Michael Kaiser, president of Washington D.C.'s Kennedy Center, has written in the Huffington Post about the slow but steady extinction of professional arts criticism in mainstream media. He is deeply worried.
His final paragraph:
No one critic should be deemed the arbiter of good taste in any market and it is wonderful that people now have an opportunity to express their feelings about a work of art. But great art must not be measured by a popularity contest. Otherwise the art that appeals to the lowest common denominator will always be deemed the best.
As a recent former critic who still has one foot -- okay, more like a big toe -- in the game, I agree. But that doesn't mean there is no way to find creative ways to join the crowd's, or the cloud's, or the swarm's conversation in a constructive, engaging way.
The cultural universe as we've known it for the past century and a bit is in the middle of a massive realignment -- larger than most of us can even imagine. And I don't think I'm being hyperbolic.
Here is a tiny sliver of an example of what I mean, taken from the pop music side of the business.
Social media isn't really about a new way of communicating, it's a new way of expressing all the weird little quirks that make us human.
Today's AHA! moment came from a story that illustrates a couple of ways people are circumventing Facebook's penchant for spreading our personal news and preferences all over the place.
Guilty pleasures suddenly become public pleasures. Wouldn't I be embarassed if my friends discovered I listen to Il Divo, or Leroy Anderson, when I should be savouring the complex pleasures of Elliott Carter?
Wouldn't you know it, there's now a service available that will mask your true listening pleasures on Facebook with a fake playlist that can help you tailor your image to whatever you feel your peer group would best approve of.
Music-loving American filmmaker Michael Lawrence sent me a note this afternoon about a tribute to Steve Jobs he has put together, in which Jobs calls the computer the greatest tool ever devised by humans, "a bicycle for our minds."
Here is Lawrence's note to me, followed by the video.
Like so many people around the world, I have been thinking of Steve Jobs since his passing. The outpouring has been almost surreal.
I could not have made BACH & friends without his computers and software.
In 1989, I filmed an interview with Steve for my Library of Congress film and what a special day that was. I remember very fondly every minute of the time I spent with him. I still have the NeXT coffee mug he gave me.
A few years back, I put up a clip from the interview on YouTube and it has been viewed over 400,000 times - 34,000 views just yesterday alone.
I didn't know Steve Jobs loved Bach until Mike Hawley asked me to send Steve and his wife Laurene a copy of BACH & friends. Mike shared that Steve was one of his closest personal friends. I found this quote of Steve talking of Bach:
"I had been listening to a lot of Bach. All of a sudden the wheat field was playing Bach. It was the most wonderful experience of my life up to that point. I felt like the conductor of this symphony with Bach coming through the wheat field.” Quote from "Return to the Little Kingdom: How Apple and Steve Jobs Changed the World" by Michael Moritz
I chose "Music for a Sunday Afternoon," for obvious reasons, plus wanting to hear him play Mozart (Sonata No. 13 in B-flat) and Beethoven (Sonata No. 17 in D minor -- the Tempest).
I can't warm up to his interpretations, but I loved his 4-minute introduction, where he explains how he can't possibly say anything original about Beethoven in such a short space of time. He does, however, say something that comes from the core of the interpreter's art.
He speaks of how Beethoven straddled Classicism and Romanticism, paying homage to the past while nodding to the great effusion of personal expression that would mark the 19th century. He call this "the inventor at odds with the museum curator."
This is exactly what anyone interpreting music from the past faces -- as well as anyone trying to judge or appreciate a concert. There is a tradition to honour, and an act of creation to carry through. Both walk arm in arm.
Some performances are the acts of museum curators. We can walk away appreciating their form or the inherent beauty of the music. But the real spark comes when the performer stirs in an act of invention, bringing an immediacy and energy to the score.
Love or hate the interpretations, Gould brought that tension to every note he played, and that's what made him so special.
It was precisely this energy that animated the Toronto's Symphony's season-opening concert a few days ago. It was an energy that reminded me how much I already miss my old job as music critic, but also lifted my mood instantly -- as, I think, it felt like it did for most people sitting in Roy Thomson Hall.
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The CBC has launched a new Gould site full of interesting stuff to check out. You'll find it here.
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To do any job well, one needs to be totally present for it. In my new life as a business reporter, it has meant very limited time to listen, read or play music over the past four weeks.
I can't imagine being able to make a meaningful contribution to the appreciation of music under these circumstances but, I'm realising today, that if I feel sufficiently inspired, I might put a word or two down here once in a while, as long as the Star keeps this blog up on the website.
Adventurous, 20-something American violinist, singer and composer Paul Dateh has been having a lot of fun for the past year and a half turning classic comedy routines into little musical webisodes.
Since every Monday morning deserves a distraction, here is Dateh going cuckoo with guitarist Ken Belcher. If you like what you see, you can find plenty more episodes of Violince here:
Imagine spending your entire life scraping out a living as a copy editor and music copyist, so you can spend every free moment as a composer who no one is seriously interested in.
That, oversimplified, is the story of English composer Havergal Brian, who died, aged 96, in 1972. (Click on the link for everything you may want to know.) He left behind stacks and stacks of music -- including 32 symphonies -- that not many people could get excited about. An old guard of influential Englsh musical figures, including Proms founder Sir Henry Wood and conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, did their best to champion Brian's work.
Today, the Proms give us a very rare opportunity to hear his most notorious creation: Symphony No. 1, called the Gothic. Brian spent eight years crafting this two-hour behemoth, which calls for a huge main orchestra, organ, four offstage brass bands, a children's choir and an Edwardian choral society-size adult choir and, as you can imagine, a gargantuan stage.
Thank goodness for Royal Albert Hall.
Today's Proms performance, with live streaming audio, features more than 1,000 performers, according to the BBC. After the live stream, the concert will remain available for listening for seven days.
Havergal completed the work in 1927. It was published in 1932 as his Symphony no. 2, then renumbered by Brian three decades later. Apparently, it made it in to the Guiness Book of World Records as the longest symphony. It didn't have its premiere until 1961.
It's difficult to describe the style of Brian's writing in this symphony; it's so eclectic that it echoes a little bit of everything inside its massive sprawl. It's like a big sonic tapestry where the creator keeps changing the colour and thickness of the yarn, while reinterpreting the design, as the loom chugs along.
That sounds awful, but it isn't, really. It simply demands a different kind of listening. I've imagined myself as a passenger on a long train ride, with the Gothic Symphony a grand succession of unfolding panoramas that come and go as I sit back in wonder.
Here is the first of three sections of a messily exuberant setting of the Te Deum that make up the work's second half. This is from a 1989 Slovak Philharmonic recording -- the first official recording (there was a bootleg LP of a live concert floating around before that):
In a jollier vein, here is a Comic Overture ispired by J.M. Synge's 1909 play, The Tinker's Wedding. The music dates from 1948. The performance is by the late, great Sir Charles Mackerras and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic:
To close, Roger Vigoles accompanying baritone Brian Rayner Cook in Brian's overwrought, 1910 setting of Robert Herrick's poem, "Why Dost Thou Wound and Break My Heart:"
Two mother lodes of free streaming get mined, starting today, as the BBC Proms -- audio streamed live, then archived -- and Verbier Festival -- audio and video streamed live, then archived -- open their seasons.
The BBC Proms do not pander, but they know how to go big. The annual festival kicks off today with a First Night performance of Janacek's roiling Glagolitic Mass, conducted by Jiri Belohlávek. You can listen in on BBC 3, which has a whole site devoted to the Proms.
Meanwhile, a bit to the east, and up a mountain or two is the Verbier Festival, which has invited conductor Charles Dutoit and pianist Nelson Freire to add their star power to the high-altitude romp. The programme offers an unlikely pairing: Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 2 with Stravinsky's 1911 Petrouchka Suite. (What makes the odd pairing possible -- and which we won't see -- is a street festival outside the Salle des Combins during intermission).
Select performances from Verbier are streamed on medici.tv live before being available for free for a limited time. The site asks for registration, but, in my experience, they are really good about not sending too many solicitation emails.
I'm more musical than political, but I can't help but applaud a group of people who are, I gather, planning to parade their way up to Rob Ford's cottage this weekend, where he is honouring "tradition" and "family" instead of acting as mayor of all Torontonians.
Part of taking on this kind of a job means sacrificing a lot (if not most) of one's personal life. It's one of the many reasons why otherwise capable and qulified people don't take on public service.
Anyway, brining a bit of colour to cottage country is not a bad idea, is it? For more information on how to join this fabulous flash mob, email info@proudoftoronto.com and check out the group's website or Facebook page.
Let's turn for inspiration to Little Britain's Matt Lucas (as regular character Dafydd), in a number from the live stage show:
Organizers have worked hard over the past couple of years to change rules and balance juries for the quadrennial event so that no one can argue with the results (something competition watchers tend to do compulsively anyway).
They are also promising live web streaming of all competition rounds, which are being held on seven different halls in St. Petersburg and Moscow (including a first look inside the Moscow Conservatory's newly renovated concert spaces). The producer for the webcasts is Molly McBride, who did a brilliant job in getting the 2009 Cliburn competition online.
It promises to be a great window on one of the world's biggest and most prestigious competitions in piano, violin, cello and voice. Instrumental competitors are aged 16 to 30, vocal competitors are 18 to 32.
Piano and cello rounds began today at 1 p.m. local time in Moscow. Vocal and violin begin tomorrow in St. Petersburg.
There are two Canadians competing this time: Canadian Opera Company Ensemble Studio alumna, soprano Yannick Muriel Noah, and remarkable 18-year-old Montrealer, cellist Stéphane Tetrault, a student of Yuli Turovsky's and the youngest member selected for the first YouTube Symphony Orchestra.
As is so often the case on the first day of a webcast from a new setup, there are teething problems. My first check of today's piano webcast wasn't promising: the stream repeatedly stalled, and I couldn't figure out how to switch away from the piano competitors to check in to the cello rounds.
John Terauds started at the Toronto Star as a freelance writer in 1988, and has been on staff since 1997. He began writing on classical music in 2001, and has been the full-time classical music critic since 2005.
He is also the organist and choir director at St. Peter's Anglican Church, a parish founded in 1863 in downtown Toronto.
If he's not listening to, writing about or playing music, it means he's either asleep, unconscious, walking his dog -- or all of the above.
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