Friday Miscellanea

Would it be elitist to point out how things like this (Back in Baroque String Tribute to AC/DC) just demonstrate the relative dullness of the original?

It just drags on and on, sounding less inspired with each monotonous phrase. Instead you could have been listening to this (Mozart, String Quintet in G minor):

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I'm not the only one to write what you might call a "post-minimalist" symphony. Kyle Gann has also done so. And really, hasn't Phil Glass written a bunch?

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Anne Midgette was very complimentary about this National Symphony Orchestra concert in a space usually reserved for hip-hop or electronic dance music. I wish I could have heard it. Sometimes these things come off really well and sometimes they don't.

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Here is a well-done scientific study of the opposing forces of variety and repetition in music. Here is the abstract:

Listening habits are strongly influenced by two opposing aspects, the desire for variety and the demand for uniformity in music. In this work we quantify these two notions in terms of instrumentation and production technologies that are typically involved in crafting popular music. We assign an ‘instrumentational complexity value’ to each music style. Styles of low instrumentational complexity tend to have generic instrumentations that can also be found in many other styles. Styles of high complexity, on the other hand, are characterized by a large variety of instruments that can only be found in a small number of other styles. To model these results we propose a simple stochastic model that explicitly takes the capabilities of artists into account. We find empirical evidence that individual styles show dramatic changes in their instrumentational complexity over the last fifty years. ‘New wave’ or ‘disco’ quickly climbed towards higher complexity in the 70s and fell back to low complexity levels shortly afterwards, whereas styles like ‘folk rock’ remained at constant high instrumentational complexity levels. We show that changes in the instrumentational complexity of a style are related to its number of sales and to the number of artists contributing to that style. As a style attracts a growing number of artists, its instrumentational variety usually increases. At the same time the instrumentational uniformity of a style decreases, i.e. a unique stylistic and increasingly complex expression pattern emerges. In contrast, album sales of a given style typically increase with decreasing instrumentational complexity. This can be interpreted as music becoming increasingly formulaic in terms of instrumentation once commercial or mainstream success sets in.

I confess that I didn't read the whole thing as the math got quite complex! Bottom-line is that too much complexity kills sales. That's my problem!

Here is an article in the Atlantic discussing the study.

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Full marks for coolness to this new piano design from Hungary, the Bóganyi piano:

Looks kind of as if the Italian sports car people at Bugatti decided to design a piano.

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Every now and then it is fun to listen to one musician talk frankly about another musician. Mostly we try to preserve a minimum of professional courtesy, but sometimes you just wanna let fly! Here is Mickey Melchiondo, founding member and lead guitarist of Ween, talking about some music he really, really hates. Favorite quote:

Everything about the song is so awful that if I sat down and tried to write the worst song ever, I couldn’t even make it 10 percent of the reality of how awful that song is.

 Not all music criticism needs to be the sober, judicious kind that Alex Ross writes.

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It is a particular delight to read an excellent piece on a just-held new music festival by Allan Kozinn in the Wall Street Journal. Mr. Kozinn, a very fine classical music critic and author of an excellent book on the Beatles, was recently let go by the New York Times, part of an unfortunate trend it seems. Nice quote:

Music’s relevance, of course, is not a function of age or style, but of its ability to grab a listener, momentarily alter reality, and offer a glimpse of the transcendent.

Yes, exactly...

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One of my favorite living composers, Esa-Pekka Salonen, will be composer-in-residence with the New York Philharmonic next season. Here is the announcement. And an interview with Salonen:

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Thanks to Terry Teachout, we have this quote from Picasso on taste:

“Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.” Pablo Picasso (quoted in Quote, Mar. 24, 1957)

Which is quite true of modernist creativeness and much less true of creativeness in other eras.

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Let's end this Friday Miscellanea with a piece by Esa-Pekka Salonen. Here is Leila Josefowicz playing his Violin Concerto composed in 2009. Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Salonen:

No, I don't think he needs to be afraid of Pierre Boulez!