Friday Miscellanea

I think I will make this a regular Friday feature. My schedule on Fridays is such that I don't have much time, so I will have a look around on the web and see what items might be of interest.

First up, is a report from the economists on the "creative sector's" contribution to the US economy: $500 billion dollars. This sort of thing, trying to quantify the "value" of the arts and culture in the economy, has been going on for a long time, of course. This is just a more ambitious attempt. The hidden assumptions behind it are what trouble me. Here is how they put it:

"One of the challenges that's always been there for economists and even lay people and certainly policy makers is to understand what is the arts' value," Ilyengar said. "Here's a measurable, legitimate, rigorous way of tracking the contributions of the creative economy in the country."

"Measurable, legitimate, rigorous" and completely wrong! The value of arts and culture is not fundamentally economic, but aesthetic. Measuring just the economic spindrift thrown off will mean fundamentally misunderstanding what the arts and culture are and how they function in a society. It means that the most important musician of 2013 is Madonna, because she earned the most money. It means that classical music has only a very tiny function in the culture. I'm sure readers of this blog will know that I have many reasons for disagreeing with this!

The brain scientists are still going at it. Here one blogger summarizes how music affects our brains:

We can usually pick if a piece of music is particularly happy or sad, but this isn’t just a subjective idea that comes from how it makes us feel. In fact, our brains actually respond differently to happy and sad music.

I have written before about what I see as problematic about this. That was not exactly the post I was looking for--for some reason the search widget on my blog doesn't seem to work any more! What I have noted is that garden variety emotions, like happiness and sadness, have objects. We are happy or sad about something. This applies to emotions like anger and love as well (if love is a mere emotion). But the moods and expressions we hear in music do not have objects; they are merely suggestive of certain sensations. You might think of them as metaphors. A piece of music is not actually happy, sad nor angry; nor was the composer happy, sad nor angry when he or she wrote it. The performers likewise do not share these emotions and finally, neither does the listener. Music does not MAKE you happy or sad or angry because it neither contains nor communicates these emotions.

What we hear when we listen to music are musical moods and expressions. These may be beautiful, or coarse, or threatening, or charming, or languid, or agitated or a thousand other things we have no words for. But what they are not are garden variety emotions.

Sorry!

So why are scientists always going down the rabbit-hole? Well, if the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. If the only tool you have is a magnetic resonance imager, then you are going to scan a lot of brains. I just don't think that it is going to tell you anything about music or how and why we enjoy it.

The article I linked above comes in several parts. Here is one I found particularly hilarious. It explains how our musical "choices" (I guess they mean "tastes" but are just afraid to use that word) predict our personalities:

To break it down, here is the connection they have found:

• Blues fans have high self-esteem, are creative, outgoing, gentle and at ease

• Jazz fans have high self-esteem, are creative, outgoing and at ease

• Classical music fans have high self-esteem, are creative, introvert and at ease

• Rap fans have high self-esteem and are outgoing

• Opera fans have high self-esteem, are creative and gentle

• Country and western fans are hardworking and outgoing

• Reggae fans have high self-esteem, are creative, not hardworking, outgoing, gentle and at ease

• Dance fans are creative and outgoing but not gentle

• Indie fans have low self-esteem, are creative, not hard working, and not gentle

• Bollywood fans are creative and outgoing

• Rock/heavy metal fans have low self-esteem, are creative, not hard-working, not outgoing, gentle, and at ease

• Chart pop fans have high self-esteem, are hardworking, outgoing and gentle, but are not creative and not at ease

• Soul fans have high self-esteem, are creative, outgoing, gentle, and at ease

Of course, generalizing based on this study is very hard. However looking at the science of introverts and extroverts, there is some clear overlap.

You know what this reminds me of? With about the same amount of scientific rigor? Yep, horoscopes. Here is what the stars reveal about your personality:

Aries (March 21- April 20): Aries is the first sign of the zodiac. Those who are Aries are independent and courageous. They enjoy leading others and bringing excitement into the lives of others. An Aries is enthusiastic and very goal-oriented.

Taurus (April 21- May 21): The second sign of the zodiac, those who are a Taurus are solid and fight for what they want. A Taurus is very easy going but can also be stubborn. A Taurus can be procrastinators but also have a good-work ethic.

Gemini (May 22- June 21): Gemini is the third sign of the zodiac. Geminis have many sides and are known for their energy. They are very talkative and are considered social butterflies. A Gemini will always take their lives in the direction they want to go.

Cancer (June 22- July 22): Cancer is the fourth sign of the zodiac. This sign is marked by inconsistency. They enjoy security but also seek adventure. A Cancer is not very predictable and always keep others guessing.

Leo (July 23- August 21): Leo is the fifth sign in the zodiac. Leos have high self esteem and are very devoted. They are also very kind and generous. A Leo is known for being hot tempered yet forgiving.

Virgo (August 22- September 23): The sixth sign of the zodiac, Virgo is very mind oriented. They are constantly analyzing and thinking. They enjoy bettering themselves and those around them.

Libra (September 24- October 23): The seventh sign of the zodiac, Libras are known for their diplomatic nature. They get along well with everyone and are ambitious. They have very expensive taste and work hard to make money.

Scorpio (October 24- November 22): The eight sign of the zodiac, Scorpios are very intense. They like to question everything and work hard at making sense of things. Scorpios treat others with kindness and loyalty.

Sagittarius (November 23- December 22): The ninth sign of the zodiac, a Sagittarius has a very positive outlook on life. They have vibrant personalities and enjoy meeting new people. They can also be reckless.

Capricorn (December 23- January 20): The 10th sign of the zodiac, those who are Capricorns are marked by their ambitious nature. They have very active minds and always have to be in control of their lives.

Aquarius (January 21- February 19): Aquarius is the 11th sign of the zodiac. Aquarians don't always care what others think about them. They take each opportunity they have and work towards formulating new ideas.

Pisces (February 20- March 20): Pisces is the 12th and last sign of the zodiac. Those who are Pisces are extremely sensitive and reserved. They like to escape from reality. A Pisces is a very good listener and friend.

Most people's musical tastes span different genres. The amount of selectivity they exhibit can also vary enormously. Some people seem to enjoy most music in a kind of non-specific way. Others have intense likings and dislikings for different songs on the same album or different pieces by the same composer. Other people, and I list myself among them, like outstanding examples of pieces in widely varying genres. I have heard rap songs that I was quite taken with, but at the same time, there are Baroque pieces I find horribly tedious. So, of course, I won't fit into any of those predictions. Neither will most of us.

Just more dreary pseudo-science, I'm afraid. But it looks so impressive with all those nifty charts and diagrams...

Let's hear some music! Does this make you happy or sad?

Minimalism in Music

A commentator asked me to write something about minimalism and within five minutes of starting to do some basic research I discovered several things that I previously didn't know! One is the use of the term "systems" music to refer to some minimalist techniques. Another is that both Steve Reich and Philip Glass were influenced by a street musician in New York known as "Moondog" or "the Viking of 6th Avenue"! Here is a photo:

Moondog recorded quite a lot of music. Here is a short sample:

Moondog reminds me of another eccentric American composer, the West Coast musician Harry Partch. Both led unconventional lives and invented their own musical instruments.

In the earliest stages of what came to be known as "minimalism" composers such as Terry Riley on the West Coast and Steve Reich on the East Coast experimented with tape delay and tape loops. Both of these techniques lead to the idea of repetition. The idea of returning to simplicity seems to have been the impetus to write music that was tonal, or at least tonally static. An early example is Terry Riley's In C dating from 1964. Here is just the first part of the original recording:

Steve Reich moved from overlapping tape loops to trying to reproduce some of the rhythmic effects with musicians. Here is Piano Phase dating from 1967. Just after the one minute mark you can hear one of the pianos "phasing" against the other. The effect is created by very slightly speeding up so the sixteenths "slip" or "phase" against one another until they come into phase again, but one sixteenth apart.

Philip Glass, who studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, so had more of a traditional grounding, was very influenced by hearing Steve Reich's music and began to write his own minimal compositions. Here is the first part of Music in Fifths dating from 1969:

Both Steve Reich and Philip Glass have undergone such huge developments in their composition that it is probably no longer suitable to stick the label "minimalist" on their music. But the experience of paring music down to its most fundamental--minimal--parts and then rebuilding from there has probably given their music a special kind of energy. Steve Reich moved on to complex but repetitive ensemble pieces like his Music for 18 Musicians from 1976. Here is the first part:

Philip Glass has become enormously prolific, writing not only operas and film scores, but also concertos and symphonies. He has described himself as a classicist, though I don't recall where. Now here is an interesting connection: Dennis Russell Davies, the conductor of the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, commissioned Glass' Symphony No. 3. Here is the first movement:

So what is the connection? Dennis Russell Davies and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra are the artists who recorded the complete symphonies of Joseph Haydn that I am currently listening my way through!

After I finish with Haydn, I would really like to take a close look at the symphonies of Philip Glass. In the meantime, enjoy. Here is another movement from the Glass symphony:

The Federal Trade Commission: Protecting You From Your Piano Teacher

The Wall Street Journal, always your source for updates on the world of music and business, has an article up about how the Federal Trade Commission is on a crusade to protect you from the rapacity of your piano teacher. Here's the nub of it:

In March of this year, a small nonprofit in Cincinnati—the Music Teachers National Association—received a letter from the FTC. The agency was investigating whether the association was engaged in, uh, anticompetitive practices.

This was bizarre, given that the MTNA has existed since 1876 solely to advance the cause of music study and support music teachers. The 501(c)(3) has about 22,000 members, nearly 90% of them piano teachers, including many women who earn a modest living giving lessons in their homes. The group promotes music study and competitions and helps train teachers. Not exactly U.S. Steel.

The association's sin, according to the feds, rested in its code of ethics. The code lays out ideals for members to follow—a commitment to students, colleagues, society. Tucked into this worthy document was a provision calling on teachers to respect their colleagues' studios, and not actively recruit students from other teachers.

I have noticed before how the mechanisms of government, grinding ever finer in the modern world, seem to be inadvertently harmful to music. I recall the case of Gibson Guitars and the confiscation of their stockpile of ebony over which seemed to be an administrative absurdity. Or the confiscation of musical instruments if the owners do not carry their full provenance with them when traveling. Indeed, just traveling with your instrument has become fraught with peril.

How ugly does this governmental abuse of power get? The article gives us some clues:

This October, MTNA signed a consent decree—its contents as ludicrous as the investigation. The association did not have to admit or deny guilt. It must, however, read a statement out loud at every future national MTNA event warning members against talking about prices or recruitment. It must send this statement to all 22,000 members and post it on its website. It must contact all of its 500-plus affiliates and get them to sign a compliance statement.

The association must also develop a sweeping antitrust compliance program that will require annual training of its state presidents on the potential crimes of robber-baron piano teachers. It must submit regular reports to the FTC and appoint an antitrust compliance officer. (The FTC wanted the officer to be an attorney, but Mr. Ingle explained that this would "break the bank," so the agency—how gracious—is allowing him to fill the post.) And it must comply with most of this for the next 20 years.

The MTNA is not yet free of fear; the FTC has still to approve the consent decree. An FTC spokesman told me the agency does not confirm or deny the existence of investigations. The organization to this day has no idea how it became a target, nor will it ever because the FTC doesn't have to provide it.

As has been said in another context, "the process is the punishment".

I can't express how much I detest this heavy-handed bureaucratic torture. There seems to be no real defense against this kind of soft tyranny. I doubt very much whether anyone outside of the music teachers' association really takes the measure of how much is lost with this politicization of every aspect of life. And how very, very little is gained.

Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition 2014

Djuro Zivkovic

NPR has an article up about the 2014 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. The winner is Serbian composer Djuro Zivkovic for his piece for chamber orchestra with piano On the Guarding of the Heart. Here is the piece:

The images seem appropriate as this music has a very "spacey" feel. While harmonically complex, it does not seem to me to be atonal. My feeling about the radically atonal music of much of the modernist phase is that it limits the expressive palette to a very narrow range of unpleasant sensations. But Zivkovic, a violinist, seems to have mystical inspirations and aspirations and the music reflects this. Not having access to the score, I don't want to say anything more detailed about the piece, but it seems quite worthwhile.

Read the NPR article as it includes an interview with the composer. One fascinating comment:

I almost always start with non-musical ideas then try to "paint" them in sound. I was very much interested in various texts, particularly French and German poetry, but since numerous composers used those texts, I was looking for something profoundly different; something that would touch still widely undiscovered philosophical and spiritual texts.

Clearly Zivkovic's music is not about technical intricacy or modernist innovation.

I have mixed feelings about music competitions, but they seem to have made a good choice with this award. Here is the composer's website.

"Sonate, que me veux-tu?"

The title is a quotation, supposedly from the French philosopher Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, cited by Rousseau at the end of his article on "Sonate" in the Encyclopédie. But while mentioned many times in the eighteenth century in connection with the controversy over the problem of the meaning or nature of expression in instrumental music, its recent notoriety stems from its use as the title of an essay by Pierre Boulez on his Third Piano Sonata published in Perspectives of New Music (Spring, 1963).

I want to go back to the original meaning of the remark: "sonata, what do you want from me?" Fontenelle was exasperated at instrumental music's lack of semantic content. The meaning of music with words could be surmised quite easily, though I wonder sometimes that people often do not seem to notice that the music accompanying text can have a rather subtle relationship to that text. It can, for example, comment sardonically or otherwise contradict or undermine the supposed meaning of the text. But what could instrumental music possibly mean? Was it mere diversion, pleasing patterns with no more significance than the patterns of wallpaper?

This question became acute in the 18th century as the instrumental genres that began in the 17th and even 16th centuries began to break away from their humble origins in, for the most part, dance music, and to take on an independent expressive role. While the Baroque composers of instrumental music like Louis and François Couperin, Antonio Vivaldi and J. S. Bach certainly created an immense corpus of purely instrumental music, it only started to take on what we might discern as a personality with the music of Joseph Haydn. Movements from symphonies or string quartets lost their abstract character and began to reflect a whole spectrum of quirky human individuality. It may have been an inkling of this that led Fontenelle to make his remark. Now, of course, as Fontenelle died in 1757, it was not the music of Haydn that he was likely to have heard, but more likely something by François Couperin. Here is Les Lis naissans from the 13th Ordre:

The title means "the nascent lilies". These kind of whimsical titles are not quite borne out in the music. This is, after all, just a rather charming allemande:

But in the hands of Joseph Haydn, instead of tacking on individual character with a colorful title, he began to instill it into the music itself, which was now hiding behind bland titles that were mere hints as to the tempo like "allegro" or "adagio". But listen to how much expressive individuality begins to infuse these movements. Here is the opening adagio from the Symphony No. 22 in E flat major, dating from 1764:

And the opening in the score:

Now compare the first movement from the Symphony No. 49 in F minor (not C major as incorrectly stated on the video) from just a few years later in 1768:

Here is how that movement begins:

Roughly the same tempo and same instruments, but how utterly different the expression and effect. [UPDATE: Silly me! The woodwinds in the Symphony No. 22 are not oboes tout simple but rather the tenor oboe called the "English Horn" or "corni inglesi" in the score.] Instead of composing within a set of conventions and guidelines, Haydn is inventing an entirely new way of writing for each movement of each symphony. One more example? Here is the opening adagio movement from the Symphony No. 34 in D minor dating from about 1766:

And the score:

Each movement, though written in roughly the same slow adagio tempo and for exactly the same instrumentation, achieves an entirely different effect. The individuality is achieved through a number of different techniques. Notice how they all begin piano (softly) with the exception of No. 22 which has the horns loud. The texture of the accompaniment is different each time: piano staccato in No. 22, sustained in No. 49 with the low strings playing just on the first beat, and in No. 34, arpeggiated chords in the 2nd violin with the low strings on the first and third beats. The melody is also utterly different in each movement. In No. 22 it is a dialogue between the horns and oboes; in No. 49 a somber movement up to the minor third in quarter notes, and in No. 34 a long, held note, that suddenly leaps into rhythmic activity just at the end of the phrase.

There are composers that are beloved of the general public and then there are composers that are especially loved by other composers because of their seemingly endless capacity for invention. Among these the foremost are probably J. S. Bach, Domenico Scarlatti with his 555 keyboard sonatas and Joseph Haydn with his 108 (or is it merely 106?) symphonies.

World's Fastest Guitarist?

Also courtesy of Norman Lebrecht comes this clip:

He does the piece, the Flight of the Bumblebee, several times. At first it seems quite plausible, but everything at 300 or above seems faked to me. For one thing, guitar strings do have a limit at the speed at which they can 'speak' and the tempi above 300 seem to violate this. Also, if you look closely at his right hand, it does not seem to be a natural movement of the hand. Just an impression, of course. I'm not going to try to "debunk" this as, frankly, it is not worth the effort.

If music were a race instead of an art-form this might be interesting. But it's not...

Far better to spend your time and energy learning how to play like this:

That is David Russell playing the Prelude, Fugue and Allegro by J. S. Bach.

Sir Thomas "One-way" Beecham

I suppose it is rather petty of me, but I just have to share with you a little clip I ran across over at Norman Lebrecht's blog of the great English conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham.

Perhaps this is just my own personal bias, but I find everything about this little clip quite disgusting. There is something about the English that can really rub me the wrong way and the irony of this seemingly pompous bigot chiding someone else for being a pompous bigot is just classic! I recall Julian Bream commenting once about performing the Aranjuez with Beecham that he was very nasty and uncompromising with the tempo.

Equally annoying is the suspicion that Sir Thomas Beecham may be absolutely correct about how to rehearse an orchestra!

Here he is conducting the third movement of the Symphony No. 38 of Mozart in Montréal in 1956: