Friday Miscellanea

I've been saying for years that much of popular music these days is produced by a committee of Swedes led by a guy named Max: When Taylor Swift Met Pop’s Supreme Hitmaker, Max Martin

Even listeners who pay little attention to liner-note credits are likely familiar with Martin and Shellback’s handiwork. Martin’s career as a hook wizard took off in the late 1990s, when he helped write and produce such evergreen earworms as Robyn’s “Show Me Love” and Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way.” In the years that followed, Martin established a reputation for songs that combined precise instrumentation with expansive, inescapable choruses, like Kelly Clarkson’s 2004 smash “Since U Been Gone.” 

“He writes songs. He’s not an artist,” Robyn said in a 2008 interview with Pitchfork. “He doesn’t have the need for expressing his personal thoughts in a song. For him, it’s about the melody. It’s about cracking a code, being as efficient as possible.”

Martin, who is press shy (“I’d rather not do this,” he told Joe Coscarelli during a 2022 New York Times interview), was a onetime rock frontman who was mentored by the Swedish pop mastermind Denniz Pop, who was known for wedding irresistible beats to sweeping choruses. “Not growing up here,” he said, referring to the United States, “you hear music differently. There was a big part of my life where I didn’t even understand what they were saying, so phonetics are super important to me — how things sound.”

This does, sort of, explain why popular music is more and more the product of an abstract process, like cheese slices, even while it masquerades as heartfelt individual expression.

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This is a look at the price-history of concert violins: With Strings Attached

In March 2025, an anonymous buyer purchased the 1715 “Baron Knoop” Stradivarius for $23 million (U.S.), making it the most expensive violin ever sold. (The seller, the American stringed-instrument collector David L. Fulton, had purchased it for a more modest $2.75 million in 1992.) Previous record setters have included the 1721 “Lady Blunt,” which fetched $15.9 million in 2011, and the “Joachim‑Ma,” which went for $11.25 million in February 2025.

All three of these models were made by Antonio Stradivari, a Cremonese luthier whose output in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is said to epitomize perfection in violin manufacturing. Depending on your point of view, they may indeed be examples of flawless human handiwork. Or they might be, as the fiction writer and journalist Ambrose Bierce once put it, objects that “tickle human ears by friction of a horse’s tail on the entrails of a cat.”

Compare this to what high-value guitars are selling for:

The guitar may exist on a similarly high level of symbolism, but the appraisal of an individual six-string turns more on its provenance and on any alterations by famous owners than on the maker. As two examples, an acoustic Gibson owned by John Lennon sold for $2.4 million in 2015, while the 1959 Martin D‑18E that Kurt Cobain used on Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York album went for just over $6 million in 2020 (he had picked it up for just $5,000). Pricey, but not near the numbers a Stradivarius commands.

Read the whole thing for a lot of interesting observations.

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Norman Lebrecht weighs in on a crisis in music criticism: Wanted: classical music influencers

he death of music criticism, long foretold, came a whole lot closer this summer. One day in mid-July, the New York Times sacked both of its chief music critics, pop and classical, along with chief theatre critic Jesse Green and Margaret Lyons, who covered TV.

The reason given for their “reassignment” was more alarming than the bloodbath itself. A memo from the culture editor, Sia Michel, warned that “new generations of artists and audiences are bypassing traditional institutions” — the New York Times — whilst “smartphones have Balkanised fandoms”. What readers crave, Michel feels, are “trusted guides to help them make sense of this complicated landscape”.

In plain English, what the Times is looking for is music critics who are as different as possible from the expert, well-dressed, wisecracking reviewers who delivered first-night juice (wisecrack intended*) daily at breakfast. Those dodos have had their daybreak.

What are we missing?

Why does this matter? Because a hostile New York Times review is worth more than a rave in ten other papers. Readers trust it, and artists use it to test their blood pressure. It has been over half a century since the Times last had a firebrand music critic in Harold Schonberg, who famously wrote: “Last night at Carnegie Hall, Jack Benny played Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn lost.” Schonberg earned the undying enmity of Leonard Bernstein, but New York devoured his every word.

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Sorry, no time for more this morning, so let's have some music. I haven't put up a late Beethoven string quartet for years and years. Here is the C# minor with the Danish String Quartet. I doubt there is any more profound music.