Friday, May 24, 2019

Friday Miscellanea

Lots of musical Photoshop memes lately:


That's always been the argument for the bagpipe.

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Yes, I know that I am normally very critical of these so-called 'scientific' studies of music that usually seem to turn up something we already knew (or something likely false) but here is one study I kind of want to believe: Smarter people listen to instrumental music: study.
A new study published in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences suggests that those who prefer instrumental music tend to be more intelligent.
Study author Elena Racevska, a PhD student at Oxford Brookes University, became interested in how musical preference is tied to personality traits as she learned about the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis, which presumes that more intelligent individuals seek more novel experiences compared to less intelligent people.
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Musicology Now has sprung back to life with three new postings in May. One of them is on the promotion of Avengers: Endgame and the music therein, one of many posts on the site dealing with popular culture. Another is on music in Paris and still another is about jobs for musicologists in academia. The situation seems as dire as in English departments.
Since 2008, the number of tenured and tenure-track faculty at higher-education institutions has declined by 35%. The Delphi Project reports that contingent (adjunct) instructors now teach 73% of courses (AAUP Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, p. 3; Delphi Project). Working conditions for contingent faculty vary widely; most work on one-semester or one-year contracts with no promise of renewal. The pay and working conditions for part-time contingent laborers are especially poor: pay may be as low as $1800 per course, and more than 70% of institutions that employ part-time faculty do not contribute to their health insurance costs (AAUP op. cit., and AAUP Annual Report, Appendix III). Part-time contract work is the fastest-growing part of the academic work force (Coalition on the Academic Workforce). The few musicologists who do find tenure-track jobs in the academy see increasing workloads and declining research support at all but the most elite institutions.
And what they don't mention is that the growth of administrative positions has outpaced that of faculty for a couple of decades. If you want a job in academia your chances are best if you are a diversity specialist or member of a "bias response team." Administrative bloat on campus has replaced full-time faculty and resulted in the decline of quality in education.

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I've posted about the Grace Notes series at the Times Literary Supplement before, noting that its basic premiss biases it towards seeing composers as "pioneers," that is, as fundamentally innovators. This is an assumption taken from the modernist manifesto, of course, and I believe I cited composers like Mozart and Bach as being ones who tend to disprove the theory. Now they have a piece in the series on Mozart so let's see how they spin it!
A more familiar instance is the A major piano sonata, K. 331, conveying the musical sense of the word “rational” in its reliance on an utterly transparent series of ratios. Phrase answering phrase, two shorts followed by a long, and so on, contrast followed by return.
And then, within this tightly structured geometry, an explosion of invention, as idea follows idea, each seemingly fresher and more original than the last.
This is the problem that Mozart poses for our contemporary ears. His music is so balanced, clear, rational in its order, especially in comparison to the music that has come after, that it is easy – for performers as well as listeners – to miss the drama. Which is why we have to turn to the one place where drama cannot be ignored: opera.
In the original, they embed musical examples. The writer, Stephen Brown, goes on to discuss Beethoven's views on and uses of themes from Don Giovanni, which gets quite away from the issue, which is, was Mozart in any sense a "pioneer" or innovator in the radical way that, oh, Beethoven was? Instead, he focuses on how Mozart creates musical drama. Quite so! But that is a slightly different question. I think that Mozart's real role, somewhat akin to J. S. Bach's before him, was to look at all the advances in musical language discovered or invented by people like J. C. Bach and Joseph Haydn, and then to work out the possibilities, create a new synthesis and generally just to perfect what everyone else was doing.

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What would a Friday miscellanea be if we didn't have a look at what is new in the avant-garde? One new figure that seems to be getting attention is Christopher Rountree:
At the vanguard of new music, composer/conductor/curator Christopher Rountree, who is also a music director and founder of the renegade ensemble wild Up, is certainly having a moment. A seventh-generation Californian, the 36-year old Rountree is the curator of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Fluxus Festival (in conjunction with The Getty Research Institute), a celebration of the anti-establishment interdisciplinary art movement that emerged in the ’60s. The year-long bash is part of the orchestra’s centennial season, with the festival culminating in two very different 12-hour marathon concerts (May 25 at REDCAT; June 1 at Walt Disney Concert Hall). The programs aptly mirror Rountree’s audacious, forward-thinking philosophy.
A graduate of Cal State Long Beach, where he studied trombone performance and education, Rountree earned a master’s degree in orchestral conducting from the University of Michigan and has been on a musical tear ever since. In 2010 he created wild Up, whose eccentric blend of new music, pop, and performance art has been lauded by critics across the board, with The New York Times’s Zachary Woolfe writing in 2015, “Boisterously theatrical and exuberantly talented, the group barnstormed its way through works written by its own members, and a couple of punk-rock arrangements, too.”
Isn't it odd how the CVs of just about every musical renegade these days sound just like all the other musical renegades? And there always has to be some punk rock in there somewhere.

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Across the pond The Guardian continues its never-ending quest to erase all high culture, School music lessons should cover hip-hop and grime, says charity: Youth Music calls for a focus on ‘Stormzy rather than Mozart’ to engage hard-to-reach pupils. Oh yes, by all means, replace Mozart with hip-hop in music classes because the students would certainly never run into hip-hop in their everyday lives!
A national charity has called for school music lessons to be overhauled to include grime, electronic music and hip-hop after research found that more inclusive music-making improves attendance among pupils at risk of exclusion.
A four-year study by Youth Music concluded that too many schools fail to include current musical genres and recommended that lessons should focus on “Stormzy rather than Mozart” in order to engage hard-to-reach young people.
That really doesn't need comment does it?

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Hilary Hahn phones in an encore. No, it's not what you think! Usually the phrase indicates an indifferent, lackluster performance perhaps delivered with professionalism, but with little enthusiasm. That is never the case with Hilary Hahn. No, what happened was that she was not given sufficient time to play an encore after a performance with the Chicago Symphony because it would have resulted in unaffordable overtime charges by the musicians' union. Follow the link for both the lovely clip of the Gigue from the E major violin partita and for some illuminating comments.

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I have been nervously waiting to see if my tickets to the Salzburg Festival will make it through the somewhat unreliable services of the Mexican Post and this week they did! Austrian efficiency delivers once again. The procedure, in case you were wondering, for obtaining tickets to the Salzburg Festival, reputedly the biggest music festival in the world with around 250,000 tickets sold every year, begins in December of the previous year when programs are announced. I ordered tickets in January to several concerts online and surrendered my credit card information. Then in March or April you are "allotted" your tickets (I seem to have gotten all that I requested) and your card is charged. They then mail the tickets, priority post, to your home address and I received them late last week. Yahoo! For one of the concerts I am inviting my German ex-wife, her new husband and their daughter to a concert of the Vienna Philharmonic, a pretty good up-and-coming orchestra. For our envoi today, here they are with the Leonore Overture No. 3 from Fidelio by Beethoven conducted by Franz Welser-Möst in a performance from the 2015 Salzburg Festival.


8 comments:

Marc in Eugene said...

Salzburg Festival time draws nearer and nearer indeed; glad you got the tickets you wanted.

Just home from work and decided to see if there are any new recordings of Handel at Spotify. There is a new track, from Serse; haven't listened to it because I was immediately distracted by the album title: Baroque Gender Stories. On the one hand, one knows that the studies people are 'into' the B.-- castrati, women singing as men, men singing as women, and so forth and so on-- but on the other, that is a title surely not much calculated to appeal to the wider audience of listeners. Am tempted to buy it via download so that I can read the booklet but I expect that after I have been refreshed by supper and a glass of wine the fancy will have passed.

Bryan Townsend said...

They really are doing their best to make that dull old white composer George Frideric Handel seem cool and diverse, aren't they?

Your last comment reminds me of the old saw: whenever I get the urge to work, I just lie down until it passes!

Marc in Eugene said...

Maybe they really do want that his music be more listened to? I ought to keep that possibility in mind.

Bryan Townsend said...

Strange as that may seem!

Marc in Eugene said...

Puzzling at first thought that HH couldn't play her encore because the orchestra musicians were contract-required to vacate the stage within a certain time but I suppose I expect to be paid when I'm at work even if I am just standing there listening to co-workers' nonsense.

Your Salzburg tickets remind me that this is the weekend when I had planned to decide which Bach Festival events I'm going to. The three that I recall off the top of my head are Mozart's Requiem, a NYC ensemble singing Renaissance music for Lent and Passiontide, and an all-Bach organ recital by Paul Jacobs.

Wenatchee the Hatchet said...

Robert craft once wrote that we could wipe out Mozart entirely and we'd still get from Haydn to Beethoven but that it was the "uselessness" of Mozart in relationship to arcs of innovation and "necessity" that made Mozart fun for Craft. Haydn and Mozart both seem like they fit firmly into what Leonard B. Meyer said about masters, that true masters have rarely been innovators or makes of new rules so much as they have been master strategists who refine and develop new and often unrealized possibilities in established and fairly stable styles. I think it was Kyle Gann who was writing over at his blog(s) about how Haydn and Mozart both benefited from each other's music, they were able to inspire each other to explore new possibilities when, in Gann's estimation at least, they were both getting into ruts as composers. I much prefer Haydn to Mozart but I can respect Mozart.

Bryan Townsend said...

Looking at the correspondence between Mozart and his father Leopold, it becomes clear that the young Mozart was a master imitator of everyone. As he matured, he improved on every style he was exposed to. Well, except Haydn perhaps.

Marc in Eugene said...

Does Grace Notes appear only at the online TLS? At their site online, I can find it, but not in the digital version of the print issues. Guess it makes sense that if the recorded samples are considered an integral part of the articles then online is the only place they'd be viewable/listenable.

Was struck earlier how the years are become quite obvious on Daniel Barenboim but not so much on Maria Joao Pires; they are only two years apart in age.