Writing

The VIOLA’s WHITE KNIGHT: HERMANN RITTER AND THE QUEST FOR THE PERFECT ALTO INSTRUMENT

PUBLISHED IN THE STRAD Posted April 10, 2024

In the 19th-century there were no daring and valiant violists such as we are accustomed to today, only tall violinists and bad violinists who were exiled to the viola section. There were scarcely any violas either, as attested to by Berlioz in his 1844 Treatise on Instrumentation:

’It needs to be mentioned that most violas in today’s French orchestras aren’t built with the necessary quality standards in mind. They don’t have the size, and neither, artistically speaking, the sound quality of a real viola. They are most often violins, equipped with viola strings. The music directors should forbid use of these bastardised instruments, whose tone robs one of the most interesting orchestral parts of its colour and power, especially in the lower registers.’

Enter Hermann Ritter - composer, musicologist, and defender of the viola. Read more…

THE MAGICIAN’s BARGAIN: WEB3 AND MUSIC

PUBLISHED IN CREATED Posted February 15, 2023

It is not a coincidence that the two most significant stage pieces of 19th-century Europe, Goethe’s Faust and Wagner’s Das Ring des Nibelungen, deal with what the famous Wagnerian C.S. Lewis described in The Abolition of Man as the “magician’s bargain.” For Lewis, the “magician’s bargain” is “that process whereby man surrenders object after object, and finally himself, to Nature in return for power.”

These works were a reaction to the 19th-century’s “magician’s bargains” of Industrialization and Secularization. Both Faust and the Ring (and most religions) proffer the same solution to the “magician’s bargain” - sacrifice. For Goethe and Wagner, whether it be selfless actions, property, money, or blood sacrifice like Brünhilde’s self-immolation in Götterdämerung, sacrifice is the means by which we prevent ourselves from becoming mere automatons. Through it we retain our humanity and atone for all the ambition, greed and desire which we call “progress.” Read more…

LOKI: THE ETHOS OF THE VIOLA

PUBLISHED IN THE JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN VIOLA SOCIETY Posted February 15, 2023

If we are being honest, not much has been said about the viola. More has been said about the one weird trick gut doctors don’t want you to know, or the twenty things flight attendants notice in three seconds. But when something is said about the viola, it is usually to the effect that it has a melancholy and beguiling timbre, that it is more palatable than the violin, or that appreciation of the viola is a sign of either sophistication or a psychological disorder. I hope to add to the literature about the viola a new thesis: that the ethos of the viola follows a mythic archetype, namely, the Norse demi-god Loki. Read more…

WAGNER’s Nightmare: WAGNER, Wister, And Westerns (1,500) words)

Posted February 15, 2023

Owen Wister’s 1902 novel, The Virginian, established many of the tropes and themes of that most quintessentially American genre: the Western. Replete with cowboys, simmering poker games, vigilante justice, and a shootout, The Virginian was adapted as a play on Broadway in 1904, as movie in 1914, 1923, 1929, and1946, and as a TV series that ran from 1962-1971. Admittedly, The Virginian’s cultural signifcance exceeds its literary merit, but it is nonetheless a very good book well worth the read.

Wister was a proud and committed Wagnerian, unlike his classmate at Harvard and dedicatee of The Virginian, Theodore Roosevelt, whom Alex Ross described as “a casual Wagnerian.” Wister studied composition at Harvard and made pilgrimage to Bayreuth in 1882, where he presented one of his compositions to Liszt. When his health broke down in 1885, Wister followed Rooselvelt’s example and headed out West. But Wagner was never far from Wister; he had his mother send him his favorite Wagner scores and said of the Western landscape that “it all looked like Die Walküre.” Read more…

WAGNER’s Nightmare: WAGNER, Wister, And Westerns (5,000 words)

Posted February 15, 2023

The Western is arguably America’s most important myth and cultural export. From Italian opera to Japanese movies, the Western has been inspired and taken up by artists all over the world. Germans particularly love Westerns, exceeding even the other Axis-power. Karl May, for instance, a German author of pulp fction Westerns in the early 20th century, was common bedtime reading for Adolf Hitler and is better known to most Germans than Thomas Mann. Today there are societies in Germany dedicated to dressing up as “Cowboys and Indians,” much like our Renaissance Fairs in America. And German tourism to the American West is big business; your author has personally enjoyed in-fight advertisements for Texas tourism on multiple Lufthansa fights. Read more…

WAGNER’s Nightmare: The Apollonian and the Dionysian

Posted February 15, 2023

Much has been written about Nietzsche and Wagner (much of it by Nietzsche and Wagner), so I will sidestep the chronicles of their personal and intellectual relationship and focus instead on a subject important to both men; the Apollonian and the Dionysian. As we shall see, the Apollonian and Dionysian distinction was part of a perennial philosophical discourse that was taken up with renewed vigor by 19th-century German philosophers. Nietzsche and Wagner both preferred the Dionysian to the Apollonian, but as they matured they increasingly disagreed on what the Dionysian actually is. Preference for the Dionysian and disagreement on what actually is Dionysian remained themes in Modernism and Postmodernism. And in our current cultural moment, called Post-postmodernism by some, a reassessment of the Apollonian and Dionysian debate, and Wagner’s outsized impact on that debate, is warranted. Read more…

WAGNER’s NIGHTMARE: WAGNER CONTRA VIOLA

Posted February 15, 2023

In the 19th century there were no violists, there were only tall violinists and bad violinist who were exiled to the viola section. Hence, Herr Wagner only heard the viola played poorly. This is reflected in his viola parts, which consist of four types of music:

a) Simple and unexposed accompaniments or harmonic filling.

b) Difcult passages that are always doubled by at least the violins or cellos.

c) Melodic material on the C string. I suspect Wagner would have used the violin or cello if he could have (in the cello’s case that’s a matter of timbre). Examples include the end of Act 1 of Parsifal and the forging music heard frst with the Nibelungs in Rhinegold, and later when Mime and Siegfried are going at it hammer and tongs in Act 1 of Siegfried.

d) For “Jewish” characters, such as Sixtus Beckmesser (Meistersinger) and the aforementioned Mime and the Nibelungs. Read more…

WHY classical Musicians should care about NFTs

Posted December 23, 2021

1. Summary: NFTs are the future of the recording industry, and musicians stand to make more money from NFTs than streaming. This is because NFTs introduce scarcity into the digital market place, decentralize distribution so that a handful of major streaming platforms do not have all the leverage over millions of un-organized musicians, and also solve… Read more…

MAHLER 1 IS OK

A few weeks ago I played Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D major, “Titan,” with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Although I don’t dislike it, Mahler 1 has always been by least favorite of his symphonies.

My initial criticism of the work was that the dramaturgy does not make sense and its German engineering is lacking. But after a week of study and performance I would amend that thesis to say… Read more…

ARPEGGIONE SONATA PROGRAM NOTES

I. Allegro moderato - Franz Schubert, famous for three minute lieder and hour long chamber works, Schubert composed the rather normal-durationed Arpeggione Sonata in 1824 at the request of arpeggione virtuoso, Vincenz Schuster. The arpeggione, essentially a bowed guitar, went extinct soon afterwards, and so did the sonata. It was not rediscovered and published until 1871, when Breitkopf and Hartel was compiling the complete works of Schubert. A cello transcription was included and violists soon after laid their claim. The challenges of playing a piece written for a six-stringed instrument on four string instruments, have been, well, challenging the C-string community for the century and a half since. But this is not the forum for airing my grievances, especially after so much effort has gone into hiding the difficulties of this piece. Read more…

Plauge-List

Amidst the astonishing measures taken in response to the coronavirus, it serves us well to be reminded of the contagious and deadly diseases which were common not so long ago. Hopefully, perspective and gratitude for the improvements in sanitation and medicine of the past century can be gained by learning about these works and their composers. Read more…