The title of the downloadable album is “Bleeding Chunks of Wagner,” a reference to an oft-quoted passage written in 1935 by English classical music critic Donald Tovey: “Defects of form are not a justifiable ground for criticism from listeners who profess to enjoy the bleeding chunks of butcher’s meat chopped from Wagner’s operas.”

The phrase is used these days as a shorthand for excerpts of music played out of context, thus, an ideal title for Naxos’ newest digital compilation adventure.

A few weeks ago, Naxos’ vision of the future of classical music expanded to include the undead. “Music for the Zombie Apocalypse” is made up of 20 tracks as varied as the Introit from Fauré’s “Requiem,” the Prologue to “Musique Funèbre” by Lutoslawski and “Discomfort Them, O Lord” by Tudor composer Thomas Tallis. The lineup seems chosen to make the last moments before zombies relieve you of your brains as haunting and ethereal as possible.

The downloads are more than a publicity stunt, said Naxos’ gleefully contrarian Chief Operating Officer Andrew Doe.

“I could come out with something pretentious about using this to bring classical music to more people, but that’s not really the goal here,” he said. “[We're making] products that are fun and that people are interested in. Most people like classical music to some degree. The struggle is often finding an entry point, a product that will give people something they can relate to.”

The “Zombie Apocalypse” album might especially seem the product of some desperate look-how-cool-we-are marketing plan. Think more fanboys.

Both Doe and Collin J. Rae, Naxos senior digital marketing manager, are horror film and zombie fans. Said Rae, “[The idea] came out of a brief conversation with some friends coupled with my longtime love affair with zombie films of the past and present. [It] was a no-brainer, for I already had the sound laid out in my head. I just had to match the pieces of music to that.”

The Wagner download, which contains excerpts you would expect to see on a traditional compilation, is an attention-getter — would we be talking about it otherwise? — but the “Zombie Apocalypse” release is more sophisticated. Instead of marketing it to the usual classical music audience, Naxos is focusing its attention on zombie blogs and fans of Devon Gilbert, the young artist who did the virtual cover. Naxos is aiming to meet people where they are, on their own terms instead of expecting listeners to come to them.

Compilations tend to come about because they are cost-effective, digital recordings even more so: When a record label already owns the songs, the cost of doing a digital-only release is negligible. When it doesn’t really matter if the release sells five copies or 10,000, the barriers to success are so low that it’s nearly impossible to fail.

Why, then, do most labels produce predictable, safe compilations?

Doe has an answer: “I think it’s a result of averaging in demographic research. If you mix all the colors together, you get dull, muddy brown. Most market researchers would say that I wouldn’t like [classical music]. But I do.”

The “Zombie Apocalypse” album peaked at No. 15 on the iTunes classical chart, selling for $7.99, and the Wagner virtual disc, at $5.99, went as high as No. 14. Both are now floating somewhere between 60 and 200. Considering how few copies of classical albums are downloaded each week, the movement isn’t as volatile as it sounds.

Adding to the shelf lift: Digital compilations are rarely deleted from the catalog (part of the reason Spotify, Ariama and other online retailers seem to be flooded with the things), so they can be sold for an indefinite period without the warehousing and distribution costs attendant to physical discs. Chart position doesn’t affect how an album appears in search results.

While chart results are open to interpretation, there is another indicator of success. Naxos plans to release a physical double disc of “Music for the Zombie Apocalypse” next fall.

The label usually releases two or three digital compilations a month, with one or two that it earmarks as a special product. Rae promised a “dark” Christmas album and another devoted to music that inspired violence at its premiere.

The possibilities are only limited by imagination.

“A digital music store is a [mail slot] through which you peer at … thousands of classical albums,” Doe said. “It does seem that the more adventurous the concept we come up with, the more traction it gains.

“Relaxing classical guitar has been done hundreds of times. There’s no point releasing that.”

Marcia Adair (Los Angeles Times) / October 26, 2011

Weblink : http://articles.latimes.com/
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I learned nothing from Beethoven, Reich commented.

Steve Reich: Beethoven was a great, great composer, whom I admire enormously. But for me, music history basically begins with Gregorian chant then goes to the end of 1750 with the death of Johann Sebastian Bach. Then it goes on without me paying much attention until Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Bartok and so on. The entire classical and Romantic period is filled with geniuses that I don’t listen to and from whom I’ve learned absolutely nothing.

I’ve learned the most from medieval music, from Bartok and Stravinsky, from John Coltrane, the jazz musician, and from Perotin in the 12th century in Paris.

At the beginning of the 20th century, people tended to think about progress in music. Does music have to go somewhere – does one piece or one composer lead to the next?

Well, there is a continuation in musical history – let’s say from Gregorian chant up through the death of Johann Sebastian Bach. Then there’s a break. Even his sons felt, “We can’t go on this way.” And they began with a much simpler music. Then the movement from Haydn to Mozart to Beethoven to Schubert to Schumann on to Brahms and to Wagner, in particular, is all so continuous. It gets harder to tell what key you’re in. It gets less and less rhythmic. Any orchestra can play Mozart or Haydn without a conductor. But no orchestra on earth can play Wagner without a conductor because he’s just not about rhythm at all.

Schönberg is the beginning of the death of German Romanticism. It’s about deciding that we didn’t need harmonic organization. But this was music for a small cadre of listeners. I think Schönberg said, “In fifty years, the postman will whistle my tunes.” Well, it’s been over a hundred years, and there is no postman on earth who whistles his tunes. There never will be a postman who whistles his music. Now this doesn’t mean Schönberg wasn’t a great composer – he is. But he’s in a dark corner and always will be.

What I and other people did was not a revolution. It was a restoration of harmony, of rhythm in a new way. We also recognized that there has always been a connection in Western music between popular music and classical music.

Mozart wrote a letter to his father that gives insight into his composing. He writes that he wants his piano concertos to appeal to the cognoscenti without going over the heads of the neophytes. Do you have the listener in mind when you compose?

When I compose, I notice I’m the only one in the room. (laughs) I tend to be a somewhat self-critical person. I use my emotional faculties to judge whether I want to hear something again. Basically I have no one in mind except pleasing myself. And my basic idea is, well, if I love it then hopefully you will love it too.

People ask me, “What do you want the listeners to feel?” To me, that’s an absurd question. I care very deeply that people want to hear my music. But how they will take it, what it will conjure up inside of them – who knows?

Looking back at music history, you sometimes see an overriding influence – without being aware of it, composers were influenced by something in the times in which they lived. Does this enter into your own creativity?

I think all of the music that we know and love comes from a time and a place. For me, one of the great examples is Kurt Weill. In the “Threepenny Opera,” Weill simply recreated – in his way – the cabaret band and the cabaret vocal style of the period and created a universal masterpiece which people can appreciate in Russia or in the US who know nothing about the Weimar Republic. But it couldn’t have come from any other time or place.

I was born in New York City, and you can hear that in my voice, in the pace of my speech and in the rhythmic energy of my music. I’ve actually come to dislike all cities and particularly New York. We moved out in 2006, and we’ve had a place in Vermont which was like my savior for 30 years.

With “Tehillim,” one of the best pieces I ever wrote, at the end of the page where I gave the date, I wrote New York, Stuttgart, Paris, New York, Vermont. Now, I sort of remembered writing the ending in Vermont, but who would know what part was written where, and who would care? “Vermont Counterpoint” was written partly in Vermont and largely in New York. But New York City is inside of me whether I like it or not, and no matter where I am.

The more composers give honest testimony to that time and place, the more we tend to love them.

Rick Fulker and Greg Wiser (Deutsche Welle) / September 27, 2011

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The BBC has produced a report warning that musicians playing in its orchestras are at risk of damaging their hearing
Photo: ALAMY

But to the BBC, it seems, they are a health and safety hazard.

The corporation has produced a report warning that musicians playing in its orchestras are at risk of damaging their hearing, and even their health, by working in a noisy environment.

It acted after European Union rules were brought in to limit exposure to noise in the workplace.

Now musicians in its five orchestras have been told they should think about using ear plugs, chewing gum and – in a new interpretation of the term musical arrangement – sitting further away from other members of the orchestra.

The advice is contained in a 50-page report which comes after a three-year study by the BBC’s in-house safety adviser.

It warns that trombonists and trumpeters are exposed to decibel levels approaching those given off by chainsaws, an average of 92 decibels.

Other musicians are also warned of the hazards they face: during a three-hour session, a horn player, for instance, is exposed to the equivalent noise of a half hour journey on a motorbike, while for an oboist it is the same as an hour spent on a London Underground train.

Last night musicians questioned whether the report chimed with their experience.

Peter Adams, a principal cellist with the English String Orchestra, said: “The tendency of musicians to do a lot of drinking at the end of concerts is surely a greater risk to health.

“Certainly, if you are sat next to the brass section it can be very loud and people do take precautions but using chewing gum – I don’t think that would look very good from the audiences’ point of view, or on the BBC cameras during the Proms.”

One of the most common problems reported by musicians is tinnitus, which results in a ringing, buzzing noise that can interfere with sense of pitch.

Possible causes include noise exposure and stress. A clenched jaw is also recognised as increasing the risk and the guidance says some violinists chew gum to keep their jaw relaxed, though adds “this may not be appropriate on stage”.

Recommendations for reducing the harmful effects of being a concert musician or member of a BBC choir include using a screen to separate parts of the orchestra during practice, sitting further away from other musicians and using ear plugs.

Unexpected sources of danger are identified in the report. Quieter instruments but higher-pitched instruments present problems.

Members of the orchestra in the “upper strings” – the violins and violas – are told they “need to be protected from piccolo (especially)” who sit behind them.

It also warns that musicians may not find their colleagues contributing to their own inner harmony.

“For a musician, the sound of your colleagues’ instruments may well contribute to increased stress levels,” it says.

Even their own playing can be stressful: “The adrenaline rush you thrive on in performance can turn under certain circumstances to unhealthy stress that is associated with raised blood pressure, compromised immunity and changes to metabolism.”

It has been written by Ruth Hansford, the BBC’s safety advisor, and has been issued to the corporation’s choir BBC Singers, as well as players in its five orchestras.

Roger Wright, controller of BBC Radio 3 and director of the Proms, said: “The BBC is a significant employer of musicians. As an organisation it therefore has a duty of care towards them, not least to help them to look after their hearing.”

Jonathan Wynne-Jones (The Telegraph) / August 28, 2011

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Mitchell Wenke, a second-year student studying both a bachelor of engineering and commerce, is considering transferring to the new degree, which will be offered from next year. He said he was conscious that his discipline was male dominated with a geeky stereotype. ”Electrical engineering is a hard degree, most people are quite nerdy. I don’t deny it, I like my maths,” he said.

Out of about 150 in his course, he said only about 20 were female, and the new program would attract a wider range of students, with a broader variety of interests. ”I personally know a number of electrical engineers that are also in all the musical societies and what not. They could have done electrical engineering and study just a bit of music on the side just for interest. There’s definitely a niche market for that kind of stuff.”

The combined degree was the brainchild of the head of the school of electrical engineering and telecommunications, Professor Eliathamby Ambikairajah, and draws on industry advice about the kind of graduate companies are looking to hire. He said the new degree would give graduates better employment opportunities.

One of those advisers is Glenn Wightwick, a director at IBM Australia. He said engineering was a creative field and welcomed graduates who had a broader focus. ”It is quite common … to find people who have very strong creative capabilities that they might express through music and … that often translates into very strong technical depth in things like software engineering.”

Jen Rosenberg (The Sunday Morning Herald) / September 14, 2011

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Canadian scientists had a group of musicians and non-musicians, between 18 and 91, perform several hearing tasks.

They measured the quietest sound the participants could detect, called pure-tone sensitivity, and their ability to detect two sounds at the same time, recognise gaps in continuous sound and understand speech in a noisy environment, all faculties that decline with age.

They found musicians could better distinguish between sounds, recognise gaps and understand speech when several people were talking – hearing tasks that relied more on the brain to process the sound than the ear – than non-musicians.

The researchers, whose findings are published in the journal Psychology and Aging, the musicians delayed the age-related changes that occur in the brain regions that process sound, allowing them to perform better in hearing tasks that rely more on cognition. But musicians were no better at the tasks that depended on the physical structure of the ear, such as microscopic hairs inside the cochlea, which atrophy with age.

The lead investigator, Ben Zendel, said playing a musical instrument may enhance cognitive reserve, thereby freeing up other brain resources to process other auditory stimuli.

Nicky Phillips (The Sunday Morning Herald) / September 17, 2011

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Dr Catherine Crock, pictured above with musician Joe Chindamo and patient Holly Richards, created the Hush music collection to calm young patients and their families.
Photo: Justin McManus

While she sleeps, Dr Catherine Crock extracts fluid from her spine and inserts a dose of yellow chemotherapy drugs to fight the leukaemia that Sasha, 12, developed last year (this is her 22nd procedure to date). In the adjoining room, Sasha’s mother, Anna Barvinsky, waits; it is an anxious time. Above the echo of feet and voices, a violin soars, scattering notes caught by a waiting piano. It is a variation of the overture from The Magic Flute, Mozart’s last opera, and the mood is infectious.

”I’ve been in waiting rooms where there’s television but that just increases the anxiety,” says Barvinsky. ”This is much more relaxing.”
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The ”Mozart effect” is widely known and hotly debated. The Austrian composer is one of the most studied in history; exposure to his tunes can increase health, well-being and even intelligence, allegedly. Just about everyone is familiar with his work. It is the muzak of call centres, lifts and mobiles. Yet just when you are about to write him off as over-exploited and overexposed, there is the music, utterly elegant and so emotionally tuned to the core of our beings that it goes beyond words.

Mozart is the theme of the Hush Foundation’s latest CD, Luminous, which will be launched tonight at the Melbourne Recital Centre. Set up 18 years ago by Crock, the charity provides music in hospitals to reduce stress and anxiety for children and families all around Australia. On this, the 11th CD, Melbourne composer and pianist Joe Chindamo has reworked some of the greatest known and best loved movements together with a jazz trio and string quartet. The result is all the beauty of classical music without the formality. ”Jazz has proved extremely effective,” says Crock. ”Maybe because it conjures up mental downtime, relaxing on a sofa, or being on holidays.”

Crock, who works at the Royal Children’s Hospital, set up the charity after talking to the families of children who were undergoing procedures. ”They found it so stressful and bewildering and asked if we could provide music. What we have found is that if the families are calm, the children are more likely to be.”

A music lover herself (she plays the oboe and piano, but not very well, she adds hastily) she dug up a few classical CDs but they didn’t quite fit the bill. She started talking to professional musicians and sound recordists about how best to combat the ambient noise created by the hospital machinery, and the project snowballed. Then award-winning jazz pianist Paul Grabowsky offered to compose music specifically for Hush ”and that took us to a different level”.

Says Crock: ”Creative people come into our space and look at it differently and it opens our eyes to what it’s like. Composers come in and see what is happening and tell me it has totally changed their idea of what was going to suit.”

The effects have been far-reaching; hospitals overseas are placing their orders and prison services in New South Wales have shown interest. The CD is now played in 12 hospitals around Australia and to date has raised more than $1 million.

In the recovery room, Sasha is waking up. While she prefers Lady Gaga, The Magic Flute was infinitely better than having to listen to all the other noise. ”It helps distract from the people talking.”

Kathy Evans (The Age) / September 14, 2011

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As part of the study, a neuroscientist, Olivier Piguet, and his colleagues asked a group of dementia patients – including people with Alzheimer’s disease – along with healthy individuals if they recognised a selection of famous melodies among a list of made-up tunes with similar musical structures.

Well known tunes included Christmas carols such as Jingle Bells, as well as folk songs and instrumental works.

The researchers, including a PhD candidate, Sharpley Hsieh, then asked participants to select the names of famous songs out of a list of classics such as Waltzing Matilda and made-up titles.

They found the ability of patients with a specific type of dementia, called semantic dementia, to identify the melodies or titles of famous tunes was profoundly impaired compared with healthy individuals and people with Alzheimer’s.

To show that deficits in this region of the brain were not just linked to music, participants were also asked to recognise environmental sounds such as laughing and coughing, and the results were similar, Dr Piguet, a senior research fellow at Neuroscience Research Australia, said.

When the researchers took magnetic resonance images of the participants’ brains, they found a region of the brain behind the right ear, called the right anterior temporal lobe, had shrunk in patients with semantic dementia compared with the Alzheimer’s patients and those without dementia.

The more the atrophy of the region, the greater a person’s memory for famous songs and faces was impaired, Dr Piguet, whose findings are published in the journal Brain, said.

He said their research, combined with other studies, indicated that unique aspects of human knowledge about the world, such as people, songs and language, known as semantic memory, were stored in the anterior temporal lobe.

Nicky Phillips (The Sunday Morning Herald) / August 23, 2011

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Pianist Yuja Wang turned the heads of fans and critics alike when she performed at the Hollywood Bowl recently in a short, tight dress. Did it affect the performance? Researchers say visual clues can influence what you hear.
(Xavier Antoinet/YujaWang.com)

Stop right there. In fact, visual cues we pick up from watching musicians in action significantly influence our judgment of their playing, according to newly published research.

German researchers Klaus-Ernst Behne and Clemens Wöllner present evidence that a pianist’s body language impacts how even knowledgeable listeners evaluate his or her performance. While they don’t address the issue of attire, their research provides a clue as to why women artists are sometimes judged differently than men.

Writing in the journal Musicae Scientiae, Behne and Wöllner describe their successful attempt to replicate a fascinating 1990 study, which was originally published in German. As part of a 2009 music psychology seminar at a major music academy, they gathered 35 students — all accomplished musicians — for a study of the visual impact of piano performances.

The participants viewed videos featuring four student musicians at the keyboard. Specifically, they watched two renditions of Chopin’s Waltz in A-Flat Major, and two performances of a capriccio by Brahms.

Unbeknownst to them, the soundtracks for the videos were recorded by the same pianist. He was seen in one of the four videos; for the other three, the on-screen performer was actually a body double.

For both the Chopin and Brahms works, one of the “performers” was male, the other female. After watching both renditions, participants rated what they heard using five-point scales to judge the players on such elements as confidence, precision, drama, virtuosity and expressivity.

Despite the fact the soundtracks were identical, “Nearly all participants identified differences between the pairs of video recordings,” the researchers report. Duplicating the results of the 1990 study, the “performances” by the male pianists were perceived as more precise, while the female pianist’s “performance” of Chopin was judged as more dramatic.

How could people with finely honed listening skills be fooled into thinking they were hearing different interpretations?

“Differences between male and female performers’ bodily communication were frequently reported [by the participants during debriefing sessions],” the researchers write. “Female performers were described as using their bodies more expressively than male performers.”

This image of physical freedom and expressivity translated into “hearing” more dynamic performances from the women. In contrast, the men’s physical restraint apparently led listeners to believe their performances were more technically exact.

“When individuals are presented with multimodal sensory information, one stream of information can overtake another, giving rise to perceptual illusion,” the researchers write. Since “music is most often the outcome of human movement,” it’s unsurprising that our observations of such movements help us make sense of what we’re hearing.

So the classical music establishment acted wisely when, in the 1960s, orchestras began holding blind auditions, with candidates playing behind a screen. But audiences and critics watch as well as listen to performances. Perhaps more problematically, so do judges of piano competitions, at least in the final rounds. This research suggests their reactions may depend in part on the competitors’ physicality.

Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that the famously stoic violinist Jascha Heifetz, who was known “neither to move nor even to flinch during a performance,” became a superstar during the era when recordings were first mass produced. Would he be as successful in this visual age, when concerts by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and its dynamic music director, Gustavo Dudamel, are beamed live into movie theaters?

On the big screen, we have been primed to expect action — and, come to think of it, sex appeal. Wang’s fashion sense, however disconcerting it is to some, may be very savvy. But this research suggests her reputation for exciting performances isn’t impacted so much by her body as it is by her body language.

Tom Jacobs (Miller McCune) / August 29, 2011

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A 1839 portrait of Franz Liszt by Henri Lehmann.
Image: P. Pierrain/Musee Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris, Paris

One person who would agree is the musicologist Alan Walker. In his monumental three-volume Liszt biography and in two supplemental books, Mr. Walker makes a case for Liszt, who died in 1886, as the towering musical figure of the 19th century. Last month, during the International Keyboard Institute and Festival at Mannes College the New School for Music, Mr. Walker gave a lecture, “Liszt at the Keyboard,” focusing on that master’s contributions to the piano. But he began by describing the stunning breadth of Liszt’s accomplishments, which unfolded, he said, “simultaneously in six directions.”

First and foremost, Liszt was a colossal pianist, the most awesome virtuoso of his era, who in his playing and his compositions for piano pushed the boundaries of technique, texture and sound. As a composer, beyond his works for piano, Liszt was the inventor of the orchestral tone poem and an inspired songwriter, and he produced a body of sublime sacred choral works. As a conductor, he introduced seminal scores, including Wagner’s “Lohengrin,” in Weimar.

Liszt was the most consequential piano teacher of his time. He taught some 400 students over 40 years, in line with his notion of “génie oblige,” the obligation of genius, and never accepted payment for the lessons, much to the chagrin of rival pedagogues. Liszt was also, Mr. Walker emphasized, a festival organizer and an important writer of essays, program notes and criticism.

In this bicentennial year there has been a bounty of Liszt recordings. Culling items from the Universal Classics catalog, Deutsche Grammophon released a limited-edition, 34-CD boxed set, “Liszt: The Collection,” a comprehensive offering of Liszt’s music, including organ pieces, songs and sacred vocal works. There have been Liszt solo piano recordings by Marc-André Hamelin, Nelson Freire, Garrick Ohlsson and others, with more to come.

In his lecture Mr. Walker emphasized two facets of Liszt the pianist that are more relevant than ever. Liszt was a champion of knotty works that mystified the public: not only music by contemporaries but also older scores, like the late Beethoven and Schubert piano sonatas. Take Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata, a piece that during Liszt’s years as a touring virtuoso was widely considered an incoherent, unplayable creation of an old, deaf and eccentric composer. Liszt showed that here was an exhilarating Beethoven masterpiece.

After hearing Liszt perform the sonata in 1836, Berlioz wrote of Liszt’s impressive fidelity to the text in a review quoted in the first volume of Mr. Walker’s biography. If the “Hammerklavier” presented the “riddle of the Sphinx,” as Berlioz wrote, then Liszt had solved it, and “in such a way that had the composer himself returned from the grave, a paroxysm of joy and pride would have swept over him.” In making comprehensible a work not yet comprehended, Berlioz added, Liszt proved that “he is the pianist of the future.”

In addition, Mr. Walker said, Liszt essentially invented the idea of the piano recital, purposefully borrowing a literary term to indicate that a piano program should be not just a collection of interesting pieces but also a musical essay with a theme or narrative.

This is exactly what the brilliant pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard accomplishes in his two-disc album “The Liszt Project,” which will be released by Deutsche Grammophon in September. Mr. Aimard brings his consummate skills and musical insights to performances of Liszt’s formidable Piano Sonata and lesser-known later works. These Liszt pieces are juxtaposed with works by Berg, Wagner, Scriabin, Bartok, Messiaen, Ravel and the Italian composer Marco Stroppa.

As a composer, Liszt was often an iconoclastic adventurer, especially in works with fluid, diaphanous textures and sounds that anticipated Impressionism. In many of his late pieces he explores radical chromatic harmony and dissonance, sometimes cutting loose almost completely from tonal moorings. In one telling sequence in “The Liszt Project,” Mr. Aimard segues from Liszt’s short, spare-textured experimental “Nuages Gris,” composed in 1881, to Berg’s early Piano Sonata (Op. 1), written some 27 years later, and it seems but a short leap from late Liszt to Berg’s intense, one-movement work, nominally in a minor key but sounding almost atonal. Mr. Aimard’s point in this album is not just to show Liszt anticipating 20th-century modernism but also to place him amid giants like Berg, Bartok and Messiaen.

But if Liszt never lacked champions among master pianists, why is he not considered as important as other Romantic composers, like Schumann and Chopin?

The problem may be that “greatness” thing, which was, admittedly, the nebulous criterion for my Top 10 Composers project. Liszt’s music can be audacious, visionary, mystical, thrilling. If it does not seem “great,” perhaps this is because he was not striving to compose masterpieces in the manner of a Beethoven. He was too concerned with the immediate and experimental.

Also, even Liszt lovers must admit that he wrote lots of shamelessly flashy piano pieces. It may not help his reputation as a master composer that Lang Lang has a new album on Sony Classical called “Liszt: My Piano Hero,” featuring a cover image of himself in a digitized, flame orange swirling cape. It looks like something out of “Priscilla Queen of the Desert.”

In discussing Liszt’s devotion to the piano, Mr. Walker quoted an open letter the 26-year-old Liszt had written to musicians who had criticized him in advance of a world tour, arguing that Liszt should instead devote himself to becoming a proper composer of symphonic works and more. In his letter, really a manifesto, Liszt placed the piano at the “top of the hierarchy of instruments.” The piano could evoke “the entire scope of the orchestra,” Liszt wrote, the “harmony of 100 players.”

This letter sheds light on Liszt’s passion for transcribing songs, symphonic music and excerpts from operas into all manner of piano fantasies and paraphrases. The best of these works are much more than virtuosic stunts. Liszt’s piano transcriptions of the nine Beethoven symphonies are works of genius. Vladimir Horowitz, in a 1988 interview, told me that he deeply regretted never having played Liszt’s arrangements of the Beethoven symphonies in public.

“These are the greatest works for the piano, tremendous works,” he said. “But they are ‘sound’ works,” by which he meant pieces that explore the piano’s coloristic possibilities. “For me,” Horowitz elaborated, “the piano is the orchestra. I don’t like the sound of the piano as a piano. I like to imitate the orchestra — the oboe, the clarinet, the violin and, of course, the singing voice. Every note of the symphonies is in the Liszt works.”

In this Liszt year we are still coming to terms with his achievement. Top 10 composer? Maybe not. But what a monumental musician! And what a character: a combination of showman and genius, superstar and, later in life, devout cleric. He covered all the bases.

Anthony Tommasini (The New York Times) / August 23, 2011

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Manfred Eicher.
Photo: Getty Images

Among ECM’s artists are jazz musicians Keith Jarrett and Jan Garbarek, classical composers Steve Reich and Arvo Part, and the Rosamunde Quartett. Almost all the label’s 1400 titles were produced by Eicher. The ultimate aesthete, he helps choose the musicians and the material, massages out near-perfect performances and oversees the luminous sound reproduction and elegant presentation.

His baptism for excellence was co-engineering now-legendary recordings by Herbert von Karajan with the Berlin Philharmonic in the 1960s. He is also a musician, playing double bass and piano, a film buff and sometime filmmaker.

Guyer and Wiedmer approached Eicher after meeting him while they were making a documentary about the gifted German actor Bruno Ganz, who was recording T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land with Eicher.

”At first I was reluctant,” he recalls on the telephone from his Munich office, ”because having a camera and lights around sometimes disturbs the musicians. But they were very sensitive in the way they worked with Bruno Ganz and I said yes.”

The film has a genuine fly-on-the-wall quality, notably in the recording of Part’s Fur Lennart in Memoriam in a church in the composer’s native Estonia.

”I believe this is a kind of iconography of how a session like this can give birth to music,” Eicher says. ”And how the composer’s physiognomy is reacting to the sounds.”

One way the composer’s physiognomy reacts to the sounds is to drag Eicher into a spontaneous dance. ”I was not very happy at the beginning that this would be in the movie,” the producer admits. ”But then friends like Bruno Ganz and other filmmakers convinced me that it should be.”

Eicher’s recording schedule dictated the film’s content, rather than vice versa. ”They said from the beginning that they did not want to make a ‘best of ECM’ kind of thing,” he says. ”And I really liked that.”

During the film, leading Greek composer Eleni Karaindrou comments on Eicher’s ability to give complete commitment to the project at hand, despite simultaneously having several albums in various stages of development.

”I have to be able to dive into a project, and get inside the idea of the musicians or the composer,” Eicher says. ”So if I close the door and commit myself to recording, I have to be there.

”I believe it’s a deep respect for the musicians and for the music to be alert and responsive … Maybe you encourage them to go further in a certain direction. Sometimes you find yourself in a different place suddenly and from there the music takes flight. This is something that you can’t plan. It just happens, like in Keith Jarrett’s wonderful solo concerts in the ’70s.” These included the best-selling Koln Concert.

In the film’s most tense sequence, brilliant Argentinian bandoneon player Dino Saluzzi becomes frustrated with the failure of Anja Lechner (the Rosamunde Quartett’s celebrated cellist) to capture his music’s rhythmic lilt. Eicher plays mediator, which he says is just another aspect of his role: ”Whether you are a director in a movie, on stage or in music-making, you are very often a psychologist as well. You have to understand when things need to stop.”

He says the solution may lie in diverting minds from music altogether. ”Sometimes the detour makes it easier to reach the target.”

Detours of a different sort can also be part of the process. ”I believe that the choice of location – the city, the country – is very important for music-making; that people leave their home sometimes in order to go to a certain place to find the music that they have thought of,” Eicher says.

Many ECM projects intermingle genres but Eicher is disdainful of glib crossover projects without a deep understanding of the genres and idioms involved. ”I don’t like to say anything goes,” he insists. ”Many things do not go at all.”

One that did ”go” was the unlikely combination of the Hilliard Ensemble, the peerless early-music vocal group from Britain, with Jan Garbarek, a Norwegian jazz saxophonist. Eicher was driving through Iceland’s lava fields while shooting the film Holozan and pondering what music to use with it.

”I was remembering a concert that I heard in Seville a long time ago,” he says, ”with Morales’s Officium defunctorum; that I would like to have these sounds but that I needed some kind of bird flying over this chordal music, written for voices. And I thought of Jan Garbarek flying over this music.”

The idea worked brilliantly (although not for his film) and the resultant Officium remains among ECM’s biggest successes.

Eicher denies that the label is a library of his personal taste. ”I hope that it’s a little bit more than just personal taste to find music, work with musicians and develop musical ideas,” he says.

”I do like to record music that speaks to me but I also like to find musicians who have something personal to say and have character in their music rather than virtuosity, skilfulness, or whatever. Today we find so many well-equipped musicians, whether in the classical field or jazz, but I don’t think we have so many who have an artistic character that is sufficiently evident to say, ‘Yes, that’s X.”’

He is disdainful of musicians being marketed glamorously. ”After all, they’re not movie stars, they’re musicians, so be a musician and be focused and ‘think of your ears as eyes’, to quote Gertrude Stein.”

As Italian reeds player Gianluigi Trovesi laments during the film: ”Music is everywhere today.”

Eicher is a master of the dying art of listening and he regrets that downloads are changing people’s interaction with music. He champions ”the dramaturgy of an album”. ”It’s like a book or a movie,” he says. ”We would like to offer you an album that begins and ends and please, listen to that first. Then you can do the download and all those kind of things later.”

John Shand (theage.com.au) / August 20, 2011

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