Name That Tune
This week’s Name That Tune is a Maestro Will special. Here’s your hint: this excerpt is by a well-known composer, and comes from a major work which has been almost entirely forgotten, but I played it in college.
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 46
Stravinsky, 4 Etudes, op. 7
I was the only one who guessed, and I guessed right!
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.
A Barbie World
This video is incredible. It’s by a young Catelan composer / arranger / pianist named Josep Castanyer Alonso who also happens to be a cellist in the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic (!!) Mad props to him for getting in on the Barbie craze and doing such a bang-up job on every single element of this video, from the arranging to the explaining to the optical illusions (be sure to watch to the end.)
Visionary
Believe it or not, trouble is brewing in Bayreuth! Quoth the New York Times:
The American director Jay Scheib was looking at a bank of monitors inside the Bayreuth Festival Theater on a recent afternoon. [...] the screens showed three-dimensional flowers floating through blank space — psychedelic animations that will come to life for audience members who see them with augmented-reality glasses.
Through those glasses, Scheib said, the flowers, and other items during the performance, will appear to float through the auditorium.
...
[P]lans to outfit nearly 2,000 audience members with the glasses for each performance were downscaled because of an apparent money dispute between the festival’s artistic and financial leadership. The compromise, in which only 330 attendees will be provided with the glasses to experience the production’s signature flourishes, has left many fuming[.]
I think we can say with some confidence that Arthur Schopenhauer would not approve either way.
The State of the Arts
I’ve read three grim takes on the state of the performing arts recently, and while I always prefer to keep this newsletter upbeat (ironic coming from a guy who devoted two weeks to Schopenhauer) I can’t help but take note of the darkening clouds.
This essay in VAN is written by a professional singer who works with art song and opera companies in Britain:
I think people are absolutely disappearing from the profession, especially freelancers. People talking about retraining—I’ve had conversations with friends going, you know, after COVID and then this, people are really exhausted. I’m in a very privileged position right now work-wise, but people five years younger than me and younger have hardly been allowed to get their careers started, because of both COVID and constant cuts.
I’m a lot more fortunate than a lot of people, but I don’t know what the next 12 to 18 months will necessarily look like.
From an article in the Gray Lady about the arts more broadly (mainly focussing on theater):
The coronavirus pandemic and its aftermath have left the industry in crisis. Interviews with 72 top-tier regional theaters located outside New York City reveal that they expect, in aggregate, to produce 20 percent fewer productions next season than they did in the last full season before the pandemic, which shuttered theaters across the country, in many cases for 18 months or more. And many of the shows that they are programming will have shorter runs, smaller casts and simpler sets.
Seattle’s ACT Theater has reduced the length of each show’s run by a week. In Los Angeles, the Geffen Playhouse will no longer schedule performances on Tuesdays, its slowest night. Philadelphia’s Arden Theater Company expects to give 363 performances next season, down from 503 performances the season before the pandemic.
Why is this happening? Costs are up, the government assistance that kept many theaters afloat at the height of the pandemic has mostly been spent, and audiences are smaller than they were before the pandemic, a byproduct of shifting lifestyles (less commuting, more streaming), some concern about the downtown neighborhoods in which many large nonprofit theaters are situated (worries about public safety), and broken habits (many former patrons, particularly older people, have not returned).
Some artistic directors believe that programming is partly at fault — that some theaters have turned off audiences by choosing shows that are too downbeat or preachily political.
And finally, this from Douglas McLennan in ArtsJournal:
We often talk about non-profit arts as if they’re a separate discrete universe. They’re not. As Andrew Taylor likes to point out – there’s only one business model – the one that supports what you’re trying to do. If you’re a theatre company right now, costs are likely up ~30 percent and ticket sales are down ~30 percent. Other non-profit art forms report versions of these numbers. Non-profit arts are caught in the same dynamics as for-profit culture, just on a smaller scale (millions of dollars instead of billions). The audience no longer makes distinctions between high and low or commercial versus non-profit. So non-profit is facing the same scale and abundance issues commercial culture is, but with more limited tools. Plus, the non-profit model has been slow to evolve whereas commercial culture is more nimble at reinventing the basics of their business model.
I have but two comments:
Even if things are going well for you as a musician, it’s really important to stay aware of the broader trends in the art form and the arts more broadly. We all have to adapt, often on short notice.
Things seem gloomy right now, but you never know when the mood—and indeed, the fundamentals—are going to shift. So stay on your toes everyone!
Classical Mixtape
Michel-Richard DeLalande, Symphonies pour les Soupers du Roy
I have greatly enjoyed working my way through this five-hour compilation of orchestral music by the fifth-most-famous early 18th-century French composer (Lully, Couperin, Rameau, Marais being nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively—Jean-Marie Leclair being the sixth.)
These symphonies are rendered with effervescent creativity by the early music ensemble La Simphonie du Marais and their leader Hugo Reyne. The set starts off with pure Handelian pomp (what could be better?) but along the way, you get to hear toy birds, bagpipes, and even baroque xylophone!
The Classical Gabfest Newsletter is a spin-off of the now-defunct Classical Gabfest Podcast. It is a co-production of William White, Joseph Vaz, and the Listeners (i.e. you.)
NTT: exclusively strings - possibly a string orchestra. Strong tonality in the mid-19th century style - I'm going to go with (Robert) Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, and just in case it's some kind of twisted joke, Mahler.