12 hours pretending I wasn’t really working
2 hours being all editorial and advisory by the light of the moon
550 kilometres
22 madonnas (and more) from Italy
100 manuscripts from Berlin (drool)
30 minutes photographing historical correspondence
1 hour of Tchaikovsky piano music (Album for the Young, The Seasons)
1 hour of Haydn sonatas (those that weren’t beyond my dormant technique)
3 movements from Grieg’s Peer Gynt suite in an arrangement for four hands
1 riotously wayward piano duo rendition of the overture to Die Meistersinger
2 hours of hand stitching
6 hours of ballet class
2 hours choosing spectacles
4 successful tussles with pumpkin hour
1 hour contemplating matters horticultural
0 tax returns completed 

Something in there was priceless – probably the piano playing.

This is one of the traps of working in music. Attending lots of concerts is a fabulous thing, enviable even, but it’s very easy to feel jaded after a while. So it’s helpful to imagine myself a “civilian” and think about the local orchestra concerts I would have attended if I were choosing to attend just nine – much in the same way that some people devise fantasy football teams. 

And so, my fantasy subscription for 2011:

Ashkenazy/de Lancie et al (Grieg’s Peer Gynt with narration)
The world needs more orchestral concerts that are conceived and presented as “shows”, as entertainments, without compromising artistic quality or programming integrity in any way. This was one of them. 

De Waart/Sydney Philharmonia Choirs (Beethoven, Barber, Adams)
Beethoven Seven. Best Beethoven symphony of the lot. ’Nuff said.
And Edo conducting Adams. 

Carter (Kerry, Grainger, Bartók)
The premiere of a new work by a composer I admire – of course I was looking forward to it. Topped off, on the night, by especially brilliant introductions by Andrew Ford. Grainger; the Australian guy in his shed. I won’t be forgetting this image in a hurry. 

Lang Lang in Recital (Beethoven, Albéniz, Prokofiev)
Every bit as astonishing as I’d expected. It was heartening to see he’d abandoned the satin polka dot suit and the unbearable OTT-ness I remembered from Blossom 2005.

Morlot/Pahud (Bach, Jarrell, Holst)
This was always going to be about the Jarrell flute concerto. Sue me. 

Evgeny Kissin in Recital (Liszt)
Fascinating, intriguing, jaw-droppingly impressive. There is nothing he can’t do. When I’m an old lady I will bore my sisters’ grandchildren with stories about hearing Kissin. Four times now. 

Strobel (Metropolis, restored with Huppertz score)
I had never seen Metropolis before. People I know who had seen it, told me that, with this new restoration, the whole movie made sense to them for the first time. The score lacked originality but what was so interesting about it was its sophistication and effectiveness as a film score given that this was a nascent genre in 1927.

Nott/Zimmermann (Brahms, Dean, Schubert)
It was the Dean I wanted to hear most of all, but my interest was further stimulated by the things Jonathan Nott had told me concerning his approach to the programming of the concert as a whole. 

Vänskä/Weilerstein (Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Beethoven)
See earlier comments. 

Inevitably there’s a concert you leave out of your fantasy subscription which turns out to be one of the highlights. This year that was the program with Nigel Westlake’s Missa Solis. I was aware from the beginning of the very personal significance of the piece and the terrible story behind it. But somehow that doesn’t prepare you for the experience of hearing the music, in the concert hall, with the composer conducting, and knowing that every musician on the stage is heart and soul behind this moving performance.

1. Frustration. Is “20th Century” a period or a state of mind?

Choosing a whole century as a category, especially one as stylistically diverse as the 20th, was always going to problematic. For some – including me – “20th century” means “modern” on some level, and by extension a lot of musical works written after 1900 are throwbacks or 20th-century only by a technicality. 

In the past, apart from the classic “general” polls, Classic 100 has polled for a genre, a composer or an instrument a clearly defined stylistic period. [Correction: there has never been a poll for a stylistic period.] Not this time. And if anything, it made the result less focused, less meaningful and, I suspect, less satisfying for nearly everybody. (See point 3)

2. Frustration. The unfair advantage of old age. 

Aka, the Gerontius effect. Acquiring favourite status inevitably takes time, especially in a deeply canonical art form such as classical music. For the repertoire that’s more than a hundred years old, age is immaterial. But when you’re comparing music that’s, say, 111 years old, with a piece that might have premiered last year, the newer piece is at a disadvantage.

The situation can be influenced by programming and promotion – I’m thinking of the clever way the Christopher Lawrence/Felix Hayman “Swoon” spot used to sneak in, with audience approval, all sorts of works that would normally have met with resistance on the grounds of youth and unfamiliarity. 

But mostly, the older a 20th-century work is, even if it approaches the “nasty modern music” end of the spectrum, the more fans it will have acquired. That’s one reason why the scattergraph for this poll shows a downward linear trend. That’s why the confronting (in character, not necessarily in style) Rite of Spring made it into the top ten, while other less-confronting but much newer works were ranked lower. Or perhaps The Rite of Spring is just better music… 

3. Frustration. (Or Amusement?) A polarised audience.

It was to be expected there would be parties throwing up their hands in disgust at the “dreadful noise” of Messiæn and others equally disgusted by the presence of backward-looking romantics such as Elgar. That’s the 20th century for you.

I could have treated it as a frustration, but the crux of the matter can be found in point 1 and this was really just the inevitable side effect. So I followed along via the social media and laughed.

4. Frustration. The vagaries of the Long Tail.

What didn’t make me laugh were some of the bizarre rankings at the bottom end of the list. (And towards the top too.) Given the very small polling sample (7,000 I believe, which must be barely 1 per cent of ABC Classic FM’s national reach) this is also not very surprising. I had to keep telling myself: “Small sample. Popularity contest. Small sample. Popularity contest.”

But despite the affirmations, I swore a bit when the Warsaw Concerto outranked Lieutenant Kijé; when ALW’s Requiem ranked higher than both Britten’s Serenade for tenor, horn and strings and Elgar’s Violin Concerto; when a folksong arrangement by Grainger came in three places ahead of Daphnis et Chloé (!!!!).

Of course, you see what’s happening here: I’m taking a poll that was unashamedly about “favourites” (and for which I myself was quite careful to choose my favourites) and I’m assessing the results against values of relative quality, importance and greatness. “Small sample. Popularity contest…”

5. Frustration. Insidious Albion.

This last frustration is purely a matter of personal taste. There are great works by English composers; I even shortlisted some. I just found it disheartening to see English music dominate the top 100. Especially so much English music of the pleasantly modal, folk-music inspired, stirringly hymn-like variety. But that’s just me. I have a serious bias towards the Russians and the French. And if there’s going to be folk inspiration I want wicked rhythms and wonky harmonies à la Bartók.

Postscript…

ABC Classic FM has shared the 100 runners up.

I took this literally: favourites. Not necessarily the greatest or the most seminal or the most famous or the most representatively “20th century”, whatever that might mean. Just favourites. For me this is music that I’m always happy to listen to, music which has given me inspiration or delight, music that has special significance for me.

The original shortlist was long (nearly 40 works) and, inevitably for the 20th century, stylistically diverse. More so than in any previous poll, it broke my heart to bring it down to ten. At this point it was necessary to invent some “rules” – each composer could be represented only once, for example, and I aimed for some representation across genres: orchestral, concerto, theatre, small ensemble…

My positive biases are evident: orchestral sound, music for dance, dramatic inspiration. Please don’t jump to conclusions about my negative biases, although the initials of one are DSCH. And I happily endorse the presence of musical theatre. Twice. Bite me, as they say.

In the end, four of my choices were in the 100, one of these scraped into the top 10 (Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet). Two of my composers made it in but with other works. The countdown isn’t over, but for the other four I’m resigned to being part of the invisible long tail.

And so my ten, annotated…

BARTÓK Bluebeard’s Castle
Thought about the Concerto for Orchestra (42 in the poll), which I've loved ever since we studied it at high school. But Bluebeard is so much more astonishing and powerful. (And I figured, correctly, that the Concerto would get plenty of votes without my help – this is a recurring theme.) 

(13) BERNSTEIN West Side Story
This is is far and away the best thing he ever wrote. And it’s cool.

KERRY This Insubstantial Pageant
This was a fond choice: I played my part in bringing this piece about. But I knew it wouldn’t make the 100, as it’s not available in a commercial recording. It should be. (Meanwhile, a reference recording can be borrowed from the AMC, and there’s an excerpt online including the quotation from Vivaldi’s “La tempesta di mare” flute concerto, which made me smile.)

LUTOSŁAWSKI Concerto for Orchestra
There’s a story here: heading off to a concert as a flute-playing teenager in order to hear Rampal play Mozart and coming away with my head buzzing with excitement about this piece by a composer I’d never heard of before. This choice is symbolic of what I strive for in my programming and ceaselessly hope for in my concert-going: come for one thing, go away thrilled by a discovery of some kind. (See Vasks.)

(10) PROKOFIEV Romeo and Juliet
Everything I love about Prokofiev’s music, plus heart in abundance.   

(62) RAVEL Piano Concerto in G
Another story. I first heard this exhilarating piece at the age of eight-and-eleven-months. It was in the theatre not as concert music, and as a result the movements now always sound as if they’re being played out of order – thank you very much, Mr Murphy.

SONDHEIM Sweeney Todd
«Have a little fop, Finest in the shop, Or some shepherd's pie peppered with actual shepherd on top…» This was the first Sondheim musical I saw. I considered others, but this one’s the closest in many respects to whatever it is that we define as “classical”, so it seemed right.  

(35) STRAVINSKY The Firebird
Oh, how I struggled in choosing between this, The Rite of Spring (9 in the poll) and Petrushka. How to decide between voluptuous beauty, pounding exhilaration and the slightly bleak but moving tale of a puppet come to life?   

WESTLAKE Omphalo Centric Lecture
There’s a reason this music for percussion ensemble is one of Nigel Westlake’s most frequently performed works (I believe). It’s just so damn addictive! Encore please. (Westlake has been represented by his Antarctica music (29); the Penguin Ballet number is kind of adorable.) 

VASKS Cello Concerto
When you program the Australian premiere of something unfamiliar, it’s not often the letters flood in, all with some variant of “I wasn’t expecting to like this piece at all and it turned out to be a highlight of the season.” (Yess!)

As a final note… I discovered after I finished that, quite without realising it, I hadn’t chosen any works that were technically 20th century but which spiritually (to my ears) belonged in the 19th. So no Rachmaninoff, no Mahler, no Elgar, no Richard Strauss. I guess that tells you something about the effect the label “20th century” has on my brain.

Postscript…

I send my regrets to Messrs Adès, Berg, Britten, Debussy, Edwards, Gershwin, Hindemith, Janáček, Meale, Messiæn, Nancarrow, Poulenc, Schoenberg, Schultz, Sculthorpe, Weill and Who-Killed-Cock-Robin, as well as the Misses Panufnik and Kats-Chernin. Some of you did just fine without me, I’m glad to see.  

Those who know me really well know that I think one of the most exquisitely sensual sounds in the world is the scratch of a quill scribing on vellum. And as I’ve pointed out before, clearly Peter Greenaway thinks it’s pretty special too. (Sadly, the video clip from Prospero’s Books that I’d previously linked to is no longer available, but try the beginning of this one.)

Now, thanks to Austin Radcliffe at Things Organized Neatly, I have another piece of calligraphy porn for my collection. No scratching in this one, but Bach ain’t bad.

Coincidentally, this gorgeous video turns out to be part of a campaign for Jumpstart Jr., a Dutch foundation which loans gut-string violins and cellos to gifted and ambitious young musicians dedicated to historical performance. (Australian cellist Catherine Jones is one of the beneficiaries.) Their slogan is “No gut, no glory” – I like it!

He has the kind of life story and unconventional career path that publicists and journalists must love, at least for a debut visit. But so far I’ve been more interested in the often provocative things he has to say about concert presentation, some of which have already sent me to my soap box. And he’s at it again, with this interview for The Sydney Morning Herald.

As before, I ended up wholeheartedly agreeing with him and tearing my hair in frustration.

1. James Rhodes says he doesn’t want people reading the program notes while he’s playing. That makes perfect sense; I’d feel the same if I were performing. 

But I’d also add that if a performance is sufficiently compelling, well… you won’t even feel like reading the program, will you? (After all, one of the many valuable services a program book offers is distraction during a dull concert. And I say that in the same spirit as Mr Rhodes himself, when he writes that Beethoven “even had to play viola as a child in order to make money”.) 

2. Then he spoils it with a careless generalisation that simply panders to prejudice: 

“And [the program note’s] always written by some Oxford don from the ’70s about sonata form in Beethoven’s Vienna.* That’s f---ing boring. I’d rather talk about the fact that Bach was like a baroque Keith Richards and had 20 children and got arrested for drinking and f---ing.”†

Seriously James, I suspect that even in London, concert-goers aren’t seeing too many program notes from Oxford dons of the ’70s. And you’d be hard-pressed to find the donnish program note here in Australia. (Well, maybe from one presenter, but I’m not publishing directions.) 

As I’ve said before, some program notes – and they can be old or recent – are poorly written, stuffy and generally unhelpful. It happens, and if an artist is lumbered with notes like this by a presenter he or she has every right to complain. (Better still, the artist who cares about such things has every right to show an interest well beforehand. Just sayin’.) But what really bugs me is when artists or commentators suggest that the badly written and unhelpful note is the status quo. Because it’s simply not.

I get that James Rhodes would prefer his audiences not be reading. Ok, so don’t give us anything to read. A well-edited and comprehensive program listing is fine by me. (Since he’s being presented by the same venue, it’s likely that his program will contain about as much reading material as that one for Stephen Kovacevich.)

And I totally get that he would prefer to share his ideas with the audience by talking to us. (Although his written comments aren’t bad at all – thoughtful and sincere  – and I’m impressed that he’s one of the minority who’ve bucked the iTunes prejudice against providing digital booklets with albums. Go James!) 

But I wish he’d get off the bandwagon about program notes ‘always’ being boring. That’s just unhelpful. And unfair.

Because the good writing about music is out there. Notes that are illuminating; notes that communicate affection for the music; notes that reveal an appreciation for how the listener is going to be experiencing it in a live concert; notes that are elegantly and generously written; notes that reflect and support the artistic vision of the programmer/performer; notes that don’t take themselves too seriously but also don’t fall into the trap of cheesy joviality and cheap shots; notes that are conceived with imagination; notes that help the readers focus their ears on the music and perhaps notice things they wouldn’t have otherwise; notes that give insightful context for the music… I could go on. 

Footnotes…

* This kind of statement is just as bad as Rupert Murdoch’s recent throwaway line about American classrooms: “Most American classrooms haven’t changed much since the days of Grover Cleveland. You have a teacher, a piece of chalk, a blackboard – and a room full of kids.” (And why exactly is Murdoch suddenly interested in American education?) 

† It always pains me to temper a good story with the truth, but Bach wasn’t jailed for drinking and f---king, unless perhaps you use that last word in a loose, figurative sense. In 1717, while trying to arrange an early dismissal from his Weimar post so he could take up a more lucrative and satisfying one in Cöthen, Bach lost his temper with (probably) his noble employer. Thus “…on November 6, the quondam concertmaster and organist Bach was confined to the County Judge’s place of detention for too stubbornly forcing the issue of his dismissal and finally on December 2 was freed from his arrest with notice of his unfavourable discharge.” Actually, you could argue that this is a far more interesting reason to be arrested than mere drunkenness, and more revealing of Bach’s personality. At least I think so.

“We don’t have a way to talk about this kind of thing,” Steve said. “In most people’s vocabularies, ‘design’ means veneer. It is interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”

Or as Morris said: “If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

There’s an irony in the comparison, as Harry Rutherford observes in his tribute, but the comparison holds nonetheless. I’ve been attracted to Apple products since 1987, in large part because of their simplicity, their beauty and their elegant functionality. And we have Steve Jobs to thank for these qualities. 

It’s not all roses. If there’s one area where I’m critical of Apple it’s the way aesthetics all too often take priority over ergonomics – it’s been a long time since I used an Apple mouse or keyboard for that reason. So not always useful. As for computer fonts: such creative power is fabulous but it doesn’t always lead to beauty. Think how many ghastly, half-baked flyers, posters and newsletters we could have avoided if Steve Jobs had never attended calligraphy class? (Ok, that price is worth paying…)

As others have also pointed out, it wasn’t just about the design and technological developments themselves, the real achievement was the way Jobs and Apple changed (and raised) our expectations of technology, sparked creative possibilities, gave great delight and empowered a generation. I didn’t know the man, but I’m grateful for the legacy.

The work is Charles Ives' Unanswered Question, and the note goes like this:

FAQs

 Q. Who was Charles Ives?

A. Ives came from a well-off New England family with its fair share of eccentricity (‘…odd, but in a nice way,’ said his wife). He studied music at Yale then became a successful life insurance salesman who composed for the love of it. This freed him to be completely original without needing to court publishers and concert presenters. He didn’t belong to a particular stylistic school but he was hugely influential as the father of modern American music. When his Third Symphony won the Pulitzer prize he said ‘Prizes are for boys – I’m grown up!’ (He was 72.)

Q. What were his musical influences?

A. When Charles was a boy his father, a leading bandmaster, made him sing songs in one key while he accompanied him on the piano in a different key, which seems to have given him a healthy disdain for conventional harmony. Similarly, he was fascinated by things that we would call ‘wrong’: a mis-harmonised hymn tune, or the competing sounds of town bands marching in different directions, each playing their own music.

Q. What kind of music did he write?

A. Ives wrote in nearly every genre, including symphonies, string quartets, piano sonatas, organ music and songs. He often quotes hymns and popular tunes, and the influence of folk music is strong. But the risk of sentimentality is countered by playful experiments with harmony and rhythm.

Q. How did he come to write The Unanswered Question?

A. The Unanswered Question was one of a pair of pieces, first performed as interludes in a New York theatre (the other was Central Park in the Dark) and together known as Two Contemplations. The flexibility of the theatre-orchestra tradition is reflected in the instrumentation: trumpet (which can be replaced by English horn, oboe or clarinet), flute quartet (third and fourth flutes replaceable by oboe and clarinet) and string orchestra or string quartet. Another theatrical aspect of the piece emerges in the staging instructions, which include placing instruments offstage.

Around this time, 1906, Ives was busy experimenting with new musical ideas. He revised The Unanswered Question in the 1930s and composer Elliott Carter arranged for its formal premiere in 1946.

Q. What does the title mean?

A. The original title was ‘A Contemplation of a Serious Matter’ or ‘The Unanswered Perennial Question’. (Central Park in the Dark was ‘A Contemplation of Nothing Serious’.) Ives’ own comments suggest metaphysical themes behind the music:

The quiet strings…represent the conventional life. We get up, and go to the office, and come home again, have dinner with the family, sit around in the evening…But sometimes there comes a Question: Is this all my life is good for? Shouldn’t I be doing something courageous for the good of humanity? This question crosses the conventional life, doesn’t fit with it. The flutes and other people try to answer, more and more intensely, but can’t seem to get through. Meanwhile the conventional life goes on, and when the Question is asked for the last time, it is still not answered.

Q. What will it sound like?

Yvonne Frindle ©2008

This Heckler is unprintable. Not because it is offensive or in poor taste but because my rant is typographically inclined.

The observant will have noticed that the Sydney Morning Herald routinely drops foreign accents from any word or name that may require them. This is evidently a style policy on the part of the paper – exactly why it is so completely mystifies me. We’re talking about a modern newspaper with sophisticated page layout technology, a paper with an online presence (where on rare occasions the accents have appeared), a paper that can print in full colour and which can accommodate the application of annoying promotional sticky notes to the front. But give it an umlaut or a circumflex and it shudders and recoils and the offending accent is dropped forthwith.

I am not concerned about foreign words that have been anglicised. In Australian English a premiere is a premiere, even without the grave on the second “e”. A fete need not have a circumflex, so long as there is fairy floss and a sausage sizzle. But there are words that become ambiguous when the accent is removed, and – more important – there are many names that are simply misspelled and may well be mispronounced without their accents.

We live in an international world and foreign names are all around us, within the Australian community itself as well as further afield. What a discourtesy we do to others when we cannot take the trouble to accommodate a special character in their names. And how insular it makes us appear.

I follow the Sydney Morning Herald arts pages, which regularly mention performers from Finland, Germany, Norway, France and other countries with interesting characters in their alphabets. In the Herald Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä loses both the umlauts from his surname, changing the pronunciation completely not to mention the name itself. (Is there a Vanska in the Finnish phone book? Perhaps.) Norwegian cellist Truls Mørk appears as “Mork” without the crossed “o” (historically a ligature of “o” and “e”), to the same effect. With the Herald as your guide you’d be forgiven for thinking that a certain Swedish trumpeter’s name was pronounced “harken” rather than “horken” – all because the style guide won’t permit the “aa” ligature in Håken Hardenberger.

Were the French baritone Jean-Baptiste Faure (no accent, rhymes with “four”) still alive and singing Fauré (with an acute accent, rhymes with “foray”) the Sydney Morning Herald would no doubt be in a pickle. Or is that ‘dans le pétrin’? – acute accent on the “e”, of course.

The result isn’t very surprising. The Time covers paint as good a picture as any of classical music’s changing prominence in culture. Of the 64 covers devoted to classical music (63 if you don’t want to count Cole Porter) about three quarters appeared before 1956.

[Download a PDF of this sobering little timeline.]

Selected observations – some curious, some disheartening:

• The last classical figure to appear on a Time cover was Vladimir Horowitz in 1986. 
• The last composer to appear was Johann Sebastian Bach in 1968 and he’d been dead 218 years. (To put this in perspective, the other 11 composers to appear were all alive at the time.)
• The last musician of any kind to appear on a Time cover was Michael Jackson (in 2009).
• Opera singers were the most frequently represented type of musician, with 22 on 21 covers.
• Conductors were the next most represented, with 17. (The Rostropovich cover shows him with baton in hand and the caption “Maestro”, so I’m counting him as a conductor here.)
• The multiple appearances award goes to Toscanini with three covers. Runners up with two: Rudolf Bing, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, Koussevitsky, Paderewski, Lily Pons, Stokowski and Richard Strauss.

You can explore all this via another rabbit hole that has captured my attention – the updated version of my timeline software, which now permits interactive embedding:

Postscript…

What was surprising insofar as I hadn’t quite imagined it panning out this way, was the dominance of opera, with a relatively large number of singers. (Did Time have an interest in the Metropolitan Opera, I wonder…) Even amongst the composers and other figures, quite a few could be said to have an opera connection. Menotti, for example, featured on a cover the year The Consul won a Pulitzer prize. Mascagni is another Time composer; Richard Strauss was featured twice.