175: Joshua Rifkin (One voice per part in Bach | Scott Joplin)

Pleased to share my new interview with Professor Joshua Rifkin!

We discuss his experiences in the New York Avant Garde circle of the 50's and 60's, his influential recordings of Scott Joplin that popularized Ragtime, and his theory of "One Voice per part" in Bach's vocal music that has seen great controversy and debate in modern performance practice.

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[ericnagler]

Hi Josh, greetings from an old confrere of those rich musical times.

Oh, this is exciting! I'm going to listen to it right away!

[MusicaAngela]

At 17:00 he says, "tonal music seemed impossibly the wrong thing" and then he adds "even though it had been around for 50 years". To me, this was an arrogance the music world could have done without. I am still scared by that attitude having studied composition in the '70's with various emperors who were wearing no clothes.

[angryjalapeno]

One per part was probably a reality in Bach's time. However in the modern world, one per part in a large or even medium space is inadequate for a paying audience especially when brass and drums were involved. Ive heard Bach St Matthew with 1 per part and the voices were barely audible. In my mind that for certain heavily instrumented vocal works if Bach had access to 3 or 4 superb voices, he would have used 3 or 4 per part. If however singers are allowed to use amplification, I'm all for 1 per part.

[johnrothfield]

Solace, magnetic rag, favorites of joshua

[superblondeDotOrg]

01:30:20 So if Bach were alive today, he would be writing music for Barbershop Quartets. 😂

[MusicaAngela]

That's so fascinating that it was the Beatles who began to deflate the egos of the paragons of "high culture".

[superblondeDotOrg]

30:00 So, The Beatles, who were a girl-band/boy-band, with members who knew zero music theory and were guided by a classical composer as manager, and who were deliberately designed to woo preteen girls for profit with vocal harmony and simplistic melodies, is what destroyed the horrible Serialist and Minimalist classist empire. wtf...!
And in current modern decades, musicians attempting academic route have to suffer with mindless and regressive "Pop Ensemble" classes which have no academic standards at all, because "The Beatles didn't use music theory or charts yet made great music". wtf...!
This is a horrible indicator of future history. It means Taylor Swift will be worshipped as a genius musician in 50 years, which definitely, she is not.