Friday Miscellanea

I'm afraid the first item is going to be controversial: UVic job posting for Black candidates only draws backlash

The University of Victoria is facing criticism on social media after posting a job vacancy in the school of music with an unusual requirement: The candidate must be Black.

The job posting for a full-time assistant professor specifies that “selection will be limited to members of the following designated group: Black people.”

On social-media site X, unrelated posts by UVic have received a deluge of responses by users calling the hiring criteria discriminatory and questioning whether it’s legal. Many of those commenting  appear to live in the U.S.

The job posting cites the university’s equity plan and the B.C. Human Rights Code. The latter allows organizations to treat people from disadvantaged groups differently in order to promote more equitable workplaces, said Kasari Govender, B.C.’s human rights commissioner

“It is very important for our human rights system to allow for this kind of progress to be made,” Govender said in a statement.

B.C.’s human rights law is designed to identify and eliminate persistent patterns of inequality, she said, and that can’t be done unless employers are allowed to proactively address systemic discrimination in their workplaces and institutions.

Organizations apply for a special program designation, which is official recognition that the organization is trying to improve conditions for a particular group protected under the human rights code.

UVic has a special program for preferential hiring of self-identified Indigenous people, women, Black people, members of a visible minority and people with disabilities, Govender said. The program applies to all employee positions, including faculty, librarians, leadership and staff.

Cassbreea Dewis, executive director of equity and human rights at UVic, said the university has had a special program designation for at least 10 years.

“In order to achieve equity, it’s sometimes necessary to treat people differently and this might mean we’re advantaging a marginalized group over a more dominant or over-represented group in a particular focused area,” she said.

This hits home for me in a number of ways. First of all, I founded the guitar program at UVic and taught there for a number of years. I remember a heated discussion with a friend of mine who was chair of the math department when they were proposing to enforce gender quotas in hiring. I was all in favor, but he was not. In retrospect, I had not thought it through. My own experience, and the reason I left, was that the music department was always pursuing political goals, often disguised, over objective ones. For example, despite the fact that I was a prominent performer compared to my colleagues, I was never going to be placed on tenure track because the guitar is not an orchestral instrument. Why this was the determining factor was never up for discussion. My successor in the position had a long and unhappy time in the department as, despite his worthy efforts, they slowly trimmed down his teaching to two students from the eight I had.

Out of a host of possible criticisms of the above global "equity" policy I will just mention a few. First of all, black people have never been disadvantaged in Victoria. They have always been a very tiny percentage and when I was there, that percentage included the conductor of the Victoria Symphony. And the whole notion of equity--the elevation of equal results over equal opportunity--is itself philosophically flawed, one of the many deranged products of post-modern thinking. If you are hiring an assistant professor in music then there are surely a considerable number of things you are looking for: someone whose expertise fills a gap in the department, someone with a track record of accomplishment, someone with a high level of academic achievement, someone who has some connection with the musical traditions of Western Canada and so on and on. Being black has nothing to do with any of that. The music department at UVic was at the beginning staffed with people from the Eastman School of Music and for a long time had a rather "alien" feel to it that made it distant from the surrounding community.

It makes me very sad to see that the University of Victoria, along with the community of which it is part, has fallen prey to the most dreary and mediocre of intellectual fads.

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And if that were not disquieting enough, we have this: Robot Symphony: Dresden orchestra conducted by 3-armed robot

In the first part of the evening, 16 brass players and 4 percussionists from the Dresdner Sinfoniker will perform works by Markus Lehmann-Horn, Konstantia Gourzi, and Wieland Reissmann under the baton of Magnus Loddgard.

After the intermission, the conductor will hand over the baton to his mechanical colleague, who will take on the difficult challenge of conducting the world premiere of "#kreuzknoten" by Wieland Reissmann. Two of its three arms will lead the orchestra safely through the overlapping tempi. One section of the musicians starts slowly and accelerates, while the other half slows down. Due to its rhythmic finesse, "#kreuzknoten" could not be conducted by a human being.

On the plus side, we may finally have found the perfect conductor for the Symphony No. 4 of Charles Ives.

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For a necessary bit of frivolity we go to Slipped Disc: YUJA WANG’S LONDON ROADIES. Is it the case that Norman Lebrecht only puts up items on Yuja Wang if they include a sexy photo? No, of course not!

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18 OPERAGOERS NEED MEDICAL TREATMENT AFTER LESBIAN HINDEMITH OPERA

 Florentina Holzinger’s Stuttgart production of Hindemith’s Sancta Susanna has hit the British tabloids after audience members complained of sickness and fainting at the sight of rollerskating naked nuns and an actor pulling down Jesus Christ’s loincloth on the cross.

In an earlier scene, Jesus spanks a nun’s naked bottom.

A representative of the opera company said those who suffered adverse symptoms were sitting in the front rows.

Holzinger is a notorious Austrian audience shocker, who gave her production a first run in remote Schwerin four months ago. Stuttgart’s state opera restricted its production to over-18s.

Gee, the things a neglected composer like Hindemith needs to do to get some press...

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Are we ready for "historically-informed Bruckner"? OAE/Fischer review – historically informed Bruckner thrills

Anton Bruckner’s symphonies are some of the most self-consciously monumental in the classical canon. It can be hard to imagine – let alone hear – those murmuring openings and vast, brassy climaxes without the precision and power of a modern symphony orchestra. But to mark the composer’s 200th birthday, the period-instrument Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment continued its unhurried foray into the late-Romantic repertory with Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony.

If “historically informed performance” suggests holier-than-thou small-scale, think again: this one featured eight brass players, with six double-basses as the formidable engine of a hefty string section. The big tunes surged. In the relatively intimate acoustic of the QEH, the breakthrough chorales verged on deafening. There was little information about the instruments themselves – simply “closer to those that would have been used in Bruckner’s day” – but such quibbles fade to meaningless in the face of results this thrilling.

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I'm sure that we will be reading articles about the upheaval in the music business caused by the internet for years and years (and some of them not by Ted Gioia!): How the Music Industry Learned to Love Piracy

History is written by the winners, and Eminem, Iovine and the rest of the plutocrats involved with “How Music Got Free” are clear victors in the aftermath of the piracy wars. What is left unmentioned, of course, is the surrounding blast crater, which has functionally erased a once-thriving ecosystem of middle-class musicians. Those artists survived on the old model of physical sales and mechanical royalties; now they have been almost completely excised from the profit pool of the streaming economy. Perhaps you have read the numbers and wrangled with their penurious abstractions. Per the Recording Industry Association of America, streaming currently accounts for 84 percent of revenue from recorded music. One estimate had streaming platforms paying an average of $0.00173 per stream; more recent numbers have it as $0.0046. Either way, a majority of that princely sum is typically captured by record labels, while the artist is left to make do with the remainder. I will save you the trouble of getting out your calculator. What this means is that it is essentially impossible for all but a glancingly small number of musicians to make meaningful income from their recordings.

The problem isn’t just the ever-decreasing viability of even established, popular artists keeping food on the table. There is also a cultural poverty that attends the streaming economy. There is the ruthless profit maximization and the constant steering of listeners toward the same music. There is the lock-step social engineering and manufactured consensus. There is the escalating — and demeaning — sense of music being treated as a utility that need not be meaningfully engaged with. There are the Spotify playlists peppered with songs generated by fake artists that Spotify owns the rights to, allowing the company to recapture its own royalty payments. And at the same time, there is the fact that nearly every space where consumers could once interact with music unsupervised by corporate gatekeepers — record stores, mail order, merch tables — has been put on life support.

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I tend to find pop music these days formulaic, mediocre and contrived. But PJ Harvey provides a salutary alternative. I can't think of anyone who can walk out there with a guitar and do straight ahead rock and roll better:

One of the most astonishing pianists of the 20th century was Sviatoslav Richter. Here is his Well-Tempered Clavier by Bach.

Hindemith, Mathis der Maler, Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester conducted by Herbert Blomstedt