Friday Miscellanea

I just ran across a very interesting piece that is not only an analysis of bad academic writing, but also a typology of writing in general and instruction in how to avoid bad writing. Pretty useful piece! I try for a blend of classic style with a touch of jocular witticism here at the Music Salon.

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Robert Fink, who supposedly is to popular music scholarship what Richard Taruskin is to classical music scholarship, has a piece up at NewMusicBox that makes some rather bold statements:

those who frame the history of the musical present by categorically denigrating contemporary commercial popular music in favor of art music are holding on to a crude cultural distinction that mimics structural racism in America.

I’m not saying you can’t hate some pop music; I’m just saying you can’t, in the presence of a practicing postmusicologist, hate on all pop music just because it is popular, disguising elitism as self-pitying pride in new music’s marginalized market position.

What's a "postmusicologist"? Is that like a "posterboy for postmodernist musicology"? Well, never mind. While I think the second statement above is overheated and injudicious (probably stances required of postmusicologists) it is not very incorrect. You can hate some pop music, but you also need to recognize that there is also some quite good pop music out there. There is good and bad in all genres. Except grindcore, of course. But the last bit of the second statement, that stuff about "self-pitying elitism", is just a nasty sneer. So, back off, buddy!

The first statement is one of those absurd bits of nonsense that some people have been inflicting on us for a long time now. Equating noticing the superior aesthetic quality of art music over commercial popular music to structural racism is an intellectual felony. For one thing, he myopically assumes that America is The World. Speaking as a Canadian, which means I come from a place where there is not now and never has been "structural racism" against black people, I call BS on this. There is art music and commercial popular music all over the world, not just in America. Hey, America, this isn't about you!

Also, those shibboleth trigger phrases like "crude cultural distinction" and "structural racism" are just masks concealing a real poverty of thought. I gave up reading the piece after the first few paragraphs as it just didn't seem worth the effort. tl;dr!

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The latest entry in the science does the arts sweepstakes is an article in the Globe and Mail about how "Scientists are unlocking the biological secrets of creativity". It's more of the same beside-the-point blather that they keep feeding us in the mass media. What really amazes me is how thin the gruel is. This is the kind of profound understanding that the research results in:

The notion that the brain is doing all kinds of interesting gymnastics when listening to music is well established, popularized by McGill University professor Daniel Levitin and his best-selling 2006 book, This Is Your Brain on Music, in which he hypothesized music is a perceptual illusion in which the brain learns to impose structure on a sequence of sounds.

Ta-da!! Wow, now that is the kind of empty profundity that you don't see every day. Oh, wait, you do!

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And now my brain will impose some more structure on these little pixels with this item: regarding the burning issue of women orchestral conductors, Reuters has this story: "Malkki at helm of Finnish orchestra cracks glass ceiling". They write:

Orchestra conductor Susanna Malkki is used to being asked what it is like working in a male-dominated world.

"Maybe one day we will have reached a point where we won't have to discuss the gender issue at all," she said with a smile.

Hey Susanna? I quit discussing this issue about thirty years ago. One of my best friends, a woman, was studying conducting and doing quite well and I didn't for a minute think it was weird. Nor did I think so when several other women friends of mine were doing quite well as graduate students in composition. It is astonishing how much of our public space is occupied by phony debates designed to benefit certain people. By lying, essentially.

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What is Sinfini Music cutting through this week? Lots of stuff about the cello and an astonishingly inept review of a cycle of Shostakovich symphonies. Reviews these days have to be very brief but this one opens with a remarkably flabby bit of prose, saying very little in an awkward manner:

The first thing to say about this symphonic cycle is that it doesn’t sound like one. I mean that as a compliment. Yes, the production values are uniformly excellent, giving space to soloists to roam free in the Gotham City fairground of Shostakovich’s orchestral imagination, but conductor Vasily Petrenko makes a distinctive case for each symphony, requiring his Liverpool band to turn on a sixpence for the jump-cut sequences in the early and late works, and mining a broad, properly Russian vein of tragedy in the mid-period symphonies.

So, the conductor tries to give each symphony its due? Wow. In this passage on the Symphony No. 4, the writer manages to combine both aesthetic and historical error with cliché:

Another highlight of the cycle is the Fourth, the loudest, most obstreperous and confrontational of all 15 symphonies, and Petrenko holds together the many episodes of the massive first movement with an acute sense of its symphonic credentials but also conveying why this music scared even its composer, so much so that after an initial rehearsal he stuck it in the bottom drawer, where it lay for a quarter of a century.

The loudest and most obstreperous symphony is No. 7, not No. 4. Nearly all Shostakovich symphonies have massive first movements with many episodes. The phrase "symphonic credentials" has no meaning that I can discern and Shostakovich cancelled the premiere until after the death of Stalin not because the music scared him, but because he had just been denounced in Pravda for "formalism" and this symphony would have provided the perfect evidence for Stalin's henchmen and ended his career.

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And that gives us the perfect music to end this miscellanea with: Shostakovich, Symphony No. 4. Here is Haitink and the Chicago Symphony: