"Science Can Explain..."

You can guess already how much I dislike this kind of headline: Science Can Explain Why Some Songs Are Universal. (This might be behind the Wall Street Journal paywall, in which case you might try Googling the headline.)

To eliminate the biases of culture, sexism, music perception and Western scholarship, the researchers used a machine learning algorithm to sift musical data for significant patterns, cross-checked by musicologists and more than 30,000 listeners recruited through online crowdsourcing.

Those damned Western scholars! Always biased about something.

To start, they drew on ethnographic reports documenting 315 cultures around the world that had been collected at Yale University. For more precise analysis, they then focused on music behavior in 60 especially well-documented societies, coding mentions of singing for 60 variables ranging from the age and sex of the singer to the time of day the song was performed and whether the singer was in costume.

Clearly the age and sex of the singer, the time of day and what the singer wore are crucial elements telling us ... uh, what, exactly? Certainly nothing about universal elements in song.

“We wanted to build data sets that properly sample human cultural and geographic diversity,” said Manvir Singh, a cognitive and evolutionary anthropologist at Harvard University, who was a co-author of the study. “But there is no standard way to represent music across cultures.”

See, now, this seems like the foggiest of foggy thinking. Obviously that shibboleth of cultural progressivism, "diversity" has mucked up the project from the beginning (and another, sex, was also lurking). I wish I knew what could possibly be meant by "there is no standard way to represent music across cultures." Western music notation has become the international standard largely because there is no good alternative.

In sifting the data, the scientists asked music experts and people with no musical expertise to listen to snippets of songs and then categorize each as a lullaby, a dance, a healing song or a love song based on acoustic features such as tempo, rhythm and pitch. To cross-check the results, they also used a sorting algorithm to match music to behavior.

So they picked obvious and wide categories, all linked to obvious and wide categories of behaviour, crunched a lot of data and, I'm guessing because they don't share a single specific bit of results with us in this article, end up with the earth-shaking discovery that lullabies (the world over!) are usually quiet and soothing, while dances are more dynamic with a strong pulse. Amirite?

These pseudo-scientific studies always seem to fall into a few obvious and wide categories themselves. This one I think we can label as Scientists Contrive a Laborious and Data-Heavy Study to Conclude Something That Musicians Have Known for Millennia. In every one of these studies the two common elements are first, a disparagement of regular music scholarship and second, the surreptitious insertion of the necessary progressive demands of diversity, inclusiveness and equality.

After that we need a Brahms lullaby:

UPDATE: From a Colby Cosh column in the National Post I find what I think is a link to the study. Here is an abstract of their conclusions:

Music is in fact universal: It exists in every society (both with and without words), varies more within than between societies, regularly supports certain types of behavior, and has acoustic features that are systematically related to the goals and responses of singers and listeners. But music is not a fixed biological response with a single prototypical adaptive function: It is produced worldwide in diverse behavioral contexts that vary in formality, arousal, and religiosity. Music does appear to be tied to specific perceptual, cognitive, and affective faculties, including language (all societies put words to their songs), motor control (people in all societies dance), auditory analysis (all musical systems have signatures of tonality), and aesthetics (their melodies and rhythms are balanced between monotony and chaos). These analyses show how applying the tools of computational social science to rich bodies of humanistic data can reveal both universal features and patterns of variability in culture, addressing long-standing debates about each.

That just prompts a lot more questions than it answers! The fact that music exists in every society means that it is universal? Well, in that extremely broad sense, so is clothing, eating utensils, language, hierarchical structures and every other element and aspect of human behaviour. That is to say, the term "universal" in this context is simply meaningless. Music is used in diverse behavioral contexts. Yep. And if they had asked I could have told them without the effort of making the study. I have no idea what they could possibly intend with the reference to "formality," "arousal," and "religiosity," but presumably that is explained in the text. Here is a good one: "all musical systems have signatures of tonality." What exactly do they mean by that? All music is tonal? What is meant by "tonal"? Well, whatever is meant by it, it certainly does not include moment form, John Cage and myriads of other music. This just confirms my belief that "applying the tools of computational social science to rich bodies of humanistic data" will not only reveal nothing we didn't know before, but will be misleading and tend to deceive us about what we do and don't know. Aren't all these kinds of studies and projects just make-work for underemployed scientists?

Theme and Variations Form

I had to create a new tag for this, which means I haven't talked about it much--if at all! The theme and variations form has been a perennial genre for the last five centuries at least. I have had one of the very first examples of it in my repertoire for most of my career: Guardame las vacas by Luis de Narváez. Here is that quite simple piece:

That is played on the vihuela, an instrument that looks a lot like a guitar, but sounds a lot like a lute.

The variation form is particularly attractive to composers because it poses the basic problems of variety within consistency that underly all composition. The idea is that you take a simple theme--folk melodies are often popular--or a harmonic progression (this one is a romanesca, a melodic-harmonic formula popular in the 16th and 17th centuries) and see what you can do with it. Repeating the basic phrase and harmonic structure in each variation provides the consistency so you just have to come up with the variety.

But composers have found many different ways of approaching the form. A particularly interesting one was the Nocturnal by Benjamin Britten for guitar using the air "Come Heavy Sleep" by John Dowland as the theme, but instead of beginning with it, he places it at the end and works his way toward it. Quite ingenious! Here is a performance by Marcin Dylla:

Another very ingenious approach was taken by Beethoven in his "Eroica" Variations for piano. He first states the bass line to the theme and does four variations on it before giving us the actual theme followed by fifteen variations and a finale which is a fugue on that original bass line (plus its inversion) followed by an Andante con moto which is another variation on the theme, not the bass line. Here is a performance by Pierre-Laurant Aimard:

And I haven't even mentioned any of the really famous sets of variations. So it might be interesting to do a survey of the theme and variation form and how composers have worked with it. What do you think?

Salzburg Festival 2020

Holy cow, I thought they didn't announce the programs until December, but I just noticed that the offerings for next summer's Salzburg Festival are already up. Let's have a look: eight operas including Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute, Electra, Boris Godunov and Don Pasquale. But also operas by Nono and Morton Feldman (the latter in concert performance). A few plays including Richard III by Shakespeare. Five concerts by the Vienna Philharmonic plus a host of guest orchestras: City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra · Orchestre des Champs-Élysées · SWR Symphonieorchester · West-Eastern Divan Orchestra · musicAeterna · ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien · Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester · Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra · Berliner Philharmoniker. Igor Levit is playing eight concerts that look like they include all the Beethoven piano sonatas!

There are all sorts of hidden gems such as the series of Moments Musicaux concerts where they don't tell you the program in advance, but it is sure to be good. On July 20 there is a chamber concert pairing Steve Reich's Different Trains with Olivier Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du temps. How could I miss that? On August 12 is a chamber concert devoted to a single long piece by Morton Feldman, Crippled Symmetry for flute, percussion and piano. How could I miss that? And the day after, the Belcea Quartet play an evening of Beethoven and Webern. August 4 is a Grigory Sokolov concert and it looks like half will be Mozart. July 30 there is a lieder recital by Christian Gerheher and Gerold Huber of works by Schubert, Berg and Fauré. Plus a gazillion other concerts including a bunch by students of the Mozarteum, stars of tomorrow.

Here is that Feldman piece, Crippled Symmetry:

I think I wrote something a lot like that, only it was four minutes long...

UPDATE: On August 28 Daniil Trifonov is playing this program:

ALBAN BERG

Piano Sonata, Op. 1

SERGEY PROKOFIEV

Sarcasms, Op. 17

BÉLA BARTÓK

Out of Doors – Five Pieces, Sz. 81

AARON COPLAND

Piano Variations

OLIVIER MESSIAEN

'Le Baiser de l’Enfant-Jésus'
from Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus

GYÖRGY LIGETI

Musica ricercata for Piano Nos. 1–4

KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN

Klavierstück IX

JOHN ADAMS

China Gates for Piano

JOHN CORIGLIANO

Fantasia on an Ostinato for piano

And how could I miss that! I think I am going to be buying a lot of cheap tickets just so I can see more concerts. For this concert tickets range from 25 to 120 Euros.

Volans with a small blanket

This is the most interesting piece for a solo percussionist I can recall hearing. Kevin Volans, She Who Sleeps with a Small Blanket performed by Tomasz Kowalczyk:

There must be a couple of dozen performances of this piece on YouTube by different percussionists, but this one really stands out.

Friday Miscellanea

I rather like 89-year-old Clint Eastwood's retirement plan. Last weekend there was a 34 acre fire close to the Warner Brothers lot in Los Angeles and they asked everyone on the lot to evacuate just as a precaution. Clint refused to leave saying he had work to do. And this was a Saturday. His retirement doesn't even involve weekends off!

* * *

Here's the pull-quote: "The digital age has given us two "gifts." The technology used for playback sounds terrible and our recorded music no longer has any monetary value" and here is the article: What the digital age means for my music — and my paycheque.

I had recently come to the conclusion that the record business is more profitable than the film and television business.

I explained that last week I received my royalty statements for a TV series I had created and produced. It cost $1.2 million to make and had been on YouTube for a year. My royalties, for 12 months were — are you sitting down? — .01 cent. Cent. Not even plural. No "S" required. .01 cent!

On the other hand, I got my music statement for our 11th CD recording and for only three months we got the whopping sum of .01 cents. But it was only for three months. You don't need an MBA to see how much more profitable music is!

The situation for the vast majority of working musicians is beyond horrible.

* * *

I was trying to find a good performance of the Symphony No. 7 by Shostakovich the other day and stumbled across this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB3zR_X25UU

Blogger won't embed but that is Klaus Mäkelä conducting the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra. His conducting style really reminds me of two Russian conductors: Yevgeny Mravinsky and Yuri Temirkanov, both conductors of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic.

* * *

From Slipped Disc comes the news that Plácido Domingo has been engaged to sing in a Verdi opera at next summer's Salzburg Festival. The comments are nearly all supportive. How interesting and odd that he has been fired from all engagements and employment in North America, but from none in Europe (that I know of). Now there's a cultural divide.

* * *

Also at Slipped Disc is an eloquent essay about how one orchestral couple are leaving their jobs and moving to Italy. You have to read the whole thing, but here is an excerpt:

Over my career in American orchestras, I’ve found that the proportion of pops to classical in my orchestra job has vastly shifted. I always knew Pops would be a part of my career, and in the right proportion, I found it engaging and fun. But the proportions are well out of whack, at least for what I am willing to do. Compounding that issue is the fact that the concerts have gotten louder and louder, with seemingly no reasonable solution or end in sight.

Maybe the tipping point was when I had to purchase lawn-mower-guy ear cans to use in addition to my earplugs, or maybe it was the first time I puked in the bushes in front of patrons after a concert from the concussive effects of extended exposure to extreme levels of sound. Or maybe it was just the first time that I realized that I counted down the days until the season was over, instead of what I used to do, count down the days until it began.

Turning my focus to the classical portion of our programming, I realized that something very important was missing. As I grew older and more experienced, I had more ideas and skills, not fewer. At the same time, my opportunity for contributing anything artistic seemed to shrink to zero. I wanted to contribute more than what was deemed appropriate or desirable within the string section of an orchestra. A lot of what I love about being a violinist was not appropriate in an orchestral setting: moving with the music, interacting musically with other players, choosing how to turn a phrase. It hit me like a thunderbolt when I realized that facial expressions are the only thing I have control over.

* * *

Here's something fun for the whole family. A clever fellow has put together a video of Steve Reich's Clapping Music that shows exactly how it is put together. It really is the simplest of musical ideas. Like much of his music from around this time (1972) it is in 6/4, though without a meter shown. The entire composition is a one-measure syncopated rhythm. The two performers clap this rhythm in unison eight times, then one of the performers simply moves one eighth-note ahead and that configuration is repeated eight times. Then one more eighth-note and so on with each configuration repeated eight times until the two performers arrive back at the original alignment which repeats eight times. End. That's it. A beautifully simple and elegant musical idea. Get with someone and try it out. Waaay harder than it looks!

* * *

The Montreal Gazette has an item about an incident with a guest conductor: OSM guest conductor Schiff 'flew off the handle' in rehearsals, musicians say.

The Hungarian-born pianist, who was scheduled to play and conduct in the Maison symphonique on Oct. 23 and 24, ended up performing only before intermission in both concerts. Schiff withdrew from the second half of the program after an acrimonious rehearsal in which OSM sources say he criticized the players unfairly and even accused them of “sabotage.”

The incident resulted in a letter to Le Devoir from the orchestra’s CEO, Madeleine Careau, in which she fiercely defended the professionalism of the players and decreed a policy of “zero tolerance” of the abusive language Schiff is alleged to have used.

Three musicians consulted by the Montreal Gazette said Schiff walked out of the first rehearsal on Oct. 21 after less than an hour of unproductive work on Bartók’s Dance Suite, a score with frequent changes of time signature and tempo. The trigger, according to these sources, was a testy exchange with a brass player who was himself on the verge of making his exit.

“What is the problem?” Schiff is alleged to have asked. “You are my problem,” was the response from this musician, whom no one consulted by the Montreal Gazette was willing to identify.

The Montreal Symphony or Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, to give their French title, do not suffer fools gladly, even if they are great pianists like Sir András Schiff. They have quarreled previously with Charles Dutoit who is a real conductor. Not everyone who stands in front of an orchestra and waves a baton is actually a capable conductor. As a friend of mine used to say, "there are conductors, semiconductors and choral conductors."

* * *

The New Yorker weighs in on the Scorsese controversy: Martin Scorsese’s Radical Attack on Marvel Movies.

Scorsese isn’t inveighing against fantasy but against a system of production that submerges directors’ authority in a network of dictates and decisions issued from the top down—a network in which the director is more of a functionary than a creator.

Scorsese doesn’t so much lament the existence of such a corporatized and impersonal mode of production as decry its dominance. He contends that this system is rooted in “the gradual but steady elimination of risk. Many films today are perfect products manufactured for immediate consumption.”

For years I have made similar complaints about pop music. The presentation of the character and imagery of the pop star overshadows the fact that the music itself is a kind of industrial product.

* * *

The obvious choice for an envoi today would be that tricky Dance Suite by Bartók. Here is the very capable Slovak conductor Juraj Valčuha with the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra:

Some Schoenberg Quotes

Most composers are either poor at communicating in words or tend to lie. One of the exceptions is Arnold Schoenberg who left quite a lot of written prose on a wide variety of topics--mostly music related of course. There is a fat book, Style and Idea, collecting his writings over his whole life that is worth looking into. I am also going through his text, Fundamentals of Musical Composition, and I notice some very quotable passages there and not ones that tend to appear when he is quoted. Here are a couple:

• "A piece of music resembles in some respects a photograph album, displaying under changing circumstances the life of its basic idea--its basic motive."
• "The concept that music expresses something is generally accepted. However, chess does not tell stories. Mathematics does not evoke emotions. Similarly, from the viewpoint of pure aesthetics, music does not express the extramusical. But from the viewpoint of psychology, our capacity for mental and emotional associations is as unlimited as our capacity for repudiating them is limited. Thus every ordinary object can provoke musical associations, and conversely, music can evoke associations with extramusical objects." [Compare to Stravinsky's famous comment that "Music is powerless to express anything at all."]
• The first sentence of his essay "My Public" reprinted in Style and Idea, written in 1930: "Called upon to say something about my public, I have to confess: I do not believe I have one."
• From "On My Fiftieth Birthday, September 13, 1924": "I am obliged to mention one clear symptom of age which is present in my case: I can no longer hate as once I could. Sometimes, and this is worse still, I can even understand without feeling contempt."
• From "Circular to my Friends on my Sixtieth Birthday, September 13, 1934." Forced to leave his post in Berlin because of the Nazi regime, he landed in the US with some disappointing teaching jobs. On the occasion of a performance by the Boston Symphony, which he thought quite good, he mentions: "The permanent conductor is Serge Koussevitzky, once a travelling double-bass virtuoso, who in the ten years he has been there has never played a single note of mine. In my firm opinion he is so uneducated that he cannot even read a score..."

There is probably a book to be written about the influence of political circumstances on the careers of the two most significant composers of the first half of the 20th century, Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Schoenberg had to leave Europe because of the rise of anti-semitism and did not easily adapt to circumstances in the United States. Despite some handsome offers from Juilliard and other institutions in New York and Chicago, he could not accept them because his health could not endure winters in the Northeast. He ended up in Hollywood (as did Stravinsky) where his music was less well understood. Stravinsky adapted much better to life outside Russia. First in France, where he was lionized, then in the US. He was always given many performances, unlike Schoenberg. It might also be interesting to note that Stravinsky, at least before the Second World War, was an admirer of Mussolini.

Schoenberg wrote an essay titled "How One Becomes Lonely" in which he tries to explain how his music is not as difficult to enjoy as many early listeners thought. In it he cites examples from Verklärte Nacht and his String Quartet No. 1. Certainly at this point in time, it is hard to see how the audience at their first performances reacted so strongly.

The Joy and Sorrow of YouTube

I just can't get interested in the streaming services for music--probably because they seem to be ill-adapted to classical music generally. But I am a heavy user of YouTube because there are so many riches to be discovered there and it is all free. Sure, there are a lot of poor or mediocre performances and many of the older clips have poor video or poor sound, but alongside those are a lot of great performances.

The problem with YouTube is mainly sorting through to find the good stuff. For example, I was looking for a good performance with good video and good sound of the Mozart Requiem to share with a friend and found the search function to just not work well. It turned up a lot of inadequate performances and then, as you scrolled down, was offering up other pieces of music entirely. Then, a few minutes later, I went to the main YouTube page and there was what I had been looking for: a 1988 film of Leonard Bernstein conducting the Requiem with the Bavarian Radio Orchestra and Choir. Here it is:

The YouTube algorithm is not your friend. I am constantly telling it not to offer up obscure pop music and dance on my personal page, but it keeps on keeping on.

YouTube contains thousands of absolute gems, but it hides them quite successfully. Looking for a good performance of the Symphony No. 7 by Shostakovich, the first on the list was Marin Alsop with the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra. These clips from Frankfurt are really excellent in terms of video and sound: crisp and clear and the camerawork does not go overboard. The problem with this one, I am afraid to say, is that Marin Alsop delivers possibly the most boring Shostakovich I have ever heard. God knows it was tidy, too tidy, but it had about as much fire and passion as a trip to Macey's. How could you make this piece in particular sound dull? Wow. The next clip was Bernstein conducting, it is unclear, but I think the New York Phillies. That had all the fire that Alsop was missing, but no video, just audio. Next Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theater Orchestra. Lots of fire again, but no video. Next, the utterly authentic Leningrad Symphony conducted by Yevgeny Mravinsky, but no video and the sound was poor. Next is Semyon Bychkov conducting the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln in a concert in Japan with video. A brisk, no-nonsense performance.

The thing with this piece, I think, is that if you have ever heard it live, you will not be satisfied with any recorded performance because the dynamic range will be seriously compressed. No ordinary sound system as far as I know, can reproduce the 11 minute crescendo in the first movement from one snare drum played very quietly to the whole orchestra, with ranks of tympanists, trombones, trumpets, horns, etc. playing full blast.

Well, I have gotten a bit off-topic, but I think what I will do, from time to time, is post particularly good YouTube clips for your general edification and amusement.