CGF Newsletter 10: Times is Hard
Artistic austerity in the UK, the next big classical movie, and a mysterious maestro
Name That Tune
Here’s your hint: I (Will) just heard this piece for the first time last week, and I found it quite lovely.
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 classicalgabfest@gmail.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing.
Last Week’s Results
CGF Newsletter 9
Charles Marie Widor, Symphonie Antique for Solo Voices, Chorus, Organ and Orchestra (1911)
I seem to have really thrown you guys for a loop last week — as is my wont! Guesses ranged widely, including Enescu, Respighi, and Sarasate (listener Eric) and Yirumi (listener Caspian).
I have to give myself credit for the clue though. Nobody ever thinks of the organ. But if there’s anyone who can be said to have a one-hit wonder with an organ work, it is Widor. Because the organ is so walled off from the rest of the classical music world, it’s possible that some of you don’t know this piece, the toccata from his organ symphony no. 5. It’s a piece that you should get to know though — it’s a total banger!
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.
UK Arts Funding Slashed
If you have artist friends in the UK, please keep them in your prayers, because they have just been dealt a rather horrid blow.
After ascending to the prime ministership on October 24, Rishi Sunak* ordered the government to delay its announcement about the next three-year arts funding cycle for the UK’s 828 “portfolio organizations.” When that delay came to an end on November 4, the government announced a slash-and-burn budget that was even worse than many had feared. According to the BBC:
The English National Opera is to move its headquarters outside London and have a drastic budget cut as part of a major shake-up of English arts funding. The prestigious company will lose its £12.6m core annual grant from Arts Council England, instead getting £17m over three years as part of a plan to relocate, possibly to Manchester [...]
Others to have lost their entire grants include the Donmar Warehouse theatre. The Royal Opera House will lose £2.9m a year, the Southbank Centre will be cut by £1.9m and the National Theatre will be reduced by £850,000.
Part of me wants to like Rishi Sunak because he has many qualities I admire; he is, after all, a teetotaling, vegetarian fashionista. But at heart, sadly, he’s a rich asshole Tory.
[How is it that I can maintain my abiding love for the British monarchy and besmirch the foot soldiers that maintain their inequitable power? People are complicated.]
More on this story from the New York Times
Chevalier Trailer Drops
Just when we’re barely out of the last classical movie hype cycle, the next one has begun, and this one’s a doozy: a biopic of Joseph Boulogne, aka the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, a 19th-century composer who was the mixed-race son of a wealthy French planter and his enslaved Black servant in Guadalupe.
I gotta say, the trailer makes me nervous. It looks to be a highly fictionalized / stylized account that is loaded down with ahistorical 21st-century politics. Note here that I am not talking about 21st-century morality — if you dig below the surface of historical accounts of earlier centuries, you’ll find that there was plenty of morality that we would recognize quite upstanding indeed, and I think it’s great to see that depicted in contemporary culture.
I also think that it’s possible to successfully play with anachronisms in historical fiction. My two favorite movies of the past decade are The Favourite and The Little Hours, and they both do that in spades. Or even consider Mozart’s punkish orange and pink wigs in Amadeus. I haven’t watched it, but by all accounts, Bridgerton also falls into this category.
But this movie — at least from the trailer — looks suspicious to me. Part of the problem might be the trailer music. It heavily implies that the classical music in the film is going to get a kind of hip-hop update. And maybe you could do a good movie with that conceit, but you’d really have to lean into it and have a ton of fun (alla Hamilton.) But from what I can see in this trailer, it’s looking like the beats are just a bait-and-switch tactic for people who might find the acoustic flavor of original Boulogne less than thrilling.
But hey, that’s just one guy’s review of a 2-minute trailer! I would be very interested to read comments from you all about this.
This Just In: Basic Bitch Enjoys Other Basic Bitch
Couldn’t help myself. 😈
Who is Don Baton?
This week in possibly-problematic classical podcasts, I introduce you to the pseudonymous Don Baton, a fellow Substacker billing his “The Podium” newsletter as “ the only place where a working orchestra conductor will tell you what he really thinks.” Oh boy.
Here’s his pitch:
Like most of the culture, the classical music world is divided into a small group of activist “woke” believers and a larger group of reasonable people terrified of being publicly denounced.
In the last few years, the former group has forced the latter, as well as the concertgoing public, to accept that undistinguished composers no one had heard of until last year are better than Beethoven; that the canon of great art we all venerate owes its existence to a “white racial frame,” and that the blind audition process for orchestras perpetuates “systemic racism,” among numerous other absurdities.
I was made aware of Maestro Baton’s presence in the world via a podcast recommendation from a Classical Gabfest Listener, who pointed me to the Don’s appearance on the Glenn Loury podcast (feat. friend of the Gabfest John McWhorter.)
I don’t disagree with everything Don Baton has to say, but as is always the case with the anti-woke crowd, it’s a question of what issues you choose to devote your time and energy to. In DB’s case, his mission is to defend the classical music industry from the danger of bad female and minority conductors and composers. Are there bad female and minority conductors and composers out there? There most certainly are. But why make this your thing?
It seems to me that Don Baton and his ilk presume that prior to the MeToo / George Floyd reckonings, things were going along just fine, and white males were competing against each other on an even playing field of perfect meritocracy.
But I am here to tell you — as a white male — that the zone has always been flooded with mediocrity. The world of orchestral music is by and large a flimflam game. Conducting and composing are both realms in which con artists can thrive as long as they believe their own bullshit enough, and there’s a thriving industry of managers, image consultants, and arts administrators who are more than happy to go along for the ride.
Fifty years ago, the people in charge of the classical music industrial complex were telling us that Pierre Boulez and Milton Babbitt were better than Beethoven. In Beethoven’s era, they were telling us that Cherubini was better than Beethoven. It’s simply the way of the world, and if Don Baton is just noticing that mediocrity saturates our field because women and Black people are making inroads, I think he may be telling on himself.
My question to the Dons Baton of the world is this: rather than railing against groups of people who have not had access to the training, exposure, or opportunity that an even smaller privileged minority (white men) have enjoyed, why not devote your efforts to promoting the artists that you do believe in, regardless of their race or gender? I promise you, you’ll be doing a greater service to your art, your profession, and indeed to posterity itself.
Classical Mixtape
William Billings, “Bethlehem” (Anonymous 4)
I have been the rehearsal pianist for a couple of choruses in recent months, and have thusly been rediscovering the joys of the choral repertoire (a world of its own with heights as high as any of the orchestral world). In the school chorus I accompany, the director has programmed this fugueing tune of early American composer William Billings. When we first read it in September I was delighted, because this particular number was on a Christmas CD that I listened to every year for the entire month of December from ages 0-18. Turns out, that’s the kind of experience that will indoctrinate you — now I consider this American’s shoddy Bach imitation to be absolutely top-tier music.
—Joey
NTT: This was quite lovely, very lush strings and nice extended harmonies with an Americana/slight blues influence. My bucket will be Still, Gershwin, and Ellington.
Chevalier trailer: I maybe wouldn't say this trailer makes me *nervous* per se, but I understand your qualms. Generally, the dearth of reasonable classical music dramaturgy in even the best media of its kind (Tár, e.g.) makes me hesitate to watch a film the subject. And I don't think that kind of accuracy was/is front of mind for these creators anyway, based on some of the music (that violin slide) in the trailer. It will hopefully be a cool way to introduce people to the vague concept of Joseph Bologne, who truly was remarkable by all accounts.
Btw Will, a hip-hop update?? You should go listen to current hip hop if you think that trailer music was hip-hop!! ;)
Amazing comments on Don Baton - not much else to add but that the first sentence of his pitch is comically persecution-delusional.