Friday Miscellanea

I hate to brag, but this blog just passed 1.5 million page views the other day. So, yahoo and here is the champagne:

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This study seems pretty straightforward: Recognition of favorite songs almost instant, researchers find.

"Our results demonstrate that recognition of familiar music happens remarkably quickly," study senior author Maria Chait said in a school news release.

"These findings point to very fast temporal circuitry and are consistent with the deep hold that highly familiar pieces of music have on our memory," Chait added.

And if you played the beginning of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, classical listeners would know it within half a second as well.

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Ok, I have to admit that Norman Lebrecht has a gift for the catchy headline: HIDING WILLY: MET BANS DICK FROM AKHNATEN CINEMA RELAYS.

We hear that the daring moments of full-frontal male nudity in the forthcoming Philip Glass opera will not be allowed to leave the house intact when Akhnaten gets a live screening on November 23.

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This reminds me of Kanye's Sunday Services: Divine transports.

the French sociologist Émile Durkheim ... observed that social activities create a kind of buzz that he called effervescence. Effervescence is generated when humans come together to make music or perform rituals, an experience that lingers when the ceremonies are over. The suggestion, therefore, is that collective experiences that are religious or religious-like unify groups and create the energy to sustain them.

The explanation is resurfacing in what can be called the trance theory of religious origins...

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This sounds like it might be really interesting: Rock, Pop, and the Development of Avant Garde Music After World War II.

These discourses established new frameworks of judgment for musics entwined in the commercial marketplace, distinct from numerical popularity and long-standing taste formations perpetuated through the educational institutions of the ruling classes. Popular music aesthetics did much more than invert or blur the line between high and low culture. Instead, it provided the grounds for a thorough fracturing of those two positions into a new, intricate system of orders and relations.

Uh-huh. Well, we know this is a scholarly publication, at least.

“Any person in today’s music scene knows that rock, classical, folk and jazz are all yesterday’s titles,” Coleman wrote in the liner notes to 1977’s Dancing in Your Head. “I feel that the music world is getting closer to being a singular expression.” Although persistent (and novel) asymmetries in prestige and resources would continue to disenable that singular expression, the late 1960s moment differed substantially from earlier ones such as Third Stream, because the latter, as George E. Lewis explains, “failed to realize or support the complexity of black musical culture’s independent development of a black experimentalism that, while in dialogue with white high culture, was . . . strongly insistent upon the inclusion of the black vernacular.”

And they really are incapable of actually making a comprehensible point. I think the problem with this kind of "discourse" is that the terms have hidden or ambiguous meanings. For example, in these brief excerpts I would very much need these terms to be defined pretty precisely:

• "frameworks of judgment"
• "taste formations"
• "invert or blur the line"
• "system of orders and relations"
• "singular expression"
• "asymmetries in prestige"

And I would likely challenge each of those definitions as being an unacceptable ideological position or assumption. Yep, that's how it works.

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Darn, am I going to have to buy a turntable again? Gen Xers, millennials and even some Gen Zs choose vinyl & drive record sales up.

Vinyl sales have been surging in the last few years, as CD sales stay flat and digital downloads decrease. In the United Kingdom, data from 2016 reveals that vinyl LP sales revenue surpassed that of digital downloads. And in the United States, LP sales are on par with the sales of CDs.

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Economist Tyler Cowan interviews music historian Ted Gioia about music as cultural cloud storage, which is quite a cool idea.

To Ted Gioia, music is a form of cloud storage for preserving human culture. And the real cultural conflict, he insists, is not between “high brow” and “low brow” music, but between the innovative and the formulaic. Imitation and repetition deaden musical culture...

 Couldn't agree more.

What people don’t understand is that, for most of history, music was a kind of cloud storage for societies. I like to tell people that music is a technology for societies that don’t have semiconductors or spaceships. If you go to any traditional community, and you try to find the historian, generally it’s a singer. Music would preserve culture; it would preserve folklore.

Well, nowadays, we rely on cloud storage to be the preserver of these same things. And I think there’s a strange shift. Both we rely on the cloud to preserve our music, but also, we no longer rely on music to preserve our culture. This is potentially a dangerous thing because it could create a situation where our musical lives grow more and more distant from our actual social lives with the people around us in our larger community.

Read the whole thing for a lot of very interesting observations about music, technology and culture.

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How about some new music? Here is a song for voice and violin by Lisa Bielawa, who is, I assume, also performing the voice part. The violinist is Jennifer Koh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=15&v=V1LvEJL4ef0

Or you can go to the Violin Channel.

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Returning from a research trip to Vienna for her new book, blogger Jessica Duchen complains Is Beethoven actually trying to kill me?

I came home from Vienna on Friday evening sick as the proverbial dog and barking like one. I was already unwell when I set off the previous Sunday; charging around the city, trying to see everything, walking about 7 miles a day during a nasty cold snap, did me so little good that I wondered if Beethoven is trying to kill me. 

Nevertheless, it was worth every second, because this trip will radically transform the atmosphere of IMMORTAL. Seeing what's available of the pleasant yet very plain apartments that the composer lived in, then visiting the former residences of his princely patrons in a grand city centre where palace piles up next to baroque palace, hammers home the desperately divided nature of that society. Among his chief supporters, Prince Kinsky's extravaganza is phenomenally OTT; Prince Lobkowitz's odd corner block is rather more tasteful (it is now the Theatre Museum, which is handy); and those are just two examples, neither of them the most extreme.

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Since we are on Beethoven, for our envoi let's listen to a piece the theme of which Schoenberg (and others) refer to as the perfect example of the musical "sentence," a particularly important kind of theme-type in music history. This is the Piano Sonata, op. 2, no. 1, dedicated to Joseph Haydn.

Those first eight measures are as perfect a theme as anyone ever wrote.