The top story: Chechnya bans all music deemed too fast or too slow
Minister of Culture Musa Dadayev announced the decision to limit all musical, vocal and choreographic compositions to a tempo ranging from 80 to 116 beats per minute (BPM) at a meeting Friday, the Russian state new agency TASS reported.
Wow, I think that eliminates everything other than Andantino through Allegretto. So, no more Bruckner. Or tarantellas.
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Ok, now here is an important question: Music vs. Lyrics. I have to admit, most of the time, unless it's Schubert or Schumann, I don't pay a lot of attention to the lyrics. Especially if it's hip-hop.
...the way I see it, you’re either a music person or a lyrics person. I am a music person. I have artists that I think of as my favorites, but probably couldn’t sing a song of theirs all the way through confidently at karaoke. However, I will know each note of that sax solo. My sister, born only a couple of years after me, is a lyrics person; she can listen to a song literally once and know all the words.
There are a bunch of quotes from various people you have never heard of.
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BBC unveils 2024 Proms lineup: Daniel Barenboim, Daleks and disco. Uh, I think that's a hard pass. I would rather have Schoenberg, Weinstein and Lea Desandre.
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This is, uh, cool: BARBARA HANNIGAN BECOMES CHIEF CONDUCTOR. Of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, that is.
The Canadian soprano and conductor has just been appointed Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra from August 2026.
She says: ‘Always curious, courageous and creative, the players of the ISO are dedicated to working at the highest level. Their technical excellence co-exists alongside their wonderful imagination. In working with the ISO, I have felt the desire and possibility, for the first time, to consider a position as Chief Conductor. It is a matter of creative chemistry and collective timing that drives us to embark on this new path, together.’
I'm a fan.
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‘People are forfeiting meals’: musicians on the struggle to financially survive
“Brexit had a massive impact. We used to do festivals in places like Italy and Spain. They pay musicians better there. In England, venues won’t provide food. But over there, it’s just expected: you give them a place to stay and you pay them properly because they’re doing a job. But it’s not the culture here.”
Manchester-based producer Dean Glover has been recording music for 10 years. “When I started,” he says, “musicians could live comfortably and have the spare money to put into their music. One thing that’s changed is that there are some artists I work with who work a 9-to-5 minimum wage job, and they will literally forfeit meals or necessities for that week if it means they can continue putting money behind their music.”
Glover, 35, is concerned that these musicians are being priced out of career success. “I’ve seen it myself many times – a band with all the flash equipment, with the van, with the crew, with all these opportunities, and that’s just because their financial background has enabled them to pursue it.”
Hey, not just career success, but priced out of the grocery store. It's not just musicians--a lot of folks are suffering, but musicians are always closer to the edge.
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AI can now generate entire songs on demand. What does this mean for music as we know it?
I’ve been working with various creative computational tools for the past 15 years, both as a researcher and a producer, and the recent pace of change has floored me. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the view that AI systems will never make “real” music like humans do should be understood more as a claim about social context than technical capability.
The argument “sure, it can make expressive, complex-structured, natural-sounding, virtuosic, original music which can stir human emotions, but AI can’t make proper music” can easily begin to sound like something from a Monty Python sketch.
Forgive me for being massively uninterested in any music not produced by and for human beings. So what if it "sounds just like" music a human being would make? That's like receiving a phone call that sounds "just like" one from your family or lover but was synthesized by a computer.
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How did we turn this into a scientific question: Why Do People Make Music?
Music baffled Charles Darwin. Mankind’s ability to produce and enjoy melodies, he wrote in 1874, “must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed.”
All human societies made music, and yet, for Darwin, it seemed to offer no advantage to our survival. He speculated that music evolved as a way to win over potential mates. Our “half-human ancestors,” as he called them, “aroused each other’s ardent passions during their courtship and rivalry.”
Other Victorian scientists were skeptical. William James brushed off Darwin’s idea, arguing that music is simply a byproduct of how our minds work — a “mere incidental peculiarity of the nervous system.”
That debate continues to this day. Some researchers are developing new evolutionary explanations for music. Others maintain that music is a cultural invention, like writing, that did not need natural selection to come into existence.
Ah, right, by ignoring that it is an art form created to give expression to aesthetic ideas and pleasures. Instead it is an anthropological quirk of evolution. Read on to see how music is all about multicultural diversity, but somehow at the same time, illustrating universal truths of evolution. Isn't it funny how "science" always seems to turn up conclusions that match up with the narrative demanded by the mainstream culture?
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On doing all of something: THE VIRTUOUS CYCLE
Playing all six Bartók string quartets in an extended performance in one thing, but what about Mozart's piano sonatas or Haydn's symphonies? Canadian pianist Stewart Goodyear sometimes performs all 32 Beethoven sonatas in one day, breaking only for meals. Paul Lewis does a similar thing with the composer's piano concertos, generally playing the five works over multiple concerts running over several days, as he did at the Proms in 2010. (He's about to perform this series with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra in Christchurch Town Hall from 19 May.) The Proms is partial to a composer cycle – in 2015 Yo-Yo Ma played all of Bach's Suites for solo cello, while, in the same year, Osmo Vänskä conducted a series of all seven Sibelius symphonies. (Perhaps, in this Bruckner bicentenary, we might see a symphony cycle this year?)
When a performer tells us something about what they are playing we tend to just believe them. However:
Shostakovich's string quartets are autobiographical; they reflect a part of his musical self that perhaps could not be shared in other work. We're playing a diverse, contrasting programme, but everything comes back to Shostakovich's twelve quartets.'
I question the "autobiographical" claim, plus, Shostakovich wrote fifteen string quartets.
I did a post on the composer version of this: doing a whole bunch of iterations in a single form or genre, like Scarlatti's 555 keyboard sonatas, or Haydn's over one hundred symphonies, or Bach's three hundred or so cantatas. The Salzburg Festival was doing things like this when I first attended as a student way back when. Alfred Brendel did all the Schubert piano sonatas in a series of concerts and the Alban Berg Quartet did all the Beethoven string quartets in another series. They don't seem to do that any more, though they did do the massive project of producing all twenty-two Mozart operas in 2006.
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Let's kick off our envois with a Schumann lied: "Ich grolle nicht."
Here is Barbara Hannigan singing and conducting Stravinsky:
The Jerusalem Quartet just got cancelled out of a couple of concerts in Amsterdam, so let's have them playing the Quartet No. 13 by Shostakovich:
7 comments:
Twelve? One of my favorites from the DSCH cycle is the Thirteenth String Quartet.
Sseveral biographers mentioned DSCH intended to write 24 string quartets but died before getting past 15 Taruskin might say that's just another reason to avoid the poietic fallacy.
I see that wordplay aim at the virtuous rather than the vicious cycle but that fifteen string quartets part is easy to look up.
Though I have all kinds of disagreements with him on the details Ted Gioia's neo-Orphic stumping could be a reminder to musicologists of a point the philosopher of religion and historian Gerardus van der Leeuw made a century ago about how music was never actually "autonomous" until relatively recently and that it always had a non-musical/extra-musical liturgical or ritual function in cultures. Or as Greil Marcus put it, critics replicate via literature the sensation of being spirit possessed.
It might not be a big surprise if Darwin's theory didn't have an explanation for that but it doesn't mean there haven't been efforts to explain the function of music on post-Freudian terms (guys learn guitar to attract mates kinds of stuff).
That many songwriters probably write as if AI were doing all the work for them doesn't mean I am in a rush to hear music generated by AI. Someone had to program all those rules into the AI. Given the massive reappraisal in the last forty years of how far afield 19th century theorists were about what 18th composers were actually doing one potential risk of the 21st century AI "boom" is it will tell us only what 21st century programmers "think" characterizes music and nothing about the music AI is ostensibly supposed to mimic or generate. As Richard Taruskin liked to say, Haydn was and is the composer where the gap between what theorists TELL you he did and what he actually did in his music is the biggest gap between theory and actual musical practices in the history of music pedagogy.
Doing a spin-off from a recent post, sometimes reading a music theorist is like reading what Husserl might have said about J Dilla. Or vice-versa. Music theorists have done some remarkable things and of course I am very out of touch with what they are doing these days, but when you stop to think that composers like John Cage, Steve Reich, Conlon Nancarrow and Sofia Gubaidulina have barely been even mentioned by music theorists who often still seem to be arguing over, yes, what Haydn was doing.
Yes, there was the idea that DSCH had hoped to write a quartet in every key.
The media invariably put those pop Proms concerts in the headlines (which are still very much a minority of the season), and they don't mention Turangalila, Holst's Cloud Messenger, Britten's Midsummer Night's Dream, Glagolitic Mass, and all the other interesting programmes. Even the BBC's own promotion of the Proms is ridiculously slanted towards the pop concerts. Whoever's doing the PR for it clearly doesn't want word to get out that it's actually still a classical festival.
I wonder if the Chechen authorities have ruled on rubato....
Thanks, Steven, for offering the necessary propaedeutic to an appreciation of what is very good about the Proms. And, of course, I do intend to attend them at some point. Not this summer, though.
The sad thing is that the dumbing down trend has a momentum all its own.
Steven,
Out of curiosity does the BBC or other similar UK media still mention Baroque music concerts? Also in talking to some classical musicians here recently they mentioned that a couple of acquaintances had moved to Ireland to play and were liking it. Is there a split between the UK and Ireland music scene because the musicians said the expats were not planning to go on the UK from Ireland but stay there.
But don't think this is an accidental slip by the BBC; it's quite deliberate.
For my two cents: I suspect Ireland is a better environment, simply because the economy is in much better shape. The UK is pretty much on the rocks.
Hm I confess don't know much about what goes on in Ireland. You might be surprised at the level of uninterest in Ireland among the vast majority of Britons. But it's doubtless easier for many musicians to be based in Republic of Ireland because it's in the EU. (And Irish arts environment can't be worse than UK's, at least...) Irish economy does seem to be doing better than the UK's. (Also, a Northern Irish friend recently informed me about the economic divide between Northern Ireland and the Republic, the extent of which I was ignorant about).
I can't recall mentions of Baroque concerts in terms of news items. (Maybe John Eliot Gardiner, but often for the wrong reasons..!) However, Baroque concerts do get into the reviews sections of the papers.
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