Teresa Carreno (1853-1917)
String Quartet in B Minor
Chamber Works by Women Composers — The Macalester Trio
Vox Box Recording
String Quartet in B Minor
1st movement: Allegro
2nd movement: Andante
3rd movement: Scherzo
4th movement: Allegro risoluto
For the love of Cello — It’s more than one instrument separates a trio from a quartet. At least that’s thought that comes to mind going from the Fanny Hendel trio last week to this quartet—where the former seems scant without the thickly rich loaf of the cello’s layer. Add to this layer a generous yet calculated seasoning of mediterranean radiance Carreno packed along for the emigration from Venezuela to New York, and the result is a quartet that shakes the dust off of old formulas.
Teresa Carreno
Gender disparity in B Major — This concludes my little month-long tour of ‘Chamber Works by Women Composers’, an arrangement performed by the Macalester Trio (hailing from the so-named college in Minnesota, circa 1968). I’m wracking my brain to find some takeaway from these past four weeks. Aside from further appreciation for the small mightiness of the chamber setting, there’s isn’t much to learn on a specific style or finding some slightly esoteric avenue of the broader classical cannon. All this collection has been is a reminder of the genres ongoing difficulty with gender parity, and the admittance that the occasion of composers who happen to female is so rare that the very fact of a handful of them is enough of a reason to record an album on. Of course it’s a good thing albums like these exist, my point here is that the overall character of the pieces recorded here are near identical to pieces composed by men elsewhere in the canon. So the rarity of female composers on a concert program has nothing to do with style and everything to do with gender. Yes yes yes this is generally an obvious thing to say—but it is nevertheless worth pointing this out in regards to a genre that is based entirely on the finery of absolute music, serious music, music as the will itself. Bullshit. There is so such thing as absolute music. Not when so much of the dregs and hullabaloo of iliberal tradition lurks just beneath the surface of this talk of ‘pure essence’ and unadulterated communion between the artist and audience. So much of this communion has been adulterated by the same seemingly ineluctable biases: gender, race, class…
Objective? — I was thinking this week of just how much of the most subjective and obtuse beliefs in our society gets to live rent free under the guise and unquestioned authority of objectivity. There is no doubt that, with the tremendous effort invested in the intellectualization of the musical experience—the scientification of music if you will—classical music is a leap towards this kind of objectivity. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s commendable even. Just don’t leap on legs made out of the same stuffs that perpetuates the unthinking, superstitious, prejudiced brute in the human psyche that we’ve only recently started rallying against. As long as classical music is disseminated, subconsciously or otherwise, as a largely and specifically white and male thing, then it needs to keep its mouth shut on any talk of objectivity.
I felt just like a traveler as I went walking up my street.
Every building so familiar but it's like I never seen em.
There's the same rows of houses, row on row.
Palimpsest — One highfalutin professor in my past struck a nerve when he described the evolution of a city’s architecture as something akin to a palimpsest—a word usually used to describe a repurposed historical manuscript such that you could still see traces of the original writing. Struck a nerve because you get to thinking that a city is in its architecture, immune to the ‘accident of persons’, stable, dependable, fairly unchanging. But really a city is in its people. And as the faces change, the street signs might as well follow suite. I’ve been walking round Bloor Street along the Annex lately, unknowingly looking for traces of the past in the buildings that are still there but also not quite there anymore. It’s not nostalgia, but something far more liquid and intractable, like if you turned around quickly enough the mirage would rise up to shake your hand, a traveller’s welcome…
All of it Was Mine — Artists too are like palimpsests. I imagine you need to be one order to survice. In their new works we search for and cling to brilliant flashes of their past iterations. It’s been a beautiful thing catching glimpses of Tamara Lindeman’s evolution, and the reception of The Weather Station’s latest album, Ignorance. I’m working through the new album slowly, but also going back to her earlier selves—which is of course no more valid that the present and future self. Yet I can’t help but hold what I like most in this new album in the same box as her time with Bruce Peninsula, and the small miracle of All of it Was Mine. It must be tough as an artist to work for and despite such sentimental expectations.
Throwback to: YR3, WEEK27 — YR2, WEEK27
Click here for the full 2020/2021 roster of selected recordings