Friday, April 26, 2019

Friday Miscellanea

The Times Literary Supplement has an article on John Coltrane.
a clean Coltrane launched into a decisive phase of overachievement. Recordings that appeared under his own name for the leading independent labels Prestige, Atlantic and Blue Note resulted in a discography so rich that inevitably gems slip into obscurity. For example, the album Lush Life is worth the title track alone. Coltrane’s interpretation of the masterpiece written by Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington’s peerless co-composer and arranger, is an object lesson in how to capture the deep world-weariness and regret of a lyric through the inflections and nuance of the tenor saxophone. This is a big leonine instrument that Coltrane handles with consummate skill, using the tonal weight for scene-stealing melodic richness on some phrases, while brightening and hardening his timbre elsewhere to create a piercing effect in line with the sharp edges of Strayhorn’s cynical musings on the prospect of “a lush life in some small dive”.
And here is that fourteen minute performance:


I don't know why I have never fallen under the spell of the great jazz artists like John Coltrane and Miles Davis. I'm not unaware of their stature, nor of the techniques they use to create these tapestries of sound. But I just don't jibe with the cultural context for some reason. This deep world-weariness is not mine.

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Here is a pdf on the Economics of Renaissance Art. It is rather a long read, and one intended for professional economists, but it has some interesting perspectives:
When painting finally appeared as an independent decorative object hung on a wall, the frame began its evolution as a richly carved and gilded tondo or cassetta that could be made by artists as prominent as the painter... the picture, once it emerged in a domestic setting, became subject to the influence of the entire range of secular culture and took on greater variety in its content and a more highly charged cultural meaning. Soon, rich families started to decorate their own chapels in churches with altarpieces commissioned directly to the painters. The purpose was to invest in the next life or just to signal their "magnificence" to the community (Nelson and Zeckhauser, 2008). This created a multiplier of artistic production as new churches were built with new chapels to be sold to private families who then commissioned new altarpieces and tombs stimulating imitative behavior by others. Such a "laicization of religion" made it possible for the demand of art to increase rapidly during our period. Part of this was because paintings were capital goods whose value was increasing during Renaissance: altarpieces for private chapels were repeatedly seen and enjoyed by the entire local community, generating benefits for their commissioners. The essential consequence of this, for my purposes, is that the new social benefits associated with art increased the willingness to pay for paintings.
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Cat concerto?


That cat has an excellent grasp of the acciaccatura ornament!

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Here's a slice of pop history: John Lennon and Chuck Berry playing together.


The slightly awkward context around this is that people like John Lennon and the Beatles took the kind of energy found in rock n roll as practiced by people like Chuck Barry, and made it into a huge commercial success. The enormous amounts of money flowing to those few pop musicians are still a rather awkward fact from the aesthetic point of view.

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More on the controversy surrounding AI composition:
AI could easily compose a Vivaldi-like (Italian Baroque) piece that, if used as transitional music in a documentary or under dialogue and sound effects, would more than do the job. Could a lifelong, professional musician tell that piece was written by AI? Maybe. It depends on too many factors to go into here. Could a discerning audience? Highly doubtful. In fact, I’m going to put a flag in the ground here and simply say no. If they were not informed (warned), no general audience would have a clue as to how the track was created, nor would the audience care.
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I mentioned the debate between Slavoj Žižek and Jordan Peterson the other day and quoted a review. Here is a rather nastier one:
You may have your own personal idea of Hell. Mine is an eternity trapped in a room with Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek. I do not like these men. I consider Peterson a toxic charlatan and Žižek a humiliating embarrassment to the left. I believe they both show how far you can get in public life without having anything of value to say, if you’re a white man with a PhD who speaks confidently and incomprehensibly. In fact, this is not really a debate at all, because these men are nearly identical as far as I am concerned. I sincerely believe that history will look back on this moment as a dark human low point.
Heh! I wonder if we will get tired of this kind of unrelenting ad hominem bile at some point?

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From Slipped Disc, here is a really odd and somewhat foreboding story:
The Norwegian label Lawo Classics has been suspended from Facebook after posting cover art on a Baroque release by the Dutch master Jan Davidsz De Heem (1606-1684), which Facebook deemed to be sexual.
As always with Slipped Disc, don't neglect the comments.

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Anne Midgette at the Washington Post weighs in on the Kate Smith controversy. It's a fairly long discussion, but she concludes by saying the baseball teams did the right thing:
You can’t edit out of history everything you don’t like. “If we go through history and we really take out everything that a person who’s controversial has done, that’s also robbing us of some of our American history,” Brownlee says.
But there’s also no need to pretend that the ballpark is the best arena in which to appreciate nuance or conduct reasoned debate about the significance of a piece of music. It’s less a question of censoring Smith altogether than of finding other appropriate places in which to encounter her work. Robinson draws a parallel to Civil War memorials in Charlottesville: “Put it in a museum,” he says, a context more appropriate for critical engagement. But leave the ballpark to the ballgames, with symbols appropriate to accompany them.
On the other hand, given the historic exclusion of black players practiced by the New York Yankees, this feels a bit hypocritical.

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Let me just point out one thing about artificial intelligence when it comes to music. It is really the case that one or more musicians are creating an application, program or algorithm to imitate a musical style. Any genius or creativity involved is entirely coming from the musicians involved. Shouldn't this be perfectly obvious? If you want to imitate or synthesize the elements that go into the style of, say, Vivaldi, then you have to intelligently study Vivaldi a great deal to understand how his structures work. Then you create a program to imitate this. All the intelligence and creativity involved is human, not artificial. So let's listen to some Vivaldi. This is the A minor concerto from L'Estro Armonico:


16 comments:

Marc in Eugene said...

Who knows, but Lawo Classics is on Facebook without any sign that the censors have been about their dark work. On the other hand, I went all the way back on their page, beyond Christmas, and didn't see that 2016 CD featuring the De Heem painting: my guess would be that someone got on his high horse and killed that one post (rather than suspending the entire page). I cancelled Fb because they (more precisely, I imagine, because some one of their censors: I mean, how likely is it that Fb minions are keeping a global watch against elderly High Anglican converts to Rome?) decided that the great Fr John Hunwicke writes posts on his blog that are worthy of deletion. The first two times they de-deleted my sharing of his posts but after that they stopped writing back when I protested. Tsk. Eventually went back to Fb, however, because of the lamentations of elderly female relatives who missed me being able to comment on their doings, tsk. Am very pleased to have been introduced to De Heem, whose still lifes are gorgeous.

Wenatchee the Hatchet said...

As a longtime admirer of a lot of jazz who is not quite as enamored with Coltrane and Davis I think if I had to try to describe what they were doing that was definitely inventive but not quite my thing is that they worked with solos based on modal mutation against the modality of the established harmonies. You can hear that in Kind of Blue and ... it's trickier to hear in Coltrane's later work as it gets more harmonically esoteric, but there's an aspect of spatialized harmony that isn't necessarily what I hear in the work of Ellington or Monk. I love Monk and a way his work has been described is that his melody and harmony fit together in such a way that you really could never just play whatever you wanted to, if you wanted to play his work competently you had to know the melody and the chord changes and always improvise based on where those chord changes led you through. Coltrane's "sheets of sound" are impressive but they're impressive in terms of solos. I'm more drawn to a Monk approach. I'm ... also not exactly a virtuoso guitarist so that's ANOTHER reason. :)

I like Coltrane's music okay but I don't adore it the way I adore Monk's music, or Ellington's.

Wenatchee the Hatchet said...

Robinson ...well ... I watched UHF and I would be hard-pressed to write THIS piece praising it as a demonstration of how socialism is the best ...

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/04/the-radical-egalitarian-politics-of-weird-als-uhf

the long rant on the corruption and hypocrisy of the Southern Poverty Law Center that recently ousted a prominent member seems more substantial, if a bit piggy-backing on New Yorker coverage. His riffs on the SPLC "hate map" made for interesting reading.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/03/the-southern-poverty-law-center-is-everything-thats-wrong-with-liberalism

I try to toggle back and forth across the "left" and the "right" in my reading and sometimes discover some curious overlaps and correspondences, like criticism of the SPLC.

./MiS said...

About Coltrane: "Jazz free zone" ring a bell? ;)
About AI: when you "intelligently study Vivaldi a great deal to understand how his structures work. Then you create a program to imitate this." then it is not AI, it's algorithmic composition. AI still requires an intelligent and creative human who writes algorithms that tell the computer to learn from musical data and find features that will allow it to create models to recreate new musical data that has similar features. Then it needs a human to interpret the learned data and adjust the learning parameters for it to improve, but the machine is not following hand-coded routines, it is trained to produce a desired output.

Bryan Townsend said...

The comments section has been too quiet lately! Thanks all for livening it up.

Marc, thanks for the details about the Facebook bannings. As I don't use the site myself, I just have to go with what I am told.

Wentachee, thanks for the links to other writings by Nathan Robinson. He certainly seems to think for himself.

Heh, yes, I have always admitted a personal bias against jazz. It's just not my groove, though I can certainly respect the great creators.

RE AI, that's an interesting distinction you bring out. You point to a heuristic function as training to produce a desired result. Desired by whom is the obvious question. By the human creators, of course, right?

Patrick said...

Please define 'spatialized harmony'. Polytonality? And how is this supposed to be received by the music consuming public that has not necessarily had the benefit of instruction in harmony and ear training? As an expression of angst, ennui, alienation, melancholy? Can't think it's about unalloyed joy.

./MiS said...

In computer science, the word "training" does not imply a heuristic function, sorry for misleading you.

Bryan Townsend said...

When you refer to "algorithms that tell the computer to learn" isn't that a heuristic function?

Wenatchee the Hatchet said...

Patrick, there aren't any easy texts on "spatialized" music. The idea that music in the West had fragmented into contrasted modes of music cognition was proposed by Theodore Adorno in Philosophy of New Music, one of the more infamously difficult texts of the earlier 20th century. A "slightly" less user-unfriendly discourse on different ways of conceptualizing music in terms of space and time would be George Rochberg's essay "The Concepts of Musical Time and Space".

Rochberg pointed out that a lot of traditional Western music can be thought of as a river that flows in one direction and you float on that river to where ever the destination may be, so to speak. That would be a time-space. Space-time is different, and in works by Varese and other sonic or soundscape composers the way to hear music is in a kind of three-dimensional spacial sense. I could give an example that's pretty easy from popular recorded music. Make sure you have the speakers for it but listen to "On the Run" by Pinkfloyd and you'll hear that the quadrophonic sound of that track has sounds that seem to swirl around or move across the "space" of the musical moment. A sound will seem to emerge in your left or right ear as yu listen on headphones and then traverse to the opposite end of the "space" in which you are hearing Pinkfloyd's music. I'd have to defer to the expertise of audio engineers to explain how all of this recording brilliance gets done.

Bryan Townsend said...

Thanks, Wenatchee. If we are talking about "spacialized harmony" then wouldn't that Pierre Boulez piece where the performers are amplified and the sound swirled around the room be another example? And, of course, there are earlier examples from Giovanni Gabrieli and Hector Berlioz.

./MiS said...

Yes, self-learning is, to some extend heuristic. The bottom line is that the process you describe is not AI. The application of AI will typically involve machine learning. The distinction here is that it is not the human creator but the machine that is doing the intelligent studying of Vivaldi's oeuvre in order to imitate it. There are parts that are heuristic in ML but one cannot simply sum it up as heuristic.

And by whom the output is desired? Definitely humans, but not creators alone, I'm afraid.

Bryan Townsend said...

Hmmm. I think we need a post on exactly how this works with enough detail to fill in the blanks. Interested in writing one?

Wenatchee the Hatchet said...

The Boulez could be a good example of what Rochberg called "space-time" and that Adorno described as the "spatial" element but these refer to modes of music cognition as much or more than to the surround sound aspects of performance and recording in their writings.

How it applies to jazz composers like Coltrane and Davis, I think, is that these composers began to write music in which exploring modal contrasts between soloist and ensemble needed harmonies static or recursive enough to highlight the shifting modal contrasts between the soloist exploration of modal mutation and the ensemble's anchoring modality. Monk was reportedly not that fond of this approach to jazz and reported complained to Davis about one of Davis' jazz fusion experiments "It's just one $@)%%# chord!"

./MiS said...

Hmmmm. A post on AI in music is actually a tempting proposition. It could be fun, I can give it a shot.

Bryan Townsend said...

Wentachee, where could I find that essay by George Rochberg? Looks like I need to read it!

Yes, please write us an intro to AI in music! I would post it with pleasure. Give us a short CV along with?

Send to my gmail: bryantown@gmail.com.

Wenatchee the Hatchet said...

The Rochberg book is a spotty read, at times fantastic and at times a slog. The essay on the concepts of musical time and space is a bit abstract but it's worth reading.

The Aesthetics of Survival: A Composer’s View of Twentieth-Century Music
George Rochberg
Copyright © 1984 by the University of Michigan
ISBN 0-472-10037-8

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2019/04/roger-scruton-on-george-rochbergs.html