Small-batch music

An arts section grab bag: Tunes, Chris Turner's new climate book, and film-schooling Spielberg's Mumford video

The NAC Orchestra’s Yosuke Kawasaki. Photo: Fred Cattroll, with permission

I know most of you subscribe for the political content. But it says right on the label that this newsletter is my party. I gave you some great clickbait just the other day. And I have a few things I’ve been saving up. So let’s make today’s post a grab bag.

If you ever want to stop receiving my arts writing, follow the instructions here to “unsubscribe from a section” and click the box next to “Positive Jam,” my arts section. If, on the other hand, you love this stuff and you have a friend who might be interested in what I do here, text them or email them to let them know. - pw

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It took me a while, when I started listening seriously to classical music as an adult, to figure out that “chamber music” is simply a term for classical music that’s composed for small numbers of musicians. It sounds somehow more imposing than that, but really all it means is “not a large band.” This is the sort of thing nobody ever explains in school. A string quartet — two violins, a viola and a cello — is an example of chamber music. So is a sonata, which is usually an extended piece for a solo instrument accompanied by a piano.

It took me longer to realize something more important: when a composer writes for fewer musicians, he or she isn’t writing something less serious or ambitious. Mozart for two players is still Mozart. Some of the best music by Beethoven or Shostakovich was written for one or a few players, much of Bach’s for musicians playing alone.

Often a composer can work through a conceptual problem, or test a new idea, more easily on a smaller scale. So there’s something of the laboratory in a lot of chamber music. Or the safe house. Shostakovich literally spent much of his career worrying Stalin’s cops would come to get him. I think he could say things in his Piano Quintet (played here by Glenn Gould) that he couldn’t say as openly in his big orchestral pieces, because as is well known, the police in police states usually skip the chamber-music concerts.

In Ottawa we sometimes get to think about such things, because for 28 years Ottawa has been home to one of Canada’s most prominent summer chamber-music festivals. Ottawa Chamberfest starts this Thursday and runs through Aug. 4. It’s one of my favourite times of the year. A chance to concentrate on concentrated music.

Here are my picks from this year’s festival, the first post-COVID Chamberfest and the first under the stewardship of the Ottawa violinist Carissa Klopoushak. She’s bringing fresh ideas to this annual celebration. Maybe a few of you will venture out and experience the intricacy of music performed in close quarters.

1. NACO Lite, July 22

Klopoushak’s rule for her festival is that no ensemble big enough to need a conductor qualifies as chamber music. The National Arts Centre Orchestra, therefore, will perform in smaller numbers — 45 players, by my count — and without a conductor. Concertmaster Yosuke Kawasaki, who leads the violin section, will direct his colleagues with gestures, glances and the radiant example of his own playing, in elegant pieces from the 1920s and ’30s by Stravinsky, Aaron Copland and Florence Price. (Here’s the orchestra playing Price’s Andante Moderato last year under conductor Alexander Shelley, who’ll have the night off.)

2. Johnny Gandelsman, This is America, July 22

I suspect a lot of NACO string players will be hightailing it from their own concert to this unaccompanied performance by one of the most audacious American violinists of his generation. Gandelsman spent 2020 and 2021 commissioning new pieces by a large number of composers, in reaction to the historic social and political upheavals of our time. No way to tell which selections from the resulting sprawling triple-CD he’ll select. The next morning Gandelsman will do another thing he does: playing three of Bach’s cello suites on violin.

3. Quator Danel, July 26

A top-tier string quartet from France, together more than 30 years, with a program of early works by three of the top string-quartet composers: Haydn, Shostakovich, Beethoven. Late works tend to get a lot of attention, for obvious reasons. They feel like, and often are, a culmination. Early works — Quartet 1 by Haydn and Shostakovich, Quartet 2 by Beethoven — let you hear huge talents just beginning to work through their material.

4. Rachel Fenlon, Winterreise, July 30

Franz Schubert died at 31, and judging from these late songs based on 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller, he was in a lousy mood. This “Winter’s Journey” was written for a pianist and a singer; Rachel Fenlon, from Vancouver Island by way of Berlin, plays the piano part herself while singing. The effect is intimate and a little disconcerting, as though Schubert were channelling Billy Joel, or vice versa.

5. Cheng² Duo, Aug. 3

Hometown heroes make good. Pianist Silvie Cheng and her brother, cellist Bryan, have been playing concerts in Ottawa and around the world since they were children. Now she teaches at the Manhattan School of Music and he just won second prize with a ferocious performance at the Geneva Cello Competition. They’re playing a program with a lot of approachable contemporary music. Plus some Brahms.

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It’s hot. There’s a book for that.

Several days ago I interviewed Chris Turner, a Calgary writer who’s one of Canada’s leading writers on climate change. (He’s against it.) His 2017 book The Patch is an ambitious history of the Alberta oil sands. I thought it deserved a lot more attention than it got. Turner is an environmentalist and former Calgary Green Party candidate (he thumped the New Democrat), but The Patch showed real empathy and insight into the innovations of Alberta’s resource pioneers and their latter-day successors.

Turner’s new book, How to be a Climate Optimist, argues the transition to a low-carbon economy is going better than is sometimes claimed. He depicts a world where governments are skittish and populations hard to convince — but where solid innovations are widely adopted, leaving quite a lot of room for hope. He spoke to me from Calgary.

Turner: My last book that was aimed straight at the climate crisis was The Leap in 2011. Ten years have passed. It was a very busy decade. Where did we get to? There was this consistent exceeding of expectation, even amidst all of the legitimately gloomy stuff that comes out of the climate science itself; that comes out of international climate politics; that comes out of, you know, all climate policy being kind of almost by nature a little bit half-assed and deeply compromised.

Despite all that, suddenly you had cheap solar, and Ford making electric trucks, and whatever else. And that felt like something. I could take the fact that I've been watching this thing for a lot longer than most people and say, actually, we've gotten a lot further than you'd think.

My oldest kid is now like a Fridays for Future protester, organizer, Climate Strike Canada, all this stuff. And that gang — and with good cause — they're very much like, “We've done nothing. We're going nowhere.” But I will always say to them, we haven't done nothing. We've done not as much as you would like, in terms of the whole world coming together as one and saying, “We've all agreed to the same climate and energy policies.” But that may never actually happen. And in the meantime, all the stuff that I pay attention to is moving really quick.

A large part of your argument hinges on this distinction between things being “less bad” and “much better.”

“Less bad” is basically the first decade or so [of the energy transition], which was: “Okay, we know emissions are bad. So how do we make fewer emissions?” And that's very much an environmentalist paradigm. You have pollution; stop doing the pollution…. That's why pipelines [seemed like] such a good target, because they recognized this was a thing that you could stop. Unfortunately, stopping it doesn't get you very far. Stopping Keystone XL did not stop the United States from adding five, six million barrels a day to their oil production through shale fracking.

So I was trying to show the difference between what government's going to do, from a regulatory point of view, and where actual momentum is going to come from to make change.

[When Germany offered generous incentives for renewable energy, principally solar] what that wound up doing was making solar cheap everywhere. That winds up being much more important than how far down the road toward zero emissions Germany got — because they've made solar cheap for China and Vietnam and India and Africa.

Nobody, even in the solar business, thought that by 2022, solar would be the dominant renewable energy source. Big industrial wind turbines — that was predicted. And that's actually moved slower. In Germany, 12, 15 years ago, a lot of people thought, “We're going to just fill the North Sea with turbines.” But that's just really taking off now. They didn't see solar getting cheap in the rest of the world. That's a much bigger ballgame than what any one country did.

You helped write a 2016 speech by Justin Trudeau to the Globe conference in Vancouver. You obviously felt like it was part of a new time. How did that work out?

On climate, [the Trudeau Liberals] have been better than anyone previous. Not quite as good as their ambition. Not quite as focused as they were in 2015, 2016. But still, the big pieces they wanted to put in place were the right pieces to put in place. The people they were talking to, and working with to try and get that stuff in place — that was the thing about that Globe conference. You had the people who had formerly been sitting out with me, you know, talking under their breath about, “Yeah, big ideas. But how are we going to get anything done with this Conservative government?” Suddenly, they were now walking in as the advisors to the ministers.

I still think the general direction of it is really good. I think they wanted to put in place a couple of things that would be very hard to get rid of. The carbon price, getting rid of coal. Ideally some stuff on fuel standards, which has been a little bit of a thornier path. That thinking was right.

And then as happens with a second and a third mandate, things get thornier and thornier. So you don't see the sense of urgency around it. Now, I think it's still a very high priority for the government. I think they're learning, or have learned, how hard it is to keep people focused.

Elizabeth May is no longer leading the Green Party, but she would show up at debates in every election cycle and say, “Look, we just don't have time to futz around. We don't have time to be ‘better than nothing.’”

And that's very common on the advocate-activist side of the climate debate for sure.

And your answer is, I think, largely sociological, which is that humanity doesn't work like that. One doesn't snap one's finger and get herds of governments moving in one direction. How about the math? May’s argument is essentially arithmetical: at some point, you've pushed the climate past the point of no return.

There's some truth to that, in the sense that we've already done some things that won't be undone. If 8 billion people had this moment of revelatory clarity tomorrow, and said, 'We will never again burn another fossil fuel,' you're still going to have the kind of climate chaos we're seeing now. The heat waves, extreme storms, serious habitat loss, extraordinary destruction of the oceans. All that's already cooked in to some degree.

Now, what climate scientists, as opposed to climate advocates and politicians will say is, there's no single point. You know, if you can't hit 1.5 degrees Celsius [of global increase in temperatures], 1.6 is still way better than 1.7 And 1.7 is still way better than 1.8.

In the book a couple times, I said, if we can't use these institutions that we've built to collectively act on our behalf, which ones would you like? Show me a lever that I can pull. There's no other way to do it. I wish I could force all the people who live around me in my neighborhood, when they sell their houses, to not sell to another person who's going to build the largest possible single-family house they can on the lot, and do nothing for community density. But I can't.

The other thing I would say, though — and this is where the optimism comes from —when I started reporting on this stuff and writing about it, really catastrophic scenarios were still fully in play. When you still had the world using coal as its default power source, that was where some of the Hollywood sci-fi Apocalypse scenarios came from. People will still trade in those. Climate scientists will argue whether we should even still be handing around those models. What they would say is, “It's not reasonable anymore to expect that the world will use five times as much coal in 50 years as it does today. Nothing is trending that way.”

Tell me what the future looks like. Does it look like sacrifice and hardship?

I think it looks like it's unknowable. We're in a pretty chaotic time. You look at the cycles of history, and these things tend when you're in the middle of them — you know, if it was 1943, and you were at the far end of a second world war that in between [the two wars] had a global depression, you wouldn't think what's about to come was one of the greatest times of prosperity and economic expansion in human history. So are we on the verge of that? I can't say for sure, but some of the elements are there.

There's reason to be cautiously optimistic that the tools that we're building for climate change, actually are things that people will go “Oh, I prefer that. Actually. I don't care about the climate bit. I just think that's a better thing.”

I have an undergrad degree in history. Digging through the historical stuff is always my favorite part of researching any book. One of the things that history teaches is that nobody, in the middle of one of these periods of great prosperity, just looks around going, “Wow.” There's not really that much of that happens. There's a lot of, “Well, you know, there's war on the horizon. You know, the Russians might blow us up.”

I would not want to undersell the fact that climate chaos is going to be real and worse. It's going to be a thing we're going to have to mitigate in a whole bunch of ways. On the other hand, the really apocalyptic stuff is looking less and less likely.

How to Be a Climate Optimist is published by Penguin Random House Canada.

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Sorry Indie: Spielberg on a chair

I don’t know about you, but I was way more excited to learn that Steven Spielberg had shot his first music video, at 75, than I was to learn Marcus Mumford has a new solo album coming out. I am a nearly unconditional Spielberg fan. Ready Player One and The BFG are the exceptions. And The Adventures of Tintin. But I even liked The Post and 1941. So my tolerance for Spielberg is high.

The end result is… mixed and, it seems to me, not entirely characteristic. Yes, I hear what a titanic nitpicker I’m being here. Of course the video is just a lovely gift from a great filmmaker to a friend. It sounds like they had a fun day in a big room, with Kate Capshaw pushing Spielberg around on an office chair while he shot Mumford in what looks like a single shot.

But what the hell is he doing from the 11-second to 40-second mark in the Cannibal video, circling Mumford’s face and pushing his phone camera in and out? This happens to be precisely what any 75-year-old in your own family would do if you gave them a brand new iPhone and asked them to shoot video of a family reunion. Makes me think Spielberg, who’s legendary for storyboarding every shot, just might have been winging it here. It also violates a principle Tony from Every Frame a Painting elucidates in this excellent Youtube retrospective of Spielberg’s long shots: “The camera never moves unmotivated. It’s always following an emotion or an action.”

That video on “the Spielberg oner” reminded me that uninterrupted long shots have always been part of his vocabulary. I tend to think of him more as a guy who tells the story in the cut, with a lot of short shots juxtaposed, as in the first few seconds of this retrospective from Duel, his 1971 TV movie. So I felt like he’d left a favourite technique on the table when he made himself the sole camera operator for Cannibal. I wished Martin Scorsese and Guillermo Del Toro had brought their own iPhones, and Spielberg could then cut their shots together in iMovie. Perhaps this would have blown Mumford’s budget.

But looking back at favourite Spielberg clips, I realized my memory was way too simplistic. Of course Spielberg almost never just parks a few cameras and then edits short uninflected shots together. He prefers to move his camera, so old photos of him on sets or locations usually feature a camera sitting on dolly tracks. An office chair, from this perspective, is just a cheap dolly.

One of my favourite Spielberg scenes, the India sequence from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, has a fantastic shot of this nature, from 0:50 to 1:10 here:

The crowd’s moving, the camera’s moving, and the central character, played by François Truffaut, is moving with his American translator toward the guy they want to question about last night’s weirdness in the sky. Camera, crowd and point-of-view characters move at different speeds, so they wind up right where he needs them at the climax of the shot. To me he must get that from Andrei Tarkovsky, and I see I’m not the first person to have that hunch.

Anyway, I nerded out there for a bit. The song sounds like Mumford and Sons, basically.