Friday Miscellanea

What's missing from this map? It shows the popularity of various genres of music based on what styles are most tweeted about. All kinds of music except classical of course, because classical music according to this isn't popular anywhere. Not even in Salzburg, Austria, a city devoted almost entirely to classical music. If you zoom in really close on the map you can see that in Salzburg the only kind of music tweeted about is K-Pop (Korean pop music), rap and country. So, what did they do? Go to great lengths to actually eliminate any tweets about classical music? Well that would be consistent with other organs of the mass media. The New York Times has an annual feature in which they offer tribute to musicians that have died in the past year. All except classical musicians, of course.

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More talk about the plight of artists in today's economic context in this Washington Post piece on "Creative Destruction" by which they mean the destruction of creativity.

Here’s a paragraph grim enough to wreck your week, a sortie of distressing numbers about the arbiters, facilitators, and creators of culture: Between 2008 and September 2012, there were 66 No. 1 songs, almost half of which were performed by only six artists (Katy Perry, Rihanna, Flo Rida, The Black Eyed Peas, Adele, and Lady Gaga); in 2011, Adele’s debut album sold more than 70 percent of all classical albums combined, and more than 60 percent of all jazz albums. Between 1982 and 2002, the number of Americans reading fiction withered by nearly 30 percent. In a 1966 UCLA study, 86 percent of students across the country declared that they intended to have a “meaningful philosophy of life”; by 2013, that percentage was amputated by half, “meaningful” no doubt replaced by “moneyful.” Over the past two decades, the number of English majors graduating from Yale University has plummeted by 60 percent; at Stanford University in 2013, only 15 percent of students majored in the humanities. In American universities, more than 50 percent of faculty is adjuncts, pittance-paid laborers with no medical insurance and barely a prayer to bolster them. In the publishing and journalism trades, 260,000 jobs were nixed between 2007 and 2009. Since the turn of the century, around 80 percent of cultural critics writing for newspapers have lost their jobs. There are only two remaining full-time dance critics in the entire United States of America. A not untypical yearly salary in 2008 for a professional dancer was $15,000.

Renovate that bromide making ends meet and you might be nearer the mark: Members of the creative class are meeting their ends. What does it mean when the middle-class makers of art are relegated to a socioeconomic purgatory? 

Just to add to the list I saw a piece about so-called professional composers in Britain that said that the average income for members of their association was around $2300 US a year. That's not an actual profession, now is it?

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Paul's still cool. Here he is, the only one to get up and groove in a retro way while everyone else just sits there like the dweebs they are:

Plus, can't the Grammy people get a restraining order against Kanye West?

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The Royal Shakespeare Company is holding a competition to write a song using a text by Shakespeare. This is in honor of Shakespeare's birthday and will be performed at a celebration in Stratford in April. While it seems tempting, there are a couple of stumbling blocks: one is that you have to be a resident of the UK. The other one is actually rather hilarious. Quoting from the rules, which you have to download, this is buried on the second page:

If you win the competition you will be provided with 2 complimentary tickets to Shakespeare’s Birthday Bash on Sunday 25th April, 2015 (excluding any travel or further expenses). No prize or part of a prize is exchangeable for cash, tickets or services.

Get it? NO PRIZE! For winning this prestigious competition you will receive absolutely no financial reward except for two tickets to the celebration. I wonder if this includes a complimentary beverage? Honestly, the people behind this should be run out of town on a rail. Talk about demeaning the value of music composition. An outstanding musical setting of a text by Shakespeare, according to the Royal Shakespeare Company, is worth exactly nothing. I wonder what Paul would think?

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One of the most interesting things going on in classical music these days is Ian Bostridge's new book, recording and concerts of Die Winterreise, possibly the finest song cycle ever written (yes, including Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band). Anne Midgette, the fine music critic at the Washington Post (and occasional commentator on this blog) has a review up. Well worth reading.

Ian Bostridge is not a classical singer. Yes, he’s a tenor, and what he does is vocal performance, and it’s strikingly compelling. But classical singers produce sound in a certain way, with a certain kind of vocal support and certain accepted wisdoms about sound and line and diction. Bostridge, by contrast, comes at singing from entirely his own direction and arrives at his own unique conclusions and results.

He actually sounds like the perfect artist to perform my song cycle Songs from the Poets. I say that because my texts are all drawn from poetry and Ian Bostridge sounds like he would really delve into them, and because the cycle is really not intended for someone with an operatic sound. My influences are probably equally drawn from Guillaume DuFay and John Lennon, so my ideal singer would be someone who is more like Ian Bostridge than, say, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (much as I love his singing!).

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There was one nice thing in the Grammy awards this year: Hilary Hahn won the Best Chamber Music category with her commissioned encore album "In 27 Pieces". And so she should have!! I talked about this album at very great length in several posts starting here. I actually did six posts, not three, on the recording.

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Tom Service makes up for leaving Allan Pettersson out of his symphony guide last year by including him in his "The 10 best Scandinavian symphonists (who aren't Sibelius or Nielsen)". And he mentions nine others who might also be worth listening to. Wow, there are sure a lot of symphonic Finns! And one of them, Leif Segerstam, has even Haydn beat for productivity with 285 symphonies! So far! Let's end today's miscellanea with one. Here is a performance of #21: