I think I have mentioned before that most pop songs are written by a mysterious committee of Swedes. Well, that is not quite true. But Max Martin has written between ten and twenty percent of the top ten pop songs over the last decade!
If you rank songwriters by the number of Billboard no 1 hits they have penned, Paul McCarthy and John Lennon have been leagues ahead of the competition for more than fifty years. This is not true anymore. If Max Martin keeps up the streak he has had for the last 25 years, he will overtake Lennon this year and McCarthy in a handful more.
And as incredible as this achievement is, Max Martin is just a part of a larger phenomenon: the so called Swedish music miracle.
No country comes close to exporting as much music in relation to the size of its economy.
The main drivers of revenue are the big pop acts, ABBA and Roxette, and a stable of songwriters who write for The Weeknd, Taylor Swift, Coldplay, Nicky Minaj, Ed Sheeran, and a large share of other acts that have been on the top of the charts over the last three decades.
The reason is that Sweden has been successful in creating a creative music scene in the same sense as Elizabethan England had a creative theater scene and Florence in the renaissance was a creative scene for writers, painters and other artists. These places had a significant number of creative people who were basically inspired by and creating works directed at one another.
Almost invariably, when you notice someone doing bold original work, there is a scene behind them. Renaissance Florence was a scene for scholars and painters, flowering in Leonardo DaVinci. The coffeehouses of Elizabethan London were a scene for playwrights, flowering in Shakespeare.
For an idea of why this came about in Sweden, follow the link. And then there was Athens in the 4th century BC and Vienna in the 18th century.
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Something new for streaming music: Apple Wants to Solve One of Music’s Biggest Problems.
“We always had a problem,” said Jonathan Gruber, the head of Apple Music’s classical programming. “A big, big problem.”
The problem was the way that classical music is categorized. The structure of classical music is completely different from pop music’s, which makes it extremely difficult for it to function in the streaming era.
As regular readers know, it's not a problem for me as I don't use a streaming service for music relying instead on my CD collection and frequent reference to YouTube.
Even the most sophisticated algorithms from the most technologically advanced companies are too clumsy to handle composers like Mozart and Brahms. That’s because they were made for individual artists like Bad Bunny and Madonna. If you want to hear a Bad Bunny song, it will be in your ears within seconds. If you want to hear a Brahms piano concerto, good luck. Try sifting through hundreds of recordings without a standardized format to track down one movement from a particular soloist who has performed it several times. You could listen to an entire Madonna album in the time it takes to find the right Mozart.
So it's really a discographic problem not solvable by tech guys but only by some musicians.
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The New Yorker devotes one of its trademark long pieces to David Sulzer, professor of psychiatry, neurology, and pharmacology at Columbia University who has a double identity as musician and composer Dave Soldier: The Wild World of Music. It's a fun piece of journalism, but my favorite bit is this very egregious quote from Allan Kozinn:
“Like the more famous Kronos Quartet, the Soldier navigates waters outside the chamber music mainstream,” the Times critic Allan Kozinn wrote in 1989. “But the Kronos’s unpolished performances leave one suspecting that it adopted its repertory to avoid comparison with better quartets. The Soldier seems to be the real thing—a virtuosic band given to iconoclastic experimentation.”
I suspect he might disavow that aesthetic judgement these days.
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Alex Ross alerts us to a new work by Cassandra Miller: I cannot love without trembling. The piece starts at around the 1:01 mark. While currently based in London, she hails from my neck of the woods, the southern end of Vancouver Island.
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And speaking of Canada: Regina Symphony Orchestra cancels shows as ticket sales drop
The orchestra returned with a full season of shows last September, something the program hasn’t offered since before the pandemic.
But the ensemble has seen an almost 50 per cent decline in attendance in both season subscriptions and single ticket purchases.
For Gerrard, the big question is: why?
“I think from what I can tell is people largely just got out of the habit of going out. There was a large time that we couldn’t go out and we had to stay home,” Gerrard said
A long time ago I said something like we would not know the full impact of the pandemic lockdowns on the music world for a long time and some might be permanent.
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The Cello Suites by Bach have a perennial appeal: A Cellist Breaks Music Into ‘Fragments,’ Then Connects Them
AT FIRST GLANCE, “Fragments” might appear to be another of Weilerstein’s explorations of Bach, a successor to her all-in-one-night performances of the six suites, her emotive recording of them on the Pentatone label and her pandemic streaming series. But Weilerstein thinks of it not as “a new approach to Bach,” she said, rather “a celebration of the really disparate voices in contemporary classical music,” with Bach as a common reference point.
Read the whole thing for the context.
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BBC suspends proposed closure of the BBC Singers
The BBC has paused its decision to close the BBC Singers, after "a number of organisations" came forward to offer alternative funding.
The group, which is the UK's only full-time professional chamber choir, was targeted by budget cuts shortly before celebrating its 100th anniversary.
The proposal sparked a backlash, with 140,000 people signing a petition urging the BBC to reverse its decision.
A temporary reprieve has been granted, as new funding models are explored.
"I am confident that this does secure their future," said Simon Webb, the BBC's head of orchestras and choirs.
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However: Los Angeles’s Metro Is Using Classical Music as a Weapon
The relentless rain and near-freezing temperatures over the last two months have driven people to seek shelter in the system’s underground stations, and the classical music was an effort to drive them back out. Cheung described the move as making the “system more enjoyable and comfortable for the people who use it as a transit system.” The music — described to me as “earplugs-at-a-concert loud” by one frequent commuter — is the audio version of hostile architecture, where bumpy benches and spiky surfaces are employed to keep those who have nowhere else to go out of sight.
I was thinking Xenakis maybe, or Stockhausen, but the video at the clip sounds more like a drunken performance of Vivaldi.
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And finally, the most entertaining writer on music, Ted Gioia: Where Did Musicology Come From?
Musicology originated as the study of magical incantations. You probably haven’t heard that before. And for a good reason: They don’t teach this stuff in music schools.
It’s too embarrassing. Too shameful. Too unsettling.
Well, the real reason is actually that this bears no resemblance whatsoever to the history of musicology, the study of music from a historical and theoretical standpoint omitting the practices of composition and performance, that was largely the invention of German scholars in the 19th century. Only in the fevered mind of Ted Gioia is it the study of magical incantations. Great opening sentence, though. I think Taruskin had an even better one in the first essay of his new collection: "I thought I'd begin by telling you how I know that God exists and watches over me." Of course the difference is that while Ted proceeds to dance around the mulberry bush for a while, Prof. Taruskin goes on to point out a number of difficult intersections between ethics and aesthetics.
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I know you wanted to hear this, so here is David Soldier's orchestra of Thai elephants with a tune called "Rain"
As you can see each elephant has a human assistant, so they are not on their own. Next is the Arditti Quartet playing Tetras by Iannis Xenakis (couldn't find a performance by Kronos):
And here is Canadian folksinger Jeffrey Straker accompanied by the Regina Symphony:
Finally, the BBC Singers with a Stabat Mater by Sulpitia Lodovica Cesis:
10 comments:
Arditti for Xenakis, I'm going out on a limb here, would be better than a Kronos take.
There is an awful lot i could write about GIoia's conpsiracy theory take on the occult origins of musicology. I may have to save it for a blog post over at my blog. Whether or not I actually want to write that this weekend remains to be seen.
That was back in the early days of Kronos, but even then they were very good in their distinctive way. I think Kozinn misevaluated them.
Not sure it is worth the time dismantling Gioia--can't we just enjoy his antics?
You've got a point there, particularly, in that GIoia is self-publishing his book on Substack and no academic or even popular level publisher has seen fit to back his recent story of how all musicology really came from sorcery.
Oh dear, I have too many books to read as it is, but that Taruskin opening line and your previous posts are tempting me terribly!
Perhaps I am only seeing a very unrepresenative sample of his work and this comment is therefore cruel and unfair... but to some extent, both in his style and even his appearance, Ted Gioia reminds me of Cliff Clavin from Cheers. This scene came to mind:
Cliff: So as we see, the roots of physical aggression in the male of the species is found right here in the old DNA molecule itself.
Diane: Fascinating, cliff.
Cliff: Oh, yes, Diane. Fascinating. You, hold onto your hat, too, because the very letters "DNA" are an acronym for the words "dames are not aggressive."
Diane: They stand for deoxyribonucleic acid.
Cliff: Ah, yes, but parse that in the Latin declension, and my point is still moot.
Diane: You know, Cliff, if it's true that a little knowledge is dangerous, you are a walking time bomb.
Cliff: Oh. Thank you, Diane.
Thanks Steven, I think you have delivered the perfect Gioia critique. He is, in the music world, the most prominent example of the eccentric, wayward intellectual. In his field of jazz history he is a real authority, but in other areas, like musicology, he is like that unpleasant uncle that keeps buttonholing you at parties to tell you his wild theories about ancient astronauts and the Illuminati. Of course, these days, when responsible adults seem to be going off the rails, he almost is plausible.
?
NAH!
Ha
I have been thinking about ways that Gioia's conspiracy theory could be modified in light of Richard Taruskin's work and other scholars. If TG were formulating musicology since the 19th century as a battle between partisans of highbrow and lowbrow art-religions I think much of his thesis could hold up ... only it would become pretty boiler-plate in the process.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2023/04/ted-gioia-continues-to-say-musicology.html
Taruskin's work has shown the highbrow art-religion has weak legs to stand on but no one has done a comparable take on the lowbrow art-religion unless we count Adorno's damning appraisal that all lowbrow arts are fascist propaganda. The problem is that I grew up Pentecostal and am more Anglican/Presbyterian these days and this is a realm where respecting that high and low liturgical idioms can explicate differences in aesthetic conviction might be something that could get past the impasse of the presumed dualisms guys like Ted Gioia or the late Roger Scruton ran with. I float an idea that if the late Roger Scruton was an aesthete of highbrow art religion Gioia is more a partisan of the lowbrow "magic" and "trance" spirit possession form of art-religions.
Thanks Wenatchee, for finding a productive way to talk about Ted Gioia. Everyone should go over to your blog and have a read.
Just a few wayward thoughts: Ted is a master of the confused half-truth. Take this sample quote: "Magic and science are total opposites. They shouldn’t rub shoulders. But music is the place where that strange meeting actually happens..." There is just enough truth there to be superficially plausible. Magic and science are very different, of course, but that is because they occupy utterly different realms. They can't be opposites because that would put them on the same spectrum. Some kinds of magic, alchemy for example, are a kind of predecessor to science while others have religious or mystical connections. If you know much about the history of science and culture quotes like Ted Gioia's give you a splitting headache. It would take thousands of words and hundreds of footnotes to sort out what is wrong with the quote and how it is based on ignorance of and misunderstanding of thousands of years of history. I just don't think it is worth the effort. Read Taruskin instead. His writing actually clarifies confusion instead of promoting it.
Good job in taking a deep dive into the Gioia text:
"So, all that is to say that “if” Ted Gioia were merely insisting that in the post Enlightenment era scholars have been dismissive of the ways in which hermetic traditions and magic were intertwined with other pursuits he’d be right. But in saying that he’d also have nothing to sell. Gioia’s thesis needs for there to be this “suppressed” history of musicology coming from sorcery."
The basic error is one committed by many amateur scholars (and some professional ones): take a position on something, preferably one that is useful to you in some way, and then rummage around in the vast quantities of historical documents to find some plausible "facts" to support it. When in doubt, just make up stuff. What you emphatically don't want to do is any kind of objective investigation to find out, as much as possible, what is or was the true state of affairs, because, good gracious, that might not be beneficial to you.
"Magic and science are very different, of course, but that is because they occupy utterly different realms."
Sure NOW they do but that's where historical scholarship shows that it wasn't always the case or even normative for large swaths of human history. The tricky thing is that if you go back fare enough in human history science and magic in medicine were the same, especially in Babylonian exorcistic medicine, so Gioia's dualism falls apart the second you consult any serious secondary literature (scholarship) on primary source accounts. We can't all read Akkadian, of course, but scholars who can have done a lot of work pointing out the fusion of exorcism and medicine in the ancient near east. Sure, the Greeks began to question the efficacy of those magic spells. Of course in Judaism blunt skepticism about the efficacy of magic also showed up.
Gioia's thesis falls apart from a variety of directions but I've focused mainly on history of religions, religious texts and inter-faith and ecumenical dialogue and the historiography of religious practice, mainly dealing with exorcism, demonology and related topics. Magic and science became viewed as opposites from the Renaissance and Enlightenment onward but they were not viewed as total opposites in earlier periods.
To pick just one example from my reading over the last few years, Clinton Arnold's work on the background of the Artemis cultic site in Ephesus as a place people could get medical care single-handedly blows Gioia's thesis out of the water that science and magic are opposites. Clinton Arnold is an evangelical Protestant who has proposed that the apostolic admonition that new Christian converts not keep going to the Ephesian Artemis cult for medical aid or protection against demons "can" be contested but as far as I know no scholar who knows of Arnold's work has contested the viability of his hypothesis, and so within biblical criticism and religion scholarship the tension between "magic" and "Science" Gioia keeps shilling got decimated forty years ago as a matter of course.
Scholars can definitely embrace intra-scholastic super-myths (Jacob Wright pointed out that thanks to German 19th century textual scholars people took as given that Samuel-Kings white-washed the life and times of King David when no reading of the text could convince a regular reader that that's the case). Taruskin's role has been to debunk intra-scholastic super-myths in musicology, for which I'm grateful. His argument that elevating classical music "above" politics and racial and ethnic conflict issues raised it up and out of relevance is a needed polemic, although I think we've agreed in the past that sweeping away the intra-scholarly canards of the past is not the same as building toward a future. Gioia's half-truths are often the long-debunked canards of earlier generations of musicology is probably the bluntest and simplest way to put it.
So, yeah, I would recommend people read Taruskin instead of Gioia, too! I've been loving the newest Taruskin book so far. That said, since I had hoped at one point in my life to do grad work in biblical studies and musicology I feel uniquely positioned (or maybe obligated, in a way) to demonstrate that, as you put it, Ted Gioia is a master of the confused half-truth.
Thanks Wenatchee, for digging into those areas where I just have no expertise!
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