Schlagobers

Have I told you how often my thoughts turn to opening a Viennese café?

There is something so distinctive about it. You can see glimpses of that culture here, in the fact that people are never asked to leave, that one can sit for hours. But here, there is a lack of sophistication, and an emphasis on the product, the volume of coffee, the size of the scone.

More importantly, no one ever brings you water. No one should ever drink an espresso without water to chase it.

Here, no one seems to care that, all too often, the espresso is too hot, and with a thin crema. And they don't care because they don't know. And then you go to Europe, and it's nearly impossible to be given a bad coffee, and North Americans travel there, and they think to themselves, "Wow, this coffee is fantastic, I wish we could have something like that over in Canada."

And they stop. They stop thinking right there.

I think most North Americans think to themselves that what happens in Europe stays in Europe, even though our consumer culture, and especially our politicians, tell them otherwise. They tell them that the world is their oyster, ready to be shucked.

But bafflingly, instead of asking for a nice rich crema, where, when you gently place sugar upon it, it holds the sweetness there, just for a few seconds, before yielding to let the sugar sink into the darkness, they are handed bitter brown water in a paper cup, and told that this is their coffee, their national heritage, their patrimoine.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, did I mention I would only serve Viennese-style coffee in the Viennese café, which means no giant paper cups filled with nice-smelling yet foul-tasting coffee? Have you ever noticed that this is the big thing here? That they make the coffee smell like heaven and taste like shit? A clever bit of misdirection.

Look, I can do the straight talk, the vulgarity which people confuse for honesty here, as I've grown up with it, but I don't want it, and I don't care for it, and I would rather tell people I won't serve them something in my Viennese café because that's the way they like it. Instead, they can learn to like it the way I do, because the way I like things happens is to found inside a tradition (the European one and also in many ways the Asian one) where cultivating the ability to make a nice coffee or arrange flowers, or tie and tie, are all seen as primary, and second to how much one paid to do, or the quantity of things they’ve bought. But these are just tired old points about the vulgarity of North American culture, utterly unscientific and needlessly pompous.

So I would like to open that Viennese café.

My café will have a selection of newspapers and good magazines on racks, and people will be encouraged to linger, although the real money will be made from all those people who don't, god bless them. But they will only be accommodated as an economic necessity, and nothing more.

So I would serve coffee only in the Viennese styles. Especially the one, which, for me and me alone, defines Viennese coffee culture — the Kaisermelange. It's coffee and a raw egg and brandy.

I would feature the Kaisermelange as the house specialty, and most would be grossed out, but those intrepid few who know a good strange thing when they see it, would embrace it. And I would rue the fact that one cannot serve liquor here in Ontario before 11, meaning no one could start their day here in Toronto with a Kaisermelange.

Again, why do we think ourselves to be so civilized?

By the way, when you’re in Vienna, you should try to check out Café Hawelka on Dorotheergasse 6, just off the Graben and behind the road of the hotel where I stayed in Vienna back in1994. The owner, Leopold Hawelka, opened it in 1939, and he's still there, supposedly!

You should have a coffee there if you can.

Many of the cafés in Vienna are expansive, cathedrals to the bitter elixir, but Hawelka is more intimate, darker, perhaps less inviting to tourists, but a refuge to locals. I would like that kind of quality, although I suspect the more open ones would be more popular here in Toronto.

What I don't want is the forced down-to-earth feeling of a Starbucks or Second Cup. I want a place that feels lived in despite being so young.

We would also have real classical musicians playing music there. No jazz. You can go anywhere to listen to jazz. You cannot go many places to listen to live performances of Haydn string quartets while sipping an Einspänner. However, this is completely inauthentic, and just something I'd like to have there.

And maybe I'll learn the cello again, and learn it well enough to play a part in those quartets myself!

It is hard to describe to you how real doing something like this seems to me now. But I'm just thinking out loud here, and have made no commitments to starting this venture.

Antoine Brumel

Tonight, while listening to my latest favourite radio station, the third starion of Hrvatska radiotelevizija, I discovered Antoine Brumel.

I consider myself an early music lover. Perhaps I would even call myself somewhat of an aficionado of this music. I have read Music in the Renaissance by Gustav Reese, as well as the more recent Renaissance Music: Music in Western Europe, 1400-1600 by Allan Atlas, and yet, despite this, when this stunning music poured through my speakers, I was at a loss. As best as I could tell, I thought it was Thomas Tallis. It just had that kind of sound to it.

So I try to silence my toddler son who is jumping on a bed behind me, in the hopes that my rudimentary knowledge of Croatian will allow to find out who wrote this stunning piece. The fates smiled upon me, and I pierced the veil of unintelligibility long enough to determine that the piece I was listening to was an Agnus Dei by Antoine Brumel.

I've never heard of him.

So much for my self-proclaimed knowledge of the field. I suppose someone's going to want to confiscate my lute now...

Well, as any of us do these days when we know nothing but a rigid designator, or for your continental philosophy types, a name, I typed "Antoine Brumel" into google, and it delivered me right to his wikipedia entry.

Now, the big question - was what I was listening to in the Naxos Music Library? Could I pump this sweet, sweet aural liquor back into my system, to again bathe my senses in its rich broth?

Yes. It was there, in fact, it was the very recording I had been listening to on HRT, by the Tallis Scholars.

The mass I am listening to right now, the glorious, life giving bit of music, music everyone in the world should listen to, is the Missa Et ecce terrae motus, or Earthquake Mass.

Wikipedia also quickly reveals why I thought it was Tallis - the Earthquake Mass is for 12 voices, which was highly unusual for the time Brumel wrote it, if not outright unheard of. The richness reminded me of Tallis' famous Spem in alium, although the Tallis is 70 years younger, and as I listen now, it seems clearer, with the strangeness of the cadences, that we are not quite yet at the fulcrum that is Josquin, when things begin (I mean begin in the lightest possible way here) to turn towards the great aesthetic paradigm that emerged alongside probability, calculus and gravitational theory - western tonality, or the major/minor tonal system, or whatever you want to call it.

One day I will attempt to articulate in much greater detail what I mean by that, perhaps in an academic thesis, or perhaps here. Who knows.

But who cares about that. Enjoy the Brumel.

All Aboard!

Friends, I apologize for the lack of posting - a perfect storm of duties professional and personal has prevented me from doing much of anything. However, the clouds are gone and so there will something to read (I hestitate to say any of it will be worth reading) very soon!

In the meantime, as a finale to those Richter videos, take a look at this early short by - Orson Welles. And the Richter won't look so odd after this.

Friday Night Videos: Race Symphony

Another Richter - to those few regular readers, life....and the piano intrude. Things will be sporadic for a few more weeks, but hang tight, because there's plenty to come!

Friday Night Videos: Two Penny Magic

Another Richter (Hans that is):

van Karajanstein reads von Doderer III - On The Outskirts of the City

Our narrator, Georg von Geyrenhoff disappears in this chapter. Or maybe it's him - he's not nearly so interested in talking about himself.

Well...it seems like him, as he tells us the story of the beautiful young Emma Drobil and her suitor Dwight Williams. Except he seems to be in love with another woman, an older woman, a woman who has recently lost her leg.

Indeed, it's why he's in Vienna. Alas, the object of his desire is in Munich, so Ms. Drobil will have to do.

Mr. Williams is a lepidopterist. Emma is good with languages. And Mary, "the broken-open fruit", the object of Dwight's desires?

Dwight and Anna sit on a rock in the middle of a brook. They talk about things that aren't important, and they wonder what will happen. So do I.

***

"Morpho Menelaus" was the name of the creature; this Latin, or rather Greek name, together with the date and place of the find, was qwritten on a small label pasted on the bottom of the case...

Dwight took occasion to remark that to his mind not only this indescribably luxurious creature but all of creation in general was pure art pour l'art (a fact which lent it such nobility), at which statement Emma Drobil, a sensible hardheaded girl, looked at him with some amazement.

This is all about Emma and Dwight, and yet it's all really about Dwight and Mary. The Overture, which seemed so clear, so preperatory, has been follwed by an this trio movement, a scherzo fragment.

One begins to get a feel for Doderer's Vienna. Not the narrator's Vienna, but the author's. At least I think this is what's starting to come through. There is a pedantry to the narrator which leads one to believe it's our friend von Geyrenhoff, but it's too early to say much more, and so this entry, much like this chapter, must remain a an nfinished thought.

What do we do about these kinds of things? What do we do when we leave feeling as though no meaning has been conveyed?

We shall have to cross our fingers.

What To Do With Radio Two

When I started this new blog, I intended to explicitly avoid commenting on cultural matters as I had in the past.

However, as this blog takes its name from a well-known CBC radio program, the recent transformation of CBC Radio Two into something very different from the radio station I grew up listening to deserves some token comments.

Do not get me wrong- this is not going to be a wistful recollection of how wonderful it was to have a radio station that appeared to have been fashioned solely for my own personal enjoyment. This was a wonderful thing, but I’m happy to accept that things change.

Indeed, many of the comments to the change (mine included) can be boiled down to something along these lines – CBC Radio Two (or CBC FM as is used to be called) – “The music Radio Two had on was the music I liked, and now there’s less of it, so this is a bad decision.”

Well, no. That’s not really fair, because the usual, and in this case, plausible counter argument appears: “Well, why should we taxpayers be supporting just your tastes – shouldn’t a publicly funded broadcaster try to reach out to as many people as possible?” (Indeed, you can see this very conversation occurring over on the Globe and Mail’s website, where comments are being posted to their article on the CBC’s change.)

Well……yes. I really hate to admit this, because it goes against my own patently elitist, snobby, stuffy interests (all these descriptions are predicated of classical music) but this argument has some teeth. It isn’t plausible to argue that in its role as a public broadcaster, the CBC should cater to the tastes of only a particular category of music listener.

So in this sense, CBC Radio Two’s shift away from a primarily classical repertoire isn’t a bad thing. Indeed, if one looks at just how fundamental the genre is to the dissemination of music, it’s downright revolutionary, a vast extension of a program they have been toying with for years now. As a public broadcaster, they have little choice but to reflect the tastes of as many Canadians as possible.

My primary concern is that have almost entirely given up on leading or directing musical tastes. The problem with this is that it appears to follow from how we see music as an art form.

By way of contrast, consider the case of CBC's mainly talk radio station, Radio One. while I've endured more debates around the elitism of classical music than I care to admit, I've never heard anyone argues that this station, Radio One, is elitist or snobbish. A show like Ideas has no problem exploring a variety of intellectual pursuits and topics. Indeed, many would hold Radio One as the only thing CBC does right.

Why? Well, when people go and listen to Radio One, they expect to learn something, or to be informed. There are no genres on Radio One, just information to be communicated.

So why does CBC Radio Two with its emphasis on classical music come under fire? Or put more generally, why is our common discourse around classical music framed in this way, around stuffiness and snobbiness, around elitism and dry intellectualism?

Perhaps it has something to do with the notion that genres are the aesthetic counterpart to Aristotle’s declaration of substance as species and that moreover, musical genres are not something one likes or dislikes, but instead pledge an aesthetic allegiance to, and classical music listeners are the ultimate chummy old boys club.

***

Perhaps looking at classical music this way helps to explain why CBC Radio Two is doing what is does and also explains why classical musicians and classical music lovers make fairly baffling comments around the state of classical music.

Alex Ross in a recent post links to an interview with Joshua Roman, who heads up the Seattle Symphony's cello section.

He says, in response to the question "Classical music was marketed for snob appeal for decades, but now it's keeping people away."

"I would love to see the classical-music industry crumble, just absolutely fall to bits. Because I think then we'd have to start over. We'd have to say, well, what is it? What is classical music? Is it this concert hall, is it these tuxedos? No, it's this music."

Sure, but....firstly was classical music really marketed for snobs? And is it really keeping away? Oh, and haven't people been saying exactly the same thing since the 1960s?

Is this really the problem with Classical Music?

This is what baffles me. We classical musicians secretly wish that the industry would die around us. But then, why haven't we killed it - most classical musicians I know are either self-employed, or could quite easily, along with their colleagues, get up and kill every symphony orchestra and opera house in the country, and start their own organizations.

Is it really the tuxedos and rich people keeping everyone from dropping their pop albums and buying tickets to the opera? If only people listened to the music?

Let me suggest that the hostility towards classical music isn't really grounded in the snobbishness or elitism, nor is it an anti-intellectual stance, (an aside - has anyone ever noticed how many prominent writers, the most common class of “intellectual”, don't like classical music?).

So what's it grounded in? Uh, I don't know, and I've staggered far from home.

***

So after all this rambling, am I any closer to understanding what's going on with CBC Radio Two, beyond the simple economics of having only two radio stations? If we had three stations, it would be much easier to have a solid block of cultural programming a la BBC3, but we don't, so we're stuck with a dyad that often alienates more than it inspires.

While I appreciate their motivations, I am still saddened by the sheer lack of talk about culture on CBC anymore. When I grew up, you could actually learn something about classical music and other arts on CBC, every day. And it wasn't restricted to classical music - I fondly recall a Saturday evening spent learning all about the metal power ballad, its origins and development.

That seems much less likely these days. There are fewer musicologists, fewer composers, yet unsurprisingly enough, more performer interviews.

For example, with the cancellation of Two New Hours, contemporary classical no longer has a dedicated home, and although I know Laurie Brown will do a great job with her new show, I simply can't imagine she'll have the breadth and depth of knowledge Larry Lake had. They folks there are there to spin records, not to teach, nor to raise.

This is what CBC has slowly been strapping from the branches of its cultural mandate. It's not the music, it's the conversation. Like their TV station, instead of offering a place where people could go and regularly expect to learn something, it has become a place for Canadians to watch sitcoms and curling.

So there are a number of disparate threads - the categorization of music, and how we as individuals come to identify with the "ideal listener" of the genre we happen to subscribe to, and Canada's unique cultural conditions.

Here's the rub. I'm listening to the Early Music Show on BBC, on the Internet - Bach Cello Suites! This show is an exemplar of what the kind of intellectually serious and accessible work the CBC used to do.

So given the cultural delicacies out there and available on my computer, as much as I'd like to keep things local, there just doesn't seem to be room for people like me on a radio station I once considered an essential part of Canada's cultural life.

At least I feel I appreciate the predicament they're in, despite the fact that it also means that I will listen to it even less than I do now.

Friday Night Videos - Ghosts Before Breakfast

It can't be all music here! Well...maybe it can. Watch for composers Paul Hindemith and Darius Milhaud in this early short by Hans Richter.

The Unbabbling Bach

The painting says so much about the man, doesn’t it? A character, perhaps a bit of a dandy, and prone to moments of humour taken a fraction too far? A clever twinkle in his eye - and yet…the way the shadow from the brim of his hat obscures his other eye…perhaps it’s just the painter’s story…no…is there more to him?

Of course there is – he’s the eldest son of Bach.

***

According to Eugene Helm in the New Grove Bach Family, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach “was a greatly gifted composer who did not fully set aside his background of contrapuntal training in favour of the new style of the mid-18th Century.”

But – “He led an unstable life and never quite developed his full creative potential.”

I do not know about the latter beyond the biographical details, however, the smattering of his work I have been able to get my hands on demonstrates his remarkable compositional skills. Indeed, of the four sons of J.S. Bach who composed music, I like him the best. If that isn’t a sure sign of genius, I’m not sure what is.

Seriously, his music is quite compelling. So why is there so little of it available? Why does every reference about him talk about him failing to live to his potential, or point to his lack of success?

He has a biography, a thin 31-page work by Martin Falck, a German musicologist who died at 28 years of age, and one of the few scholars to have had access to the recently rediscovered Notenarchiv of the Berlin Sing-Akademie. (This tidbit from the great modern Bach scholar Christoph Wolff in Notes, 58.2 pgs. 259-271)

This little tome by Falck also includes a catalogue of W.F. Bach’s work, securing Falck a sliver of immortality – when citing Bach’s work, his catalogue numbers are used, along with the first initial of his last name, a time-honoured convention in the annals of musicology, rather like naming an axiom or theorem after the mathematician who discovered (or for you constructivists, invented) it.

But why does this massive talent, and J.S. Bach’s son no less, have a short bio and only a handful of journal articles to show for, in a scholarly discipline known for the resurrection and championing of truly mediocre composers?

Put another way, has no one else seen this portrait of him? Can there not be more to the man who sat for this wonderful portrait?

(a sidebar - this was about the best photo I could get of it-

***

I have a pet theory as to why there is so little out there around his life and work.

Despite the quality of his compositions, the history of classical music, which supplies the narratives the thing we call "classical music" relies so heavily upon, disallow W.F. Bach a place in the canon because he didn’t look after his father’s manuscripts.

I recall a story where he supposedly sold sheets of oh say, that missing St. Mark passion, to fishmongers for wrapping the day’s catch! I'm not sure I need convey the anger with which this story was retold.

How can we, we musicians and historians bound to the cult of Bach, or, to the worship of this most Hegelian of histories, perhaps the most consistently Hegelian in all of the fine arts, where music progresses and tonality develops and not despise the man, the son who didn’t look after his father’s treasures?

That smile...is it really a bit of a smirk?

I imply no pettiness on the part of musicologists here, merely the possibility that he’s been overlooked not because of his music, but on account of his actions, actions we can neither explain nor justify.

Or….is there another reason? Something that has nothing to do with his father, and indeed resides in his work? Is it that he was outside the musical styles that emerged in his time? Perhaps, just perhaps, is his style a lost path, a curious synthesis of galant style and classical forms which nonetheless retains counterpoint as an central part of music making?

Was Wilhelm Bach the Beethoven born 60 years too early, at a point in history and the development of musical styles where W.F Bach’s works just don’t make any sense?

I hear some chime in – “Maybe he wasn’t good enough. Are you just trying to pawn some supposedly underrated composer off on us?”

Well, as someone who endures hour after hour of flaccid baroque concerti performed on period instruments on the local commercial classical radio station, the classical marketplace is rarely effective in determining artistic works on their merit. So why not have a listen to him?

Better yet, would it be possible to write a biography of the man? Should I?

***

Or perhaps I’m just really smitten with that painting, that lovely painting, by far the best painting in the Bach family, by the non-existent Wilhelm Weitch (see note for page 134).

Or maybe it’s that we share a name, Wilhelm Friedemann and I….

You see where all this psychologizing gets you? Maybe that’s why we leave these forays into the lives of interesting people up to the Cristoph Wolffs and Maynard Solomons of the world.

Or maybe not. Hell, why not?

The Dark Arts: Piano Tuning I

Yes my friends, that is a Yamaha U1.

It is not new. But, anyone who knows Yamahas knows that one is best advised to buy a slightly weathered model - not too old, of course. There is a sweet spot of 15-35 years, of which mine approaches the upper bound.

Why? Quite simply, it guarantees that your piano is made in Japan. I'd elaborate on why this is a very good thing, but this could get me into trouble. Just note the Japanese are known for what can only be described as an exquisite attention to detail.

But no matter. On to more important things.

Firstly, I have gathered enough information about it to know that it was made the year of my birth.

I espied this ebony beauty just before Christmas. I'd gone in to take a look at a shop run by this friendly fellow. It was out of tune, and there was no weight to the keys. But the tone showed promise, and for many of my old teachers, the U1 was the piano of choice.

So we bought it.

***

Tuning is one of the many ways in which we organize sound to create music. But tuning is not merely designating certain frequencies as pitches in one's system, it's also accepting the great mass of frequencies outside of that system as "out of tune".

Westerners are exceedingly familiar with the division of the octave into 12 (now typically equal) pitches. But there's no need to limit pitch organization to this division. Indeed, there is a fantastic podcast devoted to microtonal music, where works are composed using alternative divisions of the octave (or alternate tunings of the 12-note octave).

The latest podcast, on "neo-medieval music" has an historical bent, imagining the ways in which western music could have been organized differently.

The music will sound strange at first. It will sound out of tune. But that will change.

***

Some background on tuning will probably make what will unfold here less painful.

As a primer, the composer and scholar Kyle Gann has a wonderfully informative and opinionated website in which he does a great job of explaining microtonal music. He also provides a helpful precis of the current debate raging amongst musicologists and performers around how composers tuned their keyboard instruments before equal temperament came along and extinguished other temperaments, or divisions of the octave.

***

We waited a month before having the tuner come along. A middle-aged Russian appeared at the door - Yuri. Laying his large fur hat on my couch, he set to work. He didn't labour long before asking for the phone, and calling the people we'd sold the piano to - also Russian. They conversed, and I wondered what was going on.

"Mice", Yuri sighed. (In a thick Russian accent)"They could have been there 20 years ago, but the action's a mess - I need to remove it and take it to my shop."

He attempted to show me what was wrong, and I could see nothing. It was like a doctor asking me to evaluate an ultrasound - I had no criteria for knowing what mice through a piano looked like!

And then I realised something- why didn't I know? Why had I been playing the piano all these years, and yet knew nothing about how it worked? I'd never peered inside?

This man, with his hammer, and his wrench, who stretches octaves, who tempers, who forges, why was his work such a mystery to me? And was it just me? How many pianists know their pianos, know how to tune one?

Why do we no longer think about tuning?

As this blizzard of queries blew around my mind, I carried the soul of my piano out through the snow and placed it gently into Yuri's car.

For a week, I waited. As will you, hopefully, for the next installment of the Dark Arts.