Friday Miscellanea

Kicking off the post we have an article that goes a long way towards supporting my frequent disparagement of all psychological "studies", "surveys" and "research", not only into music, but into anything. The answer to the question "How Reliable Are Psychological Studies" the answer is "very damn little!" Here is another report on the same research: "Many scientific studies can't be replicated."

Maverick researchers have long argued that much of what gets published in elite scientific journals is fundamentally squishy — that the results tell a great story but can’t be reproduced when the experiments are run a second time.

Now a volunteer army of fact-checkers has published a new report that affirms that the skepticism was warranted. Over the course of four years, 270 researchers attempted to reproduce the results of 100 experiments that had been published in three prestigious psychology journals.

It was awfully hard. They ultimately concluded that they’d succeeded just 39 times.

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Well, I'm not quite sure what to think about this via Slipped Disc:

Universal Music Classics is rather fond of them:

Elizabeth Sobol, President & CEO of UMC says: ‘I’ve been following Mother Falcon for quite some time now. Their classically-derived instrumentation and exploratory compositions set them apart. No one sounds like Mother Falcon. Their music is truly in line with the artistic vision of Universal Music Classics.’

Okaaaay.... These are very nice people having a lot of fun and a fine-looking bunch. But the music is, well, fairly characterless indie-pop. Or rather, bland indie-pop arranged for a random bunch of classical instruments, plus a couple of guitars. The singing is weak and the whole production reminds me of a rehearsal before the concert. They have no need of music or music stands because the tunes and arrangements are so simple that it is easy to play them from memory. In terms of phrasing, rhythm and harmony, this is pretty much pop music. What they desperately need is a composer, I suspect. Oh, and this comment is pretty telling:

Did anybody actually mention that they sound TERRIBLE??!? 

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The New York Times has a big article on just how creative artists, and musicians in particular, have been faring in this new digital world. And, it turns out, the situation is not as bad as has been thought:

...in 1999 there were nearly 53,000 Americans who considered their primary occupation to be that of a musician, a music director or a composer; in 2014, more than 60,000 people were employed writing, singing or playing music. That’s a rise of 15 percent, compared with overall job-­market growth during that period of about 6 percent. The number of self-­employed musicians grew at an even faster rate: There were 45 percent more independent musicians in 2014 than in 2001. (Self-­employed writers, by contrast, grew by 20 percent over that period.)

...songwriters and music directors saw their average income rise by nearly 60 percent since 1999. The census version of the story, which includes self-­employed musicians, is less stellar: In 2012, musical groups and artists reported only 25 percent more in revenue than they did in 2002, which is basically treading water when you factor in inflation. And yet collectively, the figures seem to suggest that music, the creative field that has been most threatened by technological change, has become more profitable in the post-­Napster era — not for the music industry, of course, but for musicians themselves. Somehow the turbulence of the last 15 years seems to have created an economy in which more people than ever are writing and performing songs for a living.

Hmm, that is rather puzzling. Because we also know that the music industry has been collapsing with lower and lower revenues from the sale of recorded music. Turns out that live performances have been increasing. Ticket prices are steeply up, between 1997 and 2012 they rose 150%. The whole article is worth reading.

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Somehow this cartoon just makes me chuckle:

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High-fidelity sound systems have come a long way since Jack was a young man:

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Every August critic Jay Nordlinger from the National Review spends a couple of weeks at the Salzburg Festival in Austria, for which I deeply envy him as I was there for a month many years ago in Pepe Romero's master class and had an amazing time. Anyway, one of the things he does is interviews with some of the musicians there. For example:

The third guest in our Salzburg Festival Society series is Gianandrea Noseda, the conductor from Milan. At the festival this year, he is leading Il trovatore, the Verdi opera.

Toward the end of our hour, I ask him to give me a couple of living composers — just two or three — who are worth hearing. Not great, not destined for immortality, simply worth hearing. After reflecting a moment, he says, “May I name some from the recent past, whether they’re still living or not?” That’s cheating a bit, but I say sure. Noseda names Ligeti (1923-2006). And Messiaen (1908-92). “There,” he says, “that’s two. You said I could do two.”

Not sure about Ligeti (we will have to do some posts on him) but I certainly agree about Messiaen--and yes, expect more posts on him in the near future.

UPDATE: Link fixed.

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This piece from Slipped Disc is both charming and off-putting. A modest chamber music series asks of its performers:

5. What turns our concertgoers off fastest is a programme which they perceive as lightweight (in length or depth), or performers who assume that listeners are not knowledgeable because it’s ‘just’ a Suffolk country church on a summer Sunday afternoon. [More on not ‘talking down’ to the audience under At your concert below.]

6 By the time you see this, the programme for your concert will have been made public via a printed season brochure, as well as on the website. We are reluctant to agree any changes to this, but recognise that sometimes there are good reasons for doing so: contact me as soon as possible if you wish to discuss a change.

7 If you wish, or are asked, to perform any of the works you have agreed to perform for us at any public event within 50km of Cratfield in the three months before your concert for us, please check this out with me first.

8 If any of the works you will perform include repeats asked for by the composer, we encourage you to observe these, unless you have a good reason for not doing so.

And some of the commentators get rather pompous and arrogant.

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Here is an article about how critics rank the best orchestras in the world. European, and especially German, orchestras are in the lead. The piece is hard to excerpt, so go read the whole thing.

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The youngest conductor working in the US is Teddy Abrams, "at 28 years old the Bay Area-bred conductor heads the Britt Classical Music Festival in Oregon and the Louisville Symphony, with its illustrious history of commissioning and recording new work." Normally I'm not too impressed with most of the ideas about how to "revitalize" classical music because they so often boil down to "let's make it more like pop music!" But Teddy has a whole different approach. He thinks about the economic incentives involved:

So what’s wrong with the way this musical culture is set up?

Think about how we’ve constructed composition right now. There’s no great model for giving composers a reason to compose. When you compensate soloists and conductors on a very high level, where’s the equivalent for composers? Composers need to be given the financial resources and musical resources to do what they do. The fact is we have transitioned away from that.

A lot of very interesting ideas in that article.

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Let's end the post with a performance by the Louisville Orchestra. This is the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, op. 21 by Easley Blackwood. The soloist is Paul Kling, with whom I gave many chamber concerts. The recording is undated, but it must be from several decades ago when Paul was the concertmaster in Louisville.