63: It’s Academic

Gergiev takes Moscow, Bernstein takes Amazon, Joey takes Denver

Name That Tune

This week’s Name That Tune is a Joey Special. Here’s your hint: the piano part is an “orchestral reduction” (the orchestra part is being played in a reduced part on the piano).

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 62
Steve Reich, Piano Phase

Success! Listener Sean weighed in successfully with his first ever NTT guess, and he was followed by Listener Kevin. Listener Jeremy correctly named the composer in the comments. 

Listener Ellen was unable to identify the piece, but was curious to know more, so here we go:

Piano Phase is a seminal work of American minimalism, a “process piece” if ever there was one. Here’s how the process works: it’s a piece for two pianos in which the two pianists (both alike in dignity) begin by playing a twelve-note pattern in unison. Then the second pianist speeds up ever so slightly so that after a brief bit of smearing, the first note of the second piano’s pattern now falls on the second note of the first piano’s pattern.

This is called “phasing” and it’s a technique that Reich would continue to make use of in works such as Violin Phase and Electric Guitar Phase. Many young musicians go through a Steve Reich Phase, which hopefully doesn’t last too long.

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.

Valery’s Family

According to Izvestia (Russia’s “national newspaper”) Valery Gergiev has been appointed General Director of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater, a position that he will fulfill concurrently with this duties as General Director of St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater.

Gergiev will replace Vladimir Urin, who has resigned, supposedly of his own free will. Urin is an interesting figure: he began his career as a theater administrator and Soviet apparatchik, rising through the ranks from head of the USSR Youth Theater’s puppet department to his current position. In 2014, he signed a letter of support for Putin’s invasion of Crimea, but in the most recent invasion he did an about face and signed a letter of denunciation of Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine.

It’s pretty easy to see how this plum position is Gergiev’s gift for staying the course and backing Putin in spite of his widespread cancellation in the West.

Carnegie Hall+

Carnegie Hall+ is a new classical video service that’s now available in the U.S. as an add-on to the Amazon Prime Video service for $8 a month. Right now you can get a 7-day free trial, so I (Will) decided to do just that to see what’s up.

Here’s what’s up: the service offers videos in the following categories: Classical Music, Opera, Dance, and Documentaries. Classical Music (i.e. concert videos) has far and away the largest selection, with something like 230 videos. Opera comes in with 67, Dance with 17, and Documentaries with 22.

Apparently the service has been around for a while, available through other streaming platforms, but the Amazon partnership expands its reach tremendously. From the press release:

“Carnegie Hall+ represents the best in performing arts programming, featuring both new and historic presentations and showcasing many of the finest artists from around the world, all at an affordable price. When watching the channel, subscribers can journey to the Salzburg Festival in Austria, the BBC Proms in London, or watch the Vienna Philharmonic perform in the Golden Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna, plus much more. Hundreds of hours of programming have been specially curated with all arts lovers—from casual viewers to aficionados—in mind.”

Now, if you read carefully, you’ll notice that one major performing arts venue was left off that list: Carnegie Hall! As far as I can tell, among the 300+ offerings on the service, not a single one of them was filmed at the vaunted New York house. I don’t know what to make of that, except to reflect back on my own experiences inside Carnegie Hall, where the ushers will shut you down if you even think about snapping a picture on your phone. Maybe NOBODY’s allowed to record anything inside that space??

Anyway, in my little test drive so far, I’ve watched a production of Suor Angelica with Karita Matilla from the Salzburg Festival and a concert performance of Schubert’s Great C Major symphony with Leonard Bernstein conducting the Bavarian State Orchestra. The Bernstein concert was so incredibly good that it was worth the price of the subscription alone.

Carnegie Hall+ has touted the amount of Bernstein material in its catalog, and indeed there’s quite a bit. I’ve seen most of it before, but not everything, so I think I’ll have to hang on to my subscription until I’ve sucked it all into my eyeballs.

SMT/AMS Conference Report

I (Joey) flew to Denver last week to attend the 2023 Annual Meeting of Society for Music Theory, which was this year a joint meeting with the American Musicological Society. 

First, a brief discourse on the difference between Music Theory and Musicology: Music Theory deals with the analysis of music and theories of musical systems; Musicology deals with the broader cultural/historical study of music. Interestingly, the two disciplines are generally not distinguished outside of North America. Either way, I was privileged to watch a whole bunch of presentations about music from both approaches.

Scholars from across the country, the continent, and even beyond our shores were present, including many prominent academics whose names festoon the articles I’ve been reading since my Masters degree. I bumped into many professors and classmates from my academic studies. So it was a great time from a social point of view, and then, of course, there were the talks!

Each twenty-minute talk was followed by ten minutes of Q&A, and these could get a bit contentious (in the academic manner; no fisticuffs were come to.) Academics really care about their research! I was positively affected by this level of interest; as I told Listener Rebecca (also in attendance, and brilliantly presenting twice in the conference), it was like a Musical Candyland where everyone was interested in engaging with music at a high, thoughtful level.

I attended fascinating sessions on “Perspectives on Rhythm and Meter,” “Harmony in Popular Music,” “Lost and Found: New Work in Ravel Studies,” “Microtonal Listenings,” “A Survey of the Sources of Serialism at its Centenary,” “Puppetry, Music, and National Identity,” “Gospel Music,” and more. 

(Listeners are encouraged to peruse the conference agenda and write in the comments which sessions they would have attended!)

I myself presented a paper at the “Theorizing African American Music” preconference, talking about Ed Bland, the composer whose works are the subject of my dissertation-in-progress. Dr. Phillip Ewell, a professor at Hunter College who has been the cause of some controversy (revisit CGF 22 for more on that), chaired my session and put me to the test with questions of his own during the Q&A.

Next year’s SMT meeting is in Jacksonville, and AMS meets in Chicago. I highly recommend the experience to any lovers of music, since no institutional membership is required to register!

Tone Praise

Kurt Atterberg, Varmlands Rhapsody

I (Will) heard this piece for the first time just a couple weeks ago, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s mostly a brooding orchestral landscape piece, but there’s a sprightly dance tune hiding in the shadows that finally bursts forth about two-thirds of the way through the piece.

I don’t know much Atterberg, but I’ve now listened to this tone poem several times, so I can say from personal experience that it’s an effective way into the composer’s oeuvre.

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