds of nature. Now can we agree that Cage may have had a point?
My Favorite Easter Organ Work
April 10, 2012
Luca Signorelli, RESURRECTION OF THE BODY, Chapel of San Brizio, Duomo, Orvieto, 1499-1502
Oliver Messiaen’s “Joie et clarté des corps glorieux” (Joy and Light of the Glorious Bodies) is from his Les Corps glorieux: Sept Visions brèves de la vie des ressuscités (The Glorious Bodies: Seven Brief Visions of the Life of the Resurrected). He explained what the music portrays with a verse of scripture: “Then shall the righteous shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.”
The entire suite was completed in August of 1939 and was his last composition before his imprisonment by the Nazis, which suffices to explain its delayed premiere. While Messiaen always spoke of the organ at La Trinité as his “laboratoire,” he gave the first public performance of this movement in a recital at Paris’s Palais de Chaillot at the end of December 1941, and the premiere of the complete suite did not take place until November of 1943, in the same hall.
Messiaen was ready with an answer to those who often bitterly criticized him for the apparently profane nature of his music. It was felt to be over-dramatic, too sensuous, impure. In a conversation with Antoine Goléa the composer defended himself vehemently:
Those people who reproach me do not know the dogma and know even less about the sacred books… They expect from me a charming, sweet music, vaguely mystical and above all soporific. As an organist I have been able to note the set texts for the liturgy… Do you think that psalms, for example, speak of sweet and sugary things? A psalm groans, howls, bellows, beseeches, exults, and rejoices in turn.
This performance, though on an instrument that is not at all of the same character as that of Messiaen, is a successful one:
RogerEvansOnline.com 