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Controversial study shows rats prefer jazz to classical music, when on drugs:
I can think of no safe comment to make about this.Rats prefer the sound of silence to Beethoven and Miles Davis – except when they are on drugs. Then, they prefer the jazz.These are the results of a controversial 2011 study by Albany Medical College, in which scientists exposed 36 rats to ‘Für Elise’ by Beethoven and ‘Four’, a brassy jazz standard by Miles Davis. The rats overwhelmingly preferred Beethoven to Davis, but they liked silence best of all.In the second part of the experiment, the rats were given cocaine and played Miles Davis over a period of a few days. After that, the rodents preferred the jazz even after the drug was out of their system.The research, according to scientists, showed rats can be conditioned to like any music associated with their drug experience.
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"Perhaps Schoenberg's work deserves a more superficial treatment than it has hitherto received."
Richard Taruskin. The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Kindle Locations 4602-4603). Kindle Edition, quoting Allen Shawn.
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In this new pandemic world, singing is one of the more dangerous activities: Germany clamps down on SINGING over coronavirus fears.
German authorities are warning against singing and several states have banned it from church services over fears it spreads the coronavirus.The 'increased production of potentially infectious droplets' involved in singing means that choirs are facing a longer shutdown even as shops and restaurants re-open, the government says.Lothar Wieler, the head of Germany's RKI diseases institute, says the droplets can 'fly particularly far' when singing.In one case, at least 40 people were infected at a church service in Frankfurt where the congregation had been singing and not wearing masks.
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Sometimes you have to ask yourself: am I paranoid? Am I paranoid enough? Or is it all nonsense? The Victoria Symphony Orchestra in Canada is throwing in the towel for all of next season: SERIOUSLY BAD SIGN: ORCHESTRA RULES OUT PLAYING IN 20/21.
It is with sadness that today the Victoria Symphony is announcing the suspension of its programming for the 2020.21 Season.While this is heartbreaking news, our highest priority is the health and welfare of the organization’s patrons, musicians, artists, staff and volunteers. The decision to suspend all performances is in compliance with the Province of British Columbia’s COVID-19 health regulations and Restart Plan. Performances will resume when it is deemed safe to do so by the Province and its top health officials.
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This has been happening for a while, but now it is like the last indignity: Copyright bots and classical musicians are fighting online. The bots are winning.
As covid-19 forces more and more classical musicians and organizations to shift operations to the Internet, they’re having to contend with an entirely different but equally faceless adversary: copyright bots. Or, more accurately, content identification algorithms dispatched across social media to scan content and detect illegal use of copyrighted recordings. You’ve encountered these bots in the wild if you’ve ever had a workout video or living room lip-sync blocked or muted for ambient inclusion or flagrant use of Britney or Bruce. But who owns Brahms?These oft-overzealous algorithms are particularly fine-tuned for the job of sniffing out the sonic idiosyncrasies of pop music, having been trained on massive troves of “reference” audio files submitted by record companies and performing rights societies. But classical musicians are discovering en masse that the perceptivity of automated copyright systems falls critically short when it comes to classical music, which presents unique challenges both in terms of content and context. After all, classical music exists as a vast, endlessly revisited and repeated repertoire of public-domain works distinguishable only through nuanced variations in performance. Put simply, bots aren’t great listeners.Michael Sheppard, a Baltimore-based pianist, composer and teacher, was recently giving a Facebook Live performance of a Beethoven sonata (No. 3, Op. 2, in C) when Facebook blocked the stream, citing the detection of “2:28 of music owned by Naxos of America” — specifically a passage recorded by the French pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, whom Sheppard is not.The takedown led Sheppard into what he describes as “a byzantine web of ridiculousness” starting with Facebook’s dispute form: “Beethoven died in 1827,” he responded. “This music is very much in the public domain. Please unblock it.”
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And don't I know it: Drunk singers, Ravel on film and prime Viennese operetta: the addictive joys of classical YouTube.
The full addictive potential of classical YouTube needs to be experienced to be understood. And let’s be honest, there are only so many lockdown videos the human spirit can take. Which is why, on a sunny spring afternoon, in the prime of life and health, I find myself watching the late John Cage stroking bits of wire with a feather.The haircuts suggest that we’re in the early 1980s, and a Ron Burgundy type is floating across the screen in a little box. ‘It’s been said that listening to John Cage’s music is like chewing sand,’ he explains, unhelpfully. It seems that we’ve also been watching a live performance by the German artist Joseph Beuys. And that we’re now going over to a firework display at the Pompidou Centre.What? Why? No time to wonder, because you forgot to disable autoplay and YouTube, which sees your most secret desires, has already launched another distraction...
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For our envoi today, first Four by Miles Davis:
And second, I was going to be very clever and put up a clip of the Victoria Symphony playing Schoenberg, but such does not exist. So here they are with the Symphony No. 8 by Beethoven:
12 comments:
Sometimes you have to ask yourself: am I paranoid? Am I paranoid enough? Or is it all nonsense?
I ask myself this every morning....Our local community orchestras are also looking at scrapping next season. And I'm in California, so we're taking the ultra-careful-slow nanny-state approach.
A clear calendar frees up lots of time for composition, though. And I can't help but think that composers all over the world are pouring their efforts into new work.
Oh yes! I have a connection with the Victoria Symphony because I lived there for quite a while and played the Rodrigo concerto with them a couple of times. I also am friends with the principal flute. I'm just wondering, what are they going to be doing for the next year and a half? Not working in restaurants, that's for sure.
You hit the nail on the head with the time for composition! I just finished a new piece for violin and guitar. It is sort of like Feldman, only more concise, or like Messiaen only much easier to play. I am going to read through it with my violinist who is back in Fresno, so we will do it over Facetime.
I will make a safe comment about the rat's music listening and drugs. It is cue based conditioning except that the cue is more complex than the usual light or buzzer. Also the "music preference" will wear off quickly unless it is constantly repeated. My guess is that animals find music with recurrent beats more memorable rather than parsing the melodies or style.
Regarding taking Schoenberg more lightly, Schoenberg would have had a heart attack on the spot from such a comment.
With respect to the more serious issues of copyright vigilantes and music performance cancellation, we had discussions about this a few months ago where I expressed my fear about classical music and even jazz performances.
The copyright issue for classical online performing was easily predictable for anyone familiar with Amazon's curating of the classical music section by their bots. I have seen Cosi Fan tutte composed by Bob Marley and symphonic music paired with images of mens shirts. There are a dozen different titles associated with the same work as they fluctuate between the composer, main title, performer, conductor, group name, opus number and movement titles.
Even your new piece I'm sure has a 4 note pattern also used by Shostakovich or someone similar and will be hit with a demand for removal due to copyright infringement. The point being what I warned about earlier. Classical music is under siege and unless it fights back it will be erased.
With respect to symphony season axeing I think the 2021 cancellation is really the 2020-2021 season cancellation for most rather than a separate 2021 cancellation. While they could perform half a season there may be contractual and legal issues as we see developing with baseball and other sports.
Yes, what they are cancelling is the whole of the 2020/2021 season, it was just poorly edited.
For now my friend and I are just rehearsing my new piece on Facetime, but as I am planning on starting my own YouTube channel, I might run into this issue. I agree that we should be fighting back. But just how? Any ideas?
Who is we kimosabe? I never joined the classical music establishment even though I have remained a loyal supporter and you more or less dropped out of it. Just so you know, after the Kennedy Center fiasco I websearched for National Symphony musicians who had independent groups or websites and sent several of them a supportive message. I received zero response from any of them.
I generally choose my words carefully and I said unless classical music fights back it will be erased. That was not a statement of confidence that it will but rather a causal relation. It will not exist anymore on sufferance but only by fighting back. If it doesn't it will go under. Sadly it is clear from malign organizations like the Kennedy Center or the Met that there are traitors in their own ranks as well as many indifferent hangers on in arts organizations or record labels.
Yes, I suspect you are quite correct. This entire blog is, of course, my contribution to fighting back and I am delighted to see that there are lots of allies out there. But yes, some real traitors as well and some of them in positions of power. It is a sad truth that oftentimes institutions become taken over by mere careerists and opportunists who have no real commitment to the core values of the institution. It is in times of crisis that they reveal themselves. Taruskin had a article once reviewing some books supposedly designed to support and advance the cause of classical music. They mostly drove him to despair because of the shoddy tactics and half-truths. With friends like that, etc.
Who was it that said that the behaviour of most institutions can best be understood by assuming that they are run by a cabal of their worst enemies?
The sad fact is that this blog is the only one I'm aware of actually offering a sustained defense of classical music. It is unknowable of course the total breakdown of the blog viewers. The commenters seem very largely drawn from enthusiastic amateurs or listeners. I am not sure if the occasional writer/blogger who chimes in one or twice is reading the blog or whether they google their name and your comments about them come up in the search list.
The one hopeful sign recently has been the growth of video streaming for performers and composers that accelerated in the pandemic. So of course we promptly get the copyright bots shutting everything down unless you are a big fish. Then you can do anything because the bots mysteriously avoid you.
Wow, Maury! Is this blog that unusual? Just off the top of my head there is Jessica Duchen, On an Overgrown Path, Wenatchee, Alex Ross and a bunch I am presumably unaware of. But I may take on the specific issues more often than they do.
As for my readership, they are mostly lurkers. There is a lot of traffic from non-English-speaking countries like Russia, Germany and France, but there are almost no comments from those countries. There is a translation widget so they can read in their own language. My commentators are largely, as you say, enthusiastic amateurs, but with some professional musicians as well. Jives, for example, who commented above, is a professional musician. A few composers come by occasionally. There have also been some well known critics and professors. But out of the 15,000 to 20,000 pageviews a month, there are probably no more than a hundred or so comments. So I don't know who the rest are.
I guess my upcoming YouTube channel is going to be an interesting test case. No, I don't think that any of my own compositions will trigger the bots. I think they look for a section of similar music, which is why people doing Beethoven piano sonatas get caught up.
I'm not trying to embarrass you. I used the key word "sustained" to describe the blog focus which has been ongoing for 15 years. The Hatchet is probably the only other long running blog that has dealt with some of these issues I know. Being outside the current music establishment does make it easier.
However from the music establishment writers who blog, while they are very knowledgeable, I hope people are not relying on them for pushback. Alec Ross for example had one post in 2020 about the pandemic that was brief and very discreet about the Met Opera layoffs. He said nothing about the Kennedy Center illegal layoff of the NSO (after getting $25M to pay staff) that I could find or on any other negative force on classical music. Otherwise it was the obit page or the usual musings you find in the shrinking classical music print press. overgrownpath is very Buddhist and classical crossover centric so he may find the classical music devolution a feature rather than a bug.
Re your Beethoven example, I am on safe ground assuming this was initiated by Naxos not by Facebook. Facebook is not zealously policing the classical musical world for malefactors, it just responds when big corporate or media accounts file a complaint about something. The idea that Naxos has no idea of the difference between a Naxos recording of Beethoven and the playing of Beethoven by a non Naxos artist doesn't pass the laugh test. This is intimidation. In the past the labels were selling CDs so streamers were a minor annoyance. Now that the labels are dropping CDs for streaming these non label free streamers are a direct threat.
Not embarrassed, just surprised. The case of the abortive Musicology Now blog is interesting. That should have been a platform for the defense of classical music, but it was anything but. Instead, it was more a venue to complain about classical music, how it was too white or too privileged or too, and this is particularly hilarious, "classical." I critiqued the blog on one occasion and the editor sent me a comment. There must have been a link sent out because suddenly I got a big surge of traffic to that post. The numbers approximated the current membership of the American Musicological Society. But not one of those visitors left a comment--apart from the editor whose name I forget. Then the Musicology Now blog was simply discontinued.
I suspect that the problem for members in good standing in the musical establishment is that if they want to continue to be in good standing they must not rock the boat. For me, on the other hand, there are no risks. I don't even have to be anonymous. I do wonder, though, if I want to promote my compositions, I might have to start cultivating parts of said establishment?
Maury, your critiques are always welcome here and I'm glad you are keeping an eye on things that I often miss.
When you or I say music establishment I think it hides a rather curious issue, namely that the music establishment is seemingly composed of many disestablishmentarians. Usually fights occur between a tradition bound establishment and innovative outsiders. Here it is the establishment that is essentially dissolving their domain for some very hazy alternative. In the process, they are disemploying the performers, the schools that train them, the instrument makers and the various support groups.
If they were providing a clear alternative to move to at least then people could line up on one side or the other and majority wins. Is a music establishment needed to manage synthesized beats music streamed and not performed except in some staged video? Are musicologists or conservatories necessary to analyze or teach synthesized beats music? Presumably the "creators" will use a shared copyright so as not to run afoul of the copyright bots.The one area that seems to be going its own merry way are school bands but I don't know how long that will last.
I had this wacky idea a few years ago of persuading the Canada Council to grant me funds to do a cross-country survey of the quality of music education in the various institutions. This would include university music departments as well as the Québec Conservatoire, the Royal Conservatory in Toronto, the Calgary Conservatory, the Vancouver Conservatory and the Victoria Conservatory. I have taught in several of these institutions and played concerts in others, but I have been away from any professional contact with them for two decades. This would make me an ideal evaluator. However, partly due to an aversion to dealing with the Canada Council (the "arms-length" disburser of government grants to artists in Canada) I never made the approach.
From my occasional contacts with friends who do teach in the institutions, I have the impression that there is still a solid core of real musical instruction and training going on with a few superficial gestures toward fulfilling the progressive agenda. In other words, I think the situation in music is different from that in, say English Literature or other fields in the humanities. There is a high performance standard that must be maintained in music and this tends to act as a bulwark against the kind of wholesale destruction of cultural values that is happening elsewhere.
I think there is a bifurcation in the music "establishment." On the one hand we have the practical side: performance, composition and related activities like archival research and editing projects. This side still adheres to traditional notions of value and quality. Then we have the other side, the more theoretical side and this is the one that has seen the progressive inroads. The "new" musicology, the incessant calls for more female composers and conductors, the social analysis of hip-hop, video game music, and all the stuff we typically saw at Musicology Now. NewMusicBox is an interesting anomaly because it is supposedly a practical blog dealing with composition and performance, but all the "issues" are progressive ones. Presumably this is because all the organizations that give funding to this niche are dominated by progressive agendas.
Oddly, on another non-music blog I just read a comment of someone saying that pop music was dead, presumably as a creative force.
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