Friday Miscellanea

Consciousness is the source of all things and of all conceptions. It is a sea ringed about with visions.

--Oskar Kokoschka in 1912

The instruments out on the extremes, really high or really low, are always fun:

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Some statisticians weigh in: Who wrote the music for In My Life? Three Bayesian analyses

Over the years, Lennon and McCartney have revealed who really wrote what, but some songs are still up for debate. The two even debate between themselves — their memories seem to differ when it comes to who wrote the music for 1965’s “In My Life.” . . .

Mathematics professor Jason Brown spent 10 years working with statistics to solve the magical mystery. Brown’s the findings were presented on Aug. 1 at the Joint Statistical Meeting in a presentation called “Assessing Authorship of Beatles Songs from Musical Content: Bayesian Classification Modeling from Bags-Of-Words Representations.” . . .

The three co-authors of this paper — there was someone called Mark Glickman who was a statistician at Harvard. He’s also a classical pianist. Another person, another Harvard professor of engineering, called Ryan Song. And the third person was a Dalhousie University mathematician called Jason Brown. . . .

[Regarding In My Life,] it turns out Lennon wrote the whole thing. When you do the math by counting the little bits that are unique to the people, the probability that McCartney wrote it was .018 — that’s essentially zero. In other words, this is pretty well definitive. Lennon wrote the music. And in situations like this, you’d better believe the math because it’s much more reliable than people’s recollections.

But read the whole thing because it's complicated...

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Yet another reconstruction of Ancient Greek Music. Imagine what a reconstruction of Michael Jackson might sound like if a scholar tried to recreate it two thousand years from now if all the recordings and scores were lost. Yep.

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Ted Gioia has another of his really catchy essays: All Bad Music Will Eventually Disappear. What he means is just that, over time, the winnowing process of musicians and listeners choosing over and over what to hear, filters out the poor quality music in favor of the good quality music. Which we already, knew, of course. Unfortunately, what he doesn't mention is that the corollary is that, at any given moment in time, most music is crap. But we knew that too.

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I've been aware of this musician for some time and saw her perform in Salzburg a couple of years ago: ‘I’m not humble. I expect miracles’: why violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja wants to blow you out of your seat

Something should happen in a concert,” says Patricia Kopatchinskaja. “I don’t know what. But every time, I’m expecting a miracle. I’m not very humble about this!” If audiences have learned to expect inspiring and surprising things from this restless and unpredictable violinist, that’s nothing compared to the standards she sets for herself. On stage, Kopatchinskaja is an impish presence, a coiled spring that could unwind in any direction. In conversation, she talks seriously and softly, yet every so often an idea forms that especially pleases her and her eyes get a mischievous glint – a look that, in performance, means she and her fellow musicians are indeed about to make something happen.

Oh yes, she is a violinist, but when I saw her she was conducting and performing the voice part in Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire!

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Well, there's one great title I can't use because John Zorn grabbed it:

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This seems a very sensible approach: STEPHEN HOUGH: NO PHONES, PLEASE, BETWEEN BARS 123-176; 185-199…

I'm really excited to be playing Brahms 1 next season with one of my favourite orchestras: 

@TheCBSO

 I'm happy to be filmed on phones by the audience except for the following bars when I really need to concentrate and could be distracted:

1st movement: 91-118; 123-176; 185-199; 226-341; 352 to end;

2nd movement: 14-19; 21-27; 29-30; 33-58; 71 to end;

3rd movement: 1-36; 46-98; 122-167; 188-238; 275-333; 337-368; 376-410; 418-426; 434-442; 448 to end.

Or, all the measures in which he is actually playing.

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Notice of an important anniversary: Barenboim: What Beethoven’s Ninth Teaches Us

Music, if you study it properly, is a lesson for life. There is much we can learn from Beethoven, who was, of course, one of the strongest personalities in the history of music. He is the master of bringing emotion and intellect together. With Beethoven, you must be able to structure your feelings and feel the structure emotionally — a fantastic lesson for life! When we are in love, we lose all sense of discipline. Music doesn’t allow for that.

But music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments. It might be poetic, philosophical, sensual or mathematical, but it must have something to do with the soul.

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For those of you who have been waiting, here is a different performance of John Cage's 4'33 for orchestra.

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I tried to read this from the New York Times as it seemed an interesting ontological or aesthetic question, but it got all down into legal issues so I got bored: What Is a Song?

In many music copyright disputes, one of the main issues is originality, or how the law sets a boundary between creative expression that is the property of a single artist versus material in the public domain. Last year, a federal jury in New York heard hours of expert testimony about whether a syncopated four-chord sequence in Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” was distinctive enough that Sheeran’s song “Thinking Out Loud” infringed on it — or whether, as Sheeran’s lawyers contended, those parts are generic “building blocks” that no musician can own. The jury ruled in Sheeran’s favor, finding that he and a co-writer had created their song independently and not copied from Gaye’s 1973 classic.

But a key question running through that trial was about something even more fundamental: whether the core of “Let’s Get It On” — and what is protected by its copyright — is determined by the sounds we hear on its original recording, or the notes written on yellowing sheet music stored at the Library of Congress.

What we need is a forensic musicologist!

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After all that we need some good music. First a Vivaldi concerto for an unusual pairing of soloists:

 Claudio Monteverdi: Magnificat

And Kazuhito Yamashita with the Caprichos de Goya by Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Yes, all Italian music today.