A Little Miscellaney

“Today we can manufacture 10,000 pianos a day, but not any pianists worthy enough to play them.”

--Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

  We haven't done a miscellanea in quite a while. Here's a story: Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Next Move: Reinventing the Maestro

On Tuesday, the Los Angeles Philharmonic announced that Salonen would be its first creative director, starting in fall 2026. Simultaneously, the Philharmonie de Paris announced that he would hold its inaugural creativity and innovation chair starting in 2027, while also taking on the role of principal conductor of the Orchestre de Paris.

“One morning, I realized that I had been a music director or something to that effect for 40 years,” Salonen said in an interview. “And I thought, maybe that’s not the only option.”

Now there's a serious commute: Paris to LA every few weeks. Mind you, less grueling in First Class. 

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The success of AI music creators sparks a debate on the future of the music industry

When pop groups and rock bands practice or perform, they rely on their guitars, keyboards and drumsticks to make music. Oliver McCann, a British AI music creator who goes by the stage name imoliver, fires up his chatbot.

McCann’s songs span a range of genres, from indie-pop to electro-soul to country-rap. There’s just one crucial difference between McCann and traditional musicians. 

“I have no musical talent at all,” he said. “I can’t sing, I can’t play instruments, and I have no musical background at all.”

McCann, 37, who has a background as a visual designer, started experimenting with AI to see if it could boost his creativity and “bring some of my lyrics to life.” Last month, he signed with independent record label Hallwood Media after one of his tracks racked up 3 million streams, in what’s billed as the first time a music label has inked a contract with an AI music creator.

For those who think that this is the future of music, all I want to say is, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha and refer you to the Saint-Exupéry quote.

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 From The New Yorker: How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge

There is something a bit funny, at any rate, about pop-music criticism, which purports to offer serious analysis of a form that is often considered (by other people, who are also, in a sense, critics) rather silly. In 1969, Robert Christgau, the self-proclaimed Dean of American Rock Critics, began writing a Village Voice column called “Consumer Guide,” in which he assigned letter grades to new albums. He took pleasure in irritating the kinds of rock-loving hipsters who “considered consumption counterrevolutionary and didn’t like grades either.” He described the music of Donny Hathaway as “supper-club melodrama and homogenized jazz” (self-titled album, 1971: D-), and referred to George Harrison as a “hoarse dork” (“Dark Horse,” 1974: C-). In 1970, in Rolling Stone, Greil Marcus, another pioneering rock critic, began his review of Bob Dylan’s “Self Portrait” by asking, “What is this shit?”

Music criticism lost its way in my view, when it became no longer possible to offer reasons why something was good, bad or simply ridiculous and when the idea of aesthetics was lost.

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How about some music? I mean, the real stuff, not artificially generated and autotuned. Here is some Archangelo Corelli.