Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber may have been the finest violinist of the seventeenth century. He was also a highly innovative composer whose works — most notably his sonatas for violin — are gaining new prominence in the performing repertory.
.. Biber’s compositions stand as some of the most startlingly advanced music of the Baroque era. Biber’s manuscripts and publications record violin improvisations in unprecedented detail; in his Sonata Representativa, one will find Biber’s instrumental impressions of cuckoos, frogs, cats, and marching musketeers. These are supplied with a simple ground bass that provides plenty of room for the soloist to stretch out and show off, but are written at such a high level of difficulty that few violinists attempt to master them. In his “Mystery”, or “Rosenkranz” sonatas, Biber makes extensive use of scordatura, violin re-tunings that change the tonal character of the instrument and make “impossible” figurations possible.
The mission of the humanities is to transmit questions about value – and to question values – by testing traditions that build up over centuries and millennia. And within the humanities, it is the discipline of history that provides an antidote to short-termism, by giving pointers to the long future derived from knowledge of the deep past.
.. If we properly engage with it, surely it offers an experience of empathy, and not just any empathy, but a transgenerational empathy, in which we try on human feelings from another era.
.. In his brilliant essay on the impact of television, ‘E Unibus Pluram’, the American novelist David Foster Wallace laments the modern-day scourge of irony: “Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like an hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalised irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its subject is, when exercised, tyranny.” He fantasises about the emergence of “some weird bunch of anti-rebels … who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles”.
.. Classical music is not always single-entendre (Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony has a bruising subtext), but in an era dominated by irony there is something restorative about its sincerity.
.. but for some time the arts have not been an end in themselves; there has only been one end, and that is Growth.
.. there are good pragmatic reasons to invest in music education. Ironically, it might even contribute to Growth. Countless studies reveal that music education will improve our children’s executive function, social ability, literacy, numeracy, concentration, brain function, fine motor skills, creative thinking, working memory, study habits, and even their self-esteem.
.. It is no surprise that classical music becomes elitist, when only the privileged are taught its language.
.. The music that is closest to my heart is chamber music. It is music on a human scale, a single voice to a part: the solo piano repertoire, the lied, the piano trio, the string quartet. A true child of the Enlightenment, the string quartet was described by Goethe as “four reasonable people conversing”.
Laibach’s metamorphosis from being viewed as a fundamentally fascist band to a subversive, forward-thinking one is largely down to the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek – one of the group’s strongest defenders. In 1993, he penned an essay explaining how Laibach’s excessive adoption of the aesthetics, choreography, militarism and intensity of totalitarianism could be seen as anti-fascist.
.. While the government and administration of North Korea will be pleased to have found a band that seems to support its centralised, single-party government, others may suspect that this is one massive joke played on the Supreme Leader. Neither would be correct. As Žižek has said, Laibach “does not function as an answer, but a question”. And questions are far often far more subversive than answers.