Week 2: 9 October 2023 – Trinity 19
Plus: "Prelude to What?", Modern Times turns 10, "new" Jonathan Crary and more!
We continue to recognize that Bond Chapel is situated in the traditional homeland and native territory of the Three Fires Confederacy—the Potawatomi, Odawa and Ojibwe Nations—as well as other groups including the Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Miami, Peoria, and Sac and Fox. We resmember their forced removal and dispossession, but also remember to speak of these groups in the present tense, as Chicago continues to be resound with tens of thousands of Native voices.
This week, I’ve been enjoying some music by Natasha Fisher, a Toronto-based Ojibwe singer-songwriter who combines electronic pop/R&B with Native imagery in some really fascinating ways. Juxtaposing the lyrics and the music video for this song makes me wonder if the lying boyfriend in question might not be a metaphor for something bigger….
Week 2: 9 October 2023 – Trinity 19
Please save applause for the end of each set
Prelude in A minor, BWV 569
Wo soll ich fliehen hin, BWV 646
Ach Gott und Herr, BWV 714
Vater unser Himmelreich, BWV 682
Vater unser im Himmelreich, BWV 683
Vater unser im Himmelreich, BWV 737
Vater unser im Himmelreich, BWV 636
Wo soll ich fliehen hin, BWV 694
Prelude and Fugue in C, BWV 531
I’ll have more to say about the genre of “Prelude [and Fugue]” below, but for now let me discuss the two on this program together. In some way, these pieces give two complementary versions of what an organ Prelude can be. If (to preempt the discussion below) “Prelude” is associated with “improvisation,” then both of these Preludes represent the kind of improvisation that takes an idea and obsesses over it, playing it over and over in different variations and combinations.
For the A-minor Prelude, that idea is the musical scale: practically the entire piece is composed of sequences in which the same music is repeated on different notes of the scale, typically marching inexorably downward. The effect is almost like being on a roller coaster. Once an idea stops and a new one shows up, you know what you’re in for over the next six or eight measures, as the music slides harmonically downhill. On the way, there are S-curves and loops, startlingly dissonant passages or strange harmonies that disorient you and swing the car in sometimes wildly different directions. There are relatively few dramatic pauses or moments of jaw-dropping virtuosity in this piece; instead Bach has concentrated the drama in these shocking harmonic twists, without much room to breathe.
By contrast, the C-major Prelude (and its fugue) is built on arpeggios, on music that harps repeatedly on the three notes of a single chord. From the opening pedal solo (there’s our show-off Bach!) through its echo in the hands—i.e. for almost the first half of the Prelude—practically all you hear is a C major chord. All of the excitement comes from speed, from how the music stomps its way across the entire range of the instrument, and from the evocation of string bands and military fanfares. Scale-based writing (sequences) do show up later, and they dominate the fugue, but with more of a feeling of mechanical churning than roller-coaster disorientation. And velocity completely takes over the piece at the end of both the Prelude and the Fugue, as the music bursts into flames with torrents of thirty-second notes. Without the chromatic pungency or driving obsession of the A-minor BWV 569, Bach has managed to create an equally striking and dramatic take on the Prelude form.
Conveniently, this week’s program revisits the same three books of chorale preludes as last week. Like last week’s “Kommst du nun,” this first setting of “Wo soll ich fliehen hin” comes from the Schübler Chorales, the set of six Bach “cantata” movements that may or may not have been arranged for organ by J.S. himself. At least, we think that the chorales all came from cantata movements: there’s no known source for this one, although Bach did write another cantata on this chorale (BWV 5) for Trinity 19. Certainly, the music sounds for all the world like string writing, with possibly a (very busy!) cello in the left hand playing against a violin in the right. In typical Bach fashion, the two string parts trade off with the same bits of melody, which in turn is derived from the notes of the hymn tune played in long notes in the pedal. But this derivation can be quite loose: since the hymn begins by going up and then back down a scale, this gives Bach all the excuse he needs to flip his accompanying melodies upside down.
The same principle (two parts trading off playing the same melody) is also the basis for the next two chorale preludes. Both are constructed as canons, which is to say that the hymn melody is repeated exactly in both of the voices that play it, with only tiny adjustments. And, in both cases, this description does practically nothing to prepare you for what the actual piece sounds like—the canon principle is just a starting point.
“Ach Gott und Herr,” like “Wo soll ich fliehen hin,” is a chorale for Trinity 19, and both hymn texts are concerned with escaping from sin. (Not the cheeriest program this week—it gets even more intense!) In the version from the Neumeister Chorales, which I’m playing here, the first half or so of the piece only vaguely hints at the chorale tune, instead giving an extended and somber meditation that’s reminiscent almost of Frescobaldi’s communion toccatas from 70 years earlier. As written, this music is quite spare, but also harshly dissonant, and purposefully using keys/chords that were never quite in tune on organs of Bach’s day. (The Reneker organ approximates some of this disorienting tuning; more on that in a future week.) Then, when Bach finally introduces the chorale tune in canon, the music speeds up just a tiny bit, but keeping much of the same harshness and Spartan texture that characterized the first half. It’s a remarkably intense and unusual piece, especially for a young Bach who was relatively new to composition. Or was he more likely to write such unique music before he settled down into artistic routines?
The answer may be “yes,” but the first of this week’s four setting of the Lord’s prayer (“Vater unser”) is just as exceptional, and even more intense. Placed at the center of the Clavierübung III collection, this piece combines strict, old-fashioned and “intellectual” musical techniques (the chorale melody is played in canon, one version in each hand) with hallmarks of fashionable and foreign styles (the snappy rhythms are characteristic of French flute music) with chromaticism and musical figures that were then associated with grief and sin. You can come up with your own theological interpretations of this heady mix; the only detail I’ll add is that the piece’s climactic moment—when the pedal finally joins in with the snappy rhythms—occurs at exactly measure number 41, and 41 is the total you get when adding up the numerical values of the letters JS BACH in German Baroque fashion.
This week’s remaining chorales, including BWV 682’s keyboard-only companion in the Clavierübung III (BWV 683), offer a bit of a break from all this intensity. Bach genuinely seems to have liked the “Vater unser” chorale, or at least he managed to figure out a very pretty basic harmonization of it; and BWV 683 is a particularly gorgeous version, supporting the tune with a billowing cushion of sixteenths in a gigue-like feel. While BWV 737 returns to the stricter, more old-fashioned way of treating the tune, BWV 636, from the Orgelbüchlein, gives what is essentially a highly ornamented hymn verse. Although it has some intricate counterpoint of its own, this short chorale lets the tune sing out to great effect.
As a kind of bookend, I’ve put Bach’s other surviving organ version of “Wo soll ich fliehen hin” at the end of this set. (And before the circus and sawdust of the final Prelude and Fugue.) Same tune as BWV 646, and if your memory can reach back past the intervening pieces, you may hear a lot of similar ideas: tune in the pedals, busy string-like parts in the hands, even including some of the same melodic and rhythmic motives. (Although, because of the left hand’s enormous range, I doubt anybody would suggest that this is also a lost cantata movement.) Half of the fun of putting all the versions of each chorale on the same program is to hear Bach at work like this: trying on different variations on the same idea and different executions of the same technique.
Prelude to What?
“To a fugue, of course!”
—Not for BWV 569!
An eagle-eyed audience member last week asked about the phrase “the works now known as cantatas”; to add to the mystery, I also scarequoted “cantata” above. What gives? (And why is this relevant?)
Around 1700, the German theorist Erdmann Neumeister (not that Neumeister) defined a cantata as a work that “resembles exactly a piece from an opera.” In a strictly formal way, this isn’t a bad match for Bach’s “cantatas,” which usually have sequences of arias and recitatives at their cores. But, then as now, “opera” would have conjured up a number of images that don’t match Bach’s church music so easily: Italy, fashion, the secular world. Bach and his contemporaries rarely used the word “cantata” themselves; Bach’s only published “cantata,” for instance (BWV 71), was labeled “Motetto” on the title page. (“Sacred concerto” was another popular term, where genre labels were used at all.)
I’m told that there are in fact reasonable historical reasons to keep using the term “cantata,” including how Bach’s shorter sacred choral works relate to later works that did call themselves cantata. Still, the point remains: the titles we use nowadays for Bach’s music are often somewhat different from what he or his contemporaries would have said.1
Back to “Prelude and Fugue” now. You’ve probably guessed that this is, in fact, not, the title used by Bach for these pieces. The oldest manuscripts I can easily find2 for this week’s pieces (and last week’s BWV 550, for good measure) simply say “Präludium” or “Preludio” at the top. (Well, they actually say things like “Preludium pedaliter” or “Preludio pro organo” but you get the idea.) If they say “Fugue” at all, it’s at the beginning of the relevant section. In other words, the idea is not “Prelude and Fugue” (and certainly not “Prelude to a Fugue”), but a “Prelude” that includes a fugue.
Or more than one. By the time of Bach’s childhood, North German organists like Buxtehude typically constructed their Præludia in five parts: free, fugue, free, fugue, free. (Bach uses this format too, in pieces like BWV 566.) As far as I can tell, nobody has tried to call these “Prelude and Fugue and Prelude and Fugue and Postlude.” Or even “Preludes and Fugues,” “Prelude and Fugues” etc.
Part of this, I imagine, is the influence of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, which is described as a collections of Preludes and Fugues on Bach’s handwritten title pages. Although, even in those pieces (take the E-flat major Prelude from Book 1, BWV 852), the Preludes can adopt more of the “organ” format, and include fugues in themselves. But the idea of Prelude and Fugue as a “form” in two “movements” has surely been shaped by this collection, one of the primary ways that listeners and musicians are exposed to Bach.
I’ve probably made it clear that I find this misleading. And not just for the organ pieces: the preludes in the Well-Tempered Claviers are not “preludes to the fugues.” They are independent pieces, equal counterparts. For sure, Preludes always go first. You wouldn’t place the Preludes from the English Suites in the middle of the suite. But that’s not so much because they sometimes have an “introductory” nature, but because they are written in Italian style instead of French—and because they are by far the most substantial movements of the suites.
Then what’s up with the name? Terms like “Prelude” (præambulum etc.) were used for freely composed organ music for two and a half centuries before Bach. The original sense probably was something like “a [simulated] improvisation before something else,” but over the centuries, “prelude” came to mean something closer to improvisation or free composition itself. Prelude became a verb: Jacques Hotteterre published an Art de préluder for flute in 1719, and as late as the mid-twentieth century, “preluding” was still something that pianists did between pieces on a recital.
Maybe think of the word like “entrée” on an American menu. Does it make sense that this word has come to mean “the main event of the meal”? It’s a bit strange, but that’s what it means now, and most of us (even French speakers) probably don’t find it odd until it’s pointed out. Preludes are the main course, and the fugues, when they exist, are part of the dish. (Side dishes? Probably shouldn’t stretch this metaphor too far.)
This is part of why so many of these pieces exist under multiple titles. Cataloguers and encyclopedists used to like to try their best to separate out “Preludes and Fugues” from “Toccatas and Fugues,” “Fantasias and Fugues,” etc. but many of these pieces circulated under any or all of these titles during Bach’s lifetime. A prelude is as much of an independent piece as a toccata or fantasy (and, conversely, the latter are not souped-up preludes).
OK, but what’s this term “chorale prelude” you keep throwing around?
This one’s even weirder. There are pieces by Bach and other composers that are meant to be “preludes to chorales.” We could even call the first half of “Ach Gott und Herr” a “Prelude.” But not a “chorale prelude”: typically, such pieces are understood to be hymn (chorale) introductions, ways of introducing the tune for the congregation before everybody sings. And as that’s interpreted now, a chorale prelude is simply any organ piece (if it’s not too long) that’s based on a chorale.
I have two main issues with this definition. One is that this implies that the pieces are “functional” in a way that I don’t fully buy. The tunes that Bach wrote the most chorale preludes on are some of the most common and well-known tunes: the Gloria (“Allein Gott”), the Lord’s Prayer (“Vater unser”), Liebster Jesu etc. No congregation would have needed any kind of help remembering these tunes. The only reason to have a full introduction to these hymns would have been simply to extend them, to add variety, and to let the congregation dwell in their musical world for a couple minutes longer.
The other issue is that a huge number of the pieces that we commonly call “chorale preludes” are patently not meant to be played before or in between verses of a hymn. The longest of these pieces can stretch for almost as long as the hymn itself would; and in many of the slower ones, the tune is so heavily ornamented that it’s hard to recognize even for those who do know it already. So, when they’re being careful, scholars will carefully distinguish between “chorale preludes” and “chorale fantasies” (even “chorale fugues”), and speak more generally about “organ chorales.” Bach and other composers of his time wouldn’t have called many of these pieces “chorale prelude.”
But maybe the modern terminology actually fine. One of the nice things about adopting the term “chorale prelude” is that it sets these pieces up as counterparts to “Preludes [and Fugues].” And if we loosen up our notion of Preludes, moving away from “piece that goes before” to “free pieces,” maybe we can reinterpret our term “chorale prelude” to mean “chorale improvisation.” “My take on this chorale.” Just as much as Preludes [and Fugues], these pieces are, or can be, the main dish.
“What else is our life but a series of preludes?”—Princess Carolyne zu Sayn–Wittgenstein
What I’m listening to
This week there was a good new song from IVE (nothing from Doja Cat, sadly), but let’s start off instead with:
Igor Levit – Fantasia
I have a lot of affection for Levit, a pianist with a penchant for recording huge chunks of repertoire, and who has a particularly broad range: he typically releases double or even triple albums, at a pace of almost one per year.3 (Even a complete Beethoven Sonatas survey couldn’t slow him down!) And it doesn’t hurt that he especially seems to like piano arrangements of organ repertoire, including not only mammoth Romantic showpieces like Liszt’s Ad nos Fantasy, but also Bach, including chorale preludes.4
This album, too, takes Bach as its starting point. And ending point: the climax is Busoni’s Fantasia Contrappuntistica, a piece built around the Art of Fugue. To get from point A to point B, Levit goes through a typically eclectic range of music, linking Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue to the piano sonatas by Liszt and Berg.
This pairing makes it hard for me not to hear Levit’s album in dialogue with Hélène Grimaud’s Resonances from 2010. Swap out Mozart and Bartók for Bach and Busoni,5 and you’re left with the same chronological trajectory and the same Liszt and Berg in the middle. If this is a coincidence, it’s an unfortunate one for Levit, at least to my ear—Grimaud’s intensity and slightly unhinged energy make her Romantic and post-Romantic music really leave an impression. (Her recent Brahms and Schumann disk may be my favorite of the year so far.) By comparison, Levit can sound analytical and almost cold.
That’s of course unfair to Levit, who I’m sure feels this music as deeply as anyone. I like his rhythmic flair and crisp articulations, especially in the fugue of the Liszt. And I appreciate the speed and volume that he’s willing and able to play at—although, his octaves are often so fast and played with such ease that they can stop feeling massive and instead sound strangely hollow.6 Levit’s sound is often gorgeous and always clear. Still, there’s just some sense of “fire” that I miss in the Romantic selections. It’s almost like I can hear too much thinking.
And Levit has definitely thought hard about his interpretation of these pieces. To stick with the Liszt, and to get in the weeds for a moment: this must be the only recording I’ve heard that has a D-natural instead of a D-sharp during the final statement of the theme:
(If the timestamp doesn’t work, the passage begins at about 8:44.)
This changes the final statement from major to minor, completely altering the character of the ending. At first I just thought this was a mistake (the most obvious and easily correctable mistake in the history of piano records?), but then I finally turned up a source for this D-natural, from a footnote in Alfred Cortot’s edition:
So, Ferté heard from Risler, who maybe heard from Klindworth, who maybe heard from Liszt, that this note should be a D-natural. It’s not the most secure chain of transmission, and Cortot points out the care Liszt otherwise took with this piece’s sources. And, to quote his final paragraph:
On the other hand, the ideological feeling which seems to govern here the metamorphosis of the themes…makes us desire the D-sharp as giving to a more ecstatic expression of abandonment at the confines of the unreal than would be appropriate for the minor inflection, [which is] reminiscent of a disorder that the spirit of the composition no longer includes.
I guess Levit appreciates a final reminder of this spirit of “disorder.”
In any case, Levit really shines (as usual) in the twentieth-century repertoire. This must be the best recording of Busoni’s Fantasia (not trying to denigrate John Ogdon’s classic version), which Levit is able to make sense of, play with startling clarity, and occasionally make exciting. (I said I like the recording, not the piece!) Maybe he was saving himself in the Liszt and the Berg to give the album more of an arc: here, he draws some really gigantic sounds out of the piano, as well as delicate and shimmering ones, all integrated into a remarkably cohesive “plot” for the piece as a whole. If you don’t know this piece (who does?), the album is worth it just to hear what Levit can do with it alone.
Concert/Films
As promised, I went to see Jonathan Demme/The Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense last week. I also went to see CHAI on Monday, and was lucky enough to be able to take my class along for the ride.
The Talking Heads have to be one of the ultimate “you had to be there” bands. Aside from a handful of really good songs, most of their music has always sounded to me like a canvas for live performances: endless, somewhat aimless grooves that could be exciting to improvise over or do weird onstage aerobics routines to, but kind of…boring if you haven’t seen them live. (I certainly prefer Angelique Kidjo’s version of Remain in Light for integrating more of this energy into the actual studio version.)
The film definitely does something to showcase what these performances were like, with all of their carefully planned chaos, instrumental enthusiasm, and bizarrely compelling dancing. But partly because Stop Making Sense is such a good film—so tightly edited, so well-shot and lit, so carefully designed for sound—it still doesn’t really help me feel like I was “there.” It might be, at least for people like me, that the Talking Heads will largely depend going forward on your powers of imagination, on trying to get a feel for “what it must have been like” without ever being sure that you can possibly experience it yourself.
I wonder if people will be saying similar things about CHAI in forty years. I certainly hope that they get a Jonathan Demme to film them, because their live shows are really something to behold (even this clip doesn’t really give a good sense for their vaguely deranged stage presence):
I like the studio version of this song, and I like their first two albums in general “as albums.” The more recent two albums not so much—but both times I’ve seen CHAI live, the recent albums have dominated the setlists, and I’ve loved every second. Not just for the insane costumes (pink jumpsuits and squid-like headdresses this time) or Mana’s manic energy (like David Byrne, she literally ran around the stage in circles at one point), but for what their live performances awaken in music that, by itself, can sound dreamy verging on soporific. Listen to them for sure (especially PUNK) but know: you had to be there.
Peso Pluma (feat. Jasiel Nuñez and Junior H) – “BIPOLAR”
I’m a bit late to this (although I think it only started charting on the Hot 100 last week?) and I’m also not the person you need to be hearing about Peso Pluma from. But I just wanted to register my appreciation for this song, which is a pretty significant departure in terms of both lyrics and music. I like his music as much as anyone, but his particular version of pop norteños and corridos can get very samey very quickly: the songs are mostly in the same key,7 at almost the same BPM, with similar brass+guitars instrumentation, a similar lyric persona, similar melodic gestures, similar riffs…. Meanwhile, “BIPOLAR” (like some of the late tracks on GÉNESIS) slows things down, does more with studio sound effects, and offers a more confessional style of lyrics. I’m not sure I want a whole album of ballads or anything, but I’m excited to see what other directions Peso Pluma can go in. (If he manages to avoid irritating cartels anymore than he has already.)
Avra Banerjee – Manoyatri
Another fusion project, and one I really loved listening to. Banerjee’s album sticks relatively (relatively!) close to Hindustani classical music as its musical “frame,” usually integrating the rock instruments into the texture at the beginning of each track and then having them “branch out” or “take over” the music later on. The result is a combination of fascinating atmospheric effects (the piano and synths at the beginning of “Yamuna Yearnings”!) with virtuosic singing and playing and a smoothly integrated combination of styles.
Modern Times Turns 10
Modern Times, released 10 years ago this October 8th, is the K-pop album I always recommend to people who I don’t think will ever really like K-pop—or any kind of pop music, honestly. No dance-pop; mostly acoustic instruments; no rapping; no cutesy concepts. And yet it’s an album that practically everybody agrees is one of the genre’s very best.8 (It would probably make #1 on more lists if f(x) hadn’t gone and released Pink Tape a couple months earlier.)
A couple of times I’ve come to regret this recommendation, because the person in question liked the album too much: “is there more stuff like this?” And there isn’t really: there’s no other recent artist I’m aware of who manages to pull off excellent pop versions of samba, rumba, bossa nova, Dixieland, orchestral big band, Hot Club de France jazz, coffeeshop ballads, and nu-jazz on the same album.9 And I don’t even mean in K-pop; I’m not really enamored with almost any of the “neo-traditional” jazz-inspired music that’s been made in my lifetime. For a particularly unfair comparison, take Laufey, the Internet’s favorite “new jazz”/bossa nova artist:
This is about as wide-awake as Laufey’s music gets, and it still goes practically nowhere: a nice beat, gorgeous voice, decent tune, and then basically nothing happens. It’s “vibes music”—the kind of thing you hear on TikTok as the audible backdrop to something more interesting. Now listen to “Obliviate” from Modern Times:
I probably don’t need to belabor the point; it’s pretty clear how much more is going on in this song, both in terms of writing and production. The percussion is sharper, her voice goes through a far wider dynamic range, the song has a real arc to it, and the guitar solo is a fun and unexpected jolt.
Still, even if Modern Times has my favorite “new versions” of so many of these genres (and Park Juwon’s guitar playing on “Love of B”10 is, to my taste, about as exciting and groovy an example of Hot Club jazz as most of Django Reinhardt’s originals), I don’t think that would be a sufficient explanation for what makes it so special, why it’s received so much acclaim, and why it succeeded in a music industry that is largely dominated by good dance-pop and mediocre R&B.
For me, the tracks that best illustrate this appeal are on the album’s B-side—and, paradoxically, they’re the less popular songs. “Walk With Me, Girl,” for instance, is often singled out in English-language reviews as the album’s weakest track:
And yet the very thing that these reviewers dislike—the sudden intrusion of Choi Baek-ho’s old-fashioned (and more “Korean” or “traditional”) vocal timbre—is precisely what makes this track work. Frankly, I don’t think anybody should care if a K-pop artist was able to put together a successful facsimile of a Western musical genre; that’s practically all K-pop is to begin with, and there’s nothing more inherently worth listening to in a Django Reinhardt imitation than in a (excellent!) rewrite of A-ha’s “Take On Me.” Rather, the joy of this album (and of so much of the best K-pop) is in how it puts genres and styles in a blender to produce a familiar, but novel result. There’s no style of jazz or film music that ever sounded quite like lead single “The Red Shoes” (yes, it’s a reference to Powell and Pressburger):
And Dixieland jazz certainly never sounded like “Modern Times” (yes, she’s singing about “Mr. Chaplin”):
So, pairing Choi Baek-Ho’s vibrato and gravelly voice with IU’s sweet vocals is completely of a piece with this spirit of fusion, of careful picking and choosing from older styles, of taking whatever works musically. And his singing, just like that of folk singer Yang Hee-eun on “Daydream” can also inspire IU to do new things with her own voice:
Just like Jonghyun’s version of coffeeshop-style vocals can inspire singing and instrumental choices that help “A Gloomy Clock” avoid turning into a sleep aid:
Let me zoom out just a bit to end. It’s fairly common to compare IU to Taylor Swift, and I won’t deny that there’s overlap in their fanbases.11 The comparison makes sense in terms of popularity (in their respective countries), age, and in how they’ve shifted styles over the course of their careers; both started out as teenagers, and had to struggle to break away from that image. Still, the comparison has never quite sat right with me. It’s a bit unfair to Swift, who at least publicly projects that she writes both music and lyrics for her songs; while IU has written her own lyrics and much of her own music in the albums after Modern Times, she’s always been happy to give her composers, producers, and songwriters full credit for the music they write. And in any case, the comparison is definitely unfair to IU, who is known for public acts of charity, fanservice, helping promote younger artists, and not writing most of her songs about perceived personal slights and ex-boyfriends.
I think (post-2011) Lady Gaga is a better comparison, and Modern Times is part of why. They both earned acclaim for acting. Both started out with one particular kind of pop music image, only to move past it as their career developed. And both, above all, are respected by a wide range of audiences thanks to their appreciation for older artists and styles of music. Ten years ago, it would have been hard to predict that no obituary of Tony Bennett would leave out his collaborations with Lady Gaga; I wonder if the same may not end up being true of Choi Baek-ho. And, in a fun coincidence, the first Bennett/Gaga album Cheek to Cheek appeared in 2014, the year of Modern Times’ successor, A Flower Bookmark. The success of Modern Times is what made it possible for IU to make these albums of acoustic remakes, which in turn boosted her to the cross-generational and cross-genre popularity that she enjoys today. And the presence of these retro experiments at the very center of K-pop’s commercial popularity has been a crucial precedent for later artists to take chances with their own music. Modern Times is a watershed. What’s not to love?
Also liked, but I’ve written too much already…
Wolfgang Muthspiel – Dance of the Elders
Easymind – Cells Impact
Allison Miller – Rivers In Our Veins
Sufjan Stevens – Javelin
What I’m reading
I finally got my hands on a copy of Jonathan Crary’s new book. Crary’s writing is always something I look forward to, since he pairs a passionate writing style and perceptive eye with a very imaginative ability to connect trends in art to broader forces in society. He may not be right about all the details (I’m given to understand that some of the science in Techniques of the Observer is either cherry-picked or distorted), but it’s just plain fun to read somebody who’s willing to make such wild connections. (Luckily for everybody involved, I don’t need to summarize his prior work here, since Hal Foster’s review of Tricks of the Light does an excellent, almost didactic job of that. But should Foster have mentioned that he’s thanked by name in Crary’s Acknowledgments?)
The new book, Tricks of the Light, is mostly not actually a new book, since it’s a volume of collected essays. But it certainly puts Crary’s work in a new light, at least for people like me (non art-historians?) who only know him through his published monographs and editorship of Zone Books. Frankly, I didn’t realize that Techniques was published over 15 years into Crary’s academic career. And while it was clear that his two books on nineteenth-century art and visual culture were “directed at” late-twentieth-century concerns, I had never read his writing on (Post-)Modernism.
Most of the book consists of short essays, especially exhibition-catalog material. These essays are great fun if you like the artist in question; I loved reading his discussions of Rem Koolhaas, Bridget Riley, and Ed Ruscha in particular. The essay on Duchamp’s Passage from Virgin to Bride helped me understand some things about a painting that I’ve never really been able to get a handle on. And above all, the essays on film, especially Cronenberg (e.g. “Psychopathways”), are both sparkling pieces of criticism and fascinating meditations on film in general. (“Dr. Mabuse and Mr. Edison” in particular goes far beyond film, in ways only Crary can pull off.)
Some of the book’s best writing on film also comes in the few longer-form essays, which often constitute complements to his book projects. (It’s quite impressive that Crary managed to avoid having these essays simply be proto-versions of the books.) If there’s one single chapter to read, it’s surely “Eclipse of the Spectacle,” one of the many essays obsessed with television that nonetheless manages to sound like it’s talking about social media in 2023. Even if the essay is from 1984, the analysis of General Hospital on page 103 could practically be a description of the trope-obsessed world of BookTok. Despite being about a media environment that in many ways has vanished, the essays in this book have remained remarkably vital and relevant.
A few others:
Vittles – What is British Jewish food, really?
Elle – Sign Language Is Often Glamorized. So Why Isn’t Accessibility Taken More Seriously?
VAN – Out of Hand
Noema – Penelope the Rat
Thanks for reading, and for listening if you can make it on Monday!
This much, I guess, is obvious to art historians, who are used to calling older European paintings by descriptive titles (Rest on the Flight into Egypt) that weren’t given by the artists, and which have often been conventionalized in somewhat arbitrary ways.
I looked on IMSLP; I’m sure you could pull up better resources with a bit more effort at Bach Digital.
It’s also quite a marketing coup for Sony that this rapid pace of recording hasn’t caused critics to equate him to the musicians on budget labels who are hired to churn through “complete editions” as quickly as they can. (To be clear: a big thank-you to those musicians! I admire them too!)
See the album Encounter.
Grimaud is also a fan of Busoni: like Levit, she often performs his Bach arrangements, and she even uses his cadenzas in her Mozart concerto recordings.
Levit is far from the only pianist who’s made me feel this way; Martha Argerich’s Chopin Third Scherzo is probably my most extreme example.
Chris Batterman Cháirez points out to me that the restricted range of keys is to allow the bass players to use mostly open strings. In case it’s not clear, I don’t mean to imply that the sameiness of some of this music makes Peso Pluma or anybody else “less creative.”
Prompted by a joke from a more pun-inclined reader: sadly, JSB is unlikely to be the “B” in question, not least because the song is more from the perspective of “B” (someone who feels like “person B” relative to “person A” in a relationship).
Thanks to several anonymous Uaena for their feedback on these paragraphs.