109: Skyline

The dismal link between new architecture and new music

Name That Tune

This week’s Name That Tune is a Maestro Will special. Here’s your hint: this piece was composed and premiered in London.

As always, your goal is to provide as much accurate analysis as possible. First try to get the nationality, year, and genre, then make educated guesses about the composer and — if possible— the piece. If you know the piece immediately, send us an email at toneprose@substack.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing. 

Last Week’s Results
Tone Prose 108
Janáček, Glagolitic Mass

A small result today, but a good one all the same. I (Will) sussed out the answer just from Joey’s clue before even hearing a note. Listener Gregor wrote in with the correct answer, and Listener Eric didn’t quite get there, but he had good guesses with Scriabin and Shostakovich.

The language of the text, for those wondering, is Old Church Slavonic.

Think you can stump your fellow Listeners? Go ahead and try!

Head to our Google Form to upload a 30-second clip of an unidentified piece of classical music for us to try to identify.

When Worlds Collide

This past weekend, Michelle Wu, the piano-playing mayoress of Boston, gave a performance of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with the Boston Pops:

That makes me (Will) happy for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it’s the perfect launching pad for my new grand unified theory of everything.

A vicious cycle

I live in Seattle, so I live amid one of the most acute examples of the crisis facing America’s cities. The number one issue is housing: supply is constrained, rents are going up, and the people can’t afford to pay wind up without stable living situations. Living on the margins produces all sorts of difficulties, but for people who also suffer from mental health problems or addiction issues, the problems can be insurmountable, and all too often, the result is that they wind up living on the street. Open-air drug markets grow to meet demand, the streets are suffused with fentanyl smoke, and the overall zombification of large swaths of the city continues. (And if you think I’m exaggerating, let me assure you, Seattle’s top open-air drug market is at the bus stop right across the street from where the Seattle Symphony plays at Benaroya Hall. I’m there all the time.)

It’s a vicious cycle, and what’s even more vicious is that the structure of the U.S. financial system — in which mortgages are a foundational, financialized investment product — compels large groups of people to see to it that the status quo is maintained. But I think there’s something else that keeps the vicious cycle of NIMBYism churning: aesthetics.

The uglification of multi-unit architecture

There’s a big divide on Urbanist twitter relating to the aesthetic design of new buildings: one camp says “there is a housing crisis and any building is better than no building, so don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and get cheap housing made as quickly as possible.” The other camp says: “if we’re building things, we might as well make them nice to look at, because beautiful buildings are what make beautiful cities, and if we make beautiful cities, people will like them more, and their opposition to building projects will vanish.”

I think these are both right: the crisis is so acute that we just need more housing (including SROs), but beautiful buildings made with traditional façades are better, and better buildings would reduce opposition to more building. In other words, good aesthetics could help create a virtuous cycle.

Here’s the thing though: it’s in a developer’s interest to make attractive buildings. The reason we get ugly buildings instead, is that our civic leaders have created laws to make multi-family dwellings sub-optimal. For example: mandated parking minimums force developers to build garages, thus raising the cost of construction, meaning that they have to skimp on the façade in order to pencil out. We have laws about setbacks and floor-area-ratios that mean developers can’t maximize the size of the livable space on their lots. And, most pernicious of all, we have created the dreaded “design review,” in which a panel of architects is tasked with slowing down design and construction to a crawl, and making buildings as ugly as possible.

I promise this has to do with music

Allow me now to step back into my lane and say this: most of the new music I hear — especially new music that is commissioned and performed by major symphony orchestras — sounds like what these budget-misaligned, area-constrained, design-reviewed-to-death apartment towers look like.

Long gone are the days of the 20th-century’s atonal avant garde (music’s equivalent of architectural brutalism, one might say.) Now, consonance is allowed, but only with strict rules (it’s kind of like the opposite of the pre-Monteverdi world of controlled dissonance.)

Music can be tonal, but not too tonal. It can be rhythmic, but not too rhythmic. It needs to use as many instruments as possible, but it can’t sound overly colorful. The percussion has to play constantly. There can be melodic patternation but not melody. The style can reference “vernacular” musics, but not too much.

The weird thing is this: there are no laws or regulations dictating that these pieces have to sound this way. Arts administrators could decide tomorrow to seek more interesting, appealing music, and composers could get to writing it. No, what we have is something much more pernicious: a self-imposed design review mindset that is enforced at every level of the academic-musical complex, particularly at the elite universities from which the “top” composers and arts administrators are drawn.

How do we solve this problem?

I don’t know, probably just play my music.

So all this pseudo-intellectual theorizing was just a self-serving advertisement?

Yes.

Tone Praise

J. S. Bach, Partita No. 2 in D minor: Chaconne, arranged for the 26-string koto

If you want a spellbinding experience, you’d be hard-pressed to find one better than this.

Tone Prose is a co-production of William White, Joseph Vaz, and the Listeners (i.e. you.)