Friday Miscellanea

Here is the future, the complete commercialization of music:

It has been announced that New York’s Juilliard School has received a $5 Million grant from trustee Michael and Carol Marks to develop a new student business-skills and entrepreneurship program.

To be called the ‘Alan D Marks Center for Career Services and Entrepreneurship’, the program will include the development of a compulsory entrepreneurship course for all first-year students and a number of seminars and training programmes on financial planning, public speaking, networking and concert programming.

The Centre will also award a number of annual grants of up to US $10,000 to support innovative student projects.

The announcement, from the traditionally performance-based institution, comes just months after both Mannes College and the Manhattan School of Music announced revamped curriculums – to include courses in entrepreneurship, technology and improvisation.

I can remember a time, not long ago, when cultural grants were mostly given to projects of special aesthetic value so they would NOT have to be subject to commercial pressures!

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And now for something completely different. If you haven't heard it you really should have a listen to the Philosopher's Song delivered (along with free Foster's beer) by Monty Python at the Hollywood Bowl.

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Does anyone else find this article talking up toy musical instruments a bit, uh, disturbing?

Wilco guitarist Nels Cline proudly plays miniature pianos and plastic “Cowboy” guitars—and bristles at the term “toy instrument,” which he finds “denigrating and dismissive.” He prefers “little instruments.”
“To me there’s no differentiation between a so-called ‘toy instrument’ and a traditional one,” he said. “You could go to IKEA right now and buy a tiny keyboard that kids play in kindergarten and it may totally make a track on a record.”

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Make of these statistics what you will. For me it is rather a golden age of recorded music as you can buy all sorts of big integral recordings really cheap.

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I'm a big fan of the movies of Luc Besson. In his The Fifth Element a very tall blue-skinned alien diva sings an aria with a stunning vocal range of, what, three or four octaves? Five, maybe? Here is the sequence:

The actress is Luc Besson's then girlfriend Maïwenn Le Besco, but the actual singing is done by a real opera singer, soprano Inva Mula. It is the beginning of an aria scena, "Il dolce suono", from the opera "Lucia di Lammermoor" by Donizetti. The techno bit that follows is an addition for the film and involves what I always assumed was some technological wizardry to punch up the voice, not to mention adding an octave or so on either end of the range. But now there is an Armenian contestant in a talent show that seems to be doing it au naturel (though I don't think she gets down into the lowest part):

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Sometimes just after reading one of those essays about how we need to make classical music more "accessible" by dumbing it down, I think that those people are correct who claim that IQ levels have fallen by one standard deviation since Victorian times. And then I read something like this (link):

There’s a delightful and true saying, often attributed to Joseph Sobran, that in a hundred years, we’ve gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial English in college.

And I think, yep, that's probably true. And it explains how we got from Sousa and Joplin and Puccini (to name three very popular composers from around 1900) to Jay-Z and Beyoncé...

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Here is an account of a very special concert in Berlin in remembrance of the Holocaust and the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. One of the pieces played was the Adagietto from the Symphony No. 5 of Gustav Mahler, which gives us our musical envoi: