Friday Miscellanea

Here's some good news: Blogger has moved the extremely annoying Google links icon from its position blocking the text off to one side where it is more easily ignored. Thanks Google, our friend and master. Let's see if we can find something interesting in this seasonal season.

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Here's something: Is the Internet Making Culture Worse? Well, obviously.

In Marx’s history of American pop culture, which places heavy emphasis on media, music, and fashion, with glancing mentions of literature, art, and dance, a theme emerges: Everyone is selling out or trying their best to. Craven commercialism has replaced creativity. Culture has become “a vehicle for entertainment, politics, and profiteering — but at the expense of pure artistic innovation.

Another way of looking at it is that creativity has been almost completely replaced by formula. The only path for anyone working in the internet is to find the formula that generates immediate appeal and hence clicks or traffic. But formulas are exactly what any creative artist avoids because they are the opposite of creativity. The ability of AI to instantly "create" plausible facsimiles of popular music styles is proof that these styles are nothing but empty formulas.

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Here's a theory for you: Anton Bruckner's symphonies are the high water of Western Civilization. While he personally doubted his own abilities, the music shows no doubt or anxiety about the worth of the musical culture. A few years later, the symphonies of Mahler are angst-ridden as the culture starts to disintegrate. Then World War I lays waste to Western Europe. Most of Mahler's symphonies were composed after 1900. In between we have the extremely revealing work Verklärte Nacht from 1899 by Arnold Schoenberg which to my mind perfectly reveals the beginning of the disintegration of the romantic phase in music. Soon after Schoenberg turned to atonality, a kind of aesthetic mirror of cultural alienation. Let's listen to this musical evolution.

I don't know if you hear what I hear, but the expansive expression of Bruckner is followed by the dark, internal doubts of the Schoenberg and then by the neurosis of the Mahler, despite its external brilliance. As Yeats said, "the centre cannot hold."

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LANDR Study Uncovers How 87% of Artists Really Use AI

LANDR, the AI-driven music tech and distribution platform used by more than 7 million creators worldwide, today shares results of its international study showing that a large percentage of musicians and producers are leveraging AI tools across almost every area of their workflow.

From songwriting and production to promotion and fan engagement, AI is shaping how music is made and shared.

And someone once said that 90% of art is bad, so I guess that tracks.

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Instead of composing (I'm in an extended dry spell) I have been writing haiku for the last few years. Let's end with one:

I'm very grateful

For my life, but I do not

Know quite whom to thank.

To all my readers I wish a happy and healthy new year with abundance and joy.