Friday Miscellanea

Let's start with a very Jewish Christmas: ‘Christmas With Your Jewish Boyfriend’: A Jewish jazz guitarist recorded a dozen famous Christmas songs written by Jews.

“If you imagine a Norman Rockwell Christmas image, you can imagine that the music that would be playing in the background would be something like ‘White Christmas’ or ‘Winter Wonderland,’ which was written either by an Eastern European Jewish immigrant from the Lower East Side or a descendant of one of those people,” Curtis said in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

To Curtis, the fact that Jews wrote so many Christmas classics isn’t a coincidence. From the 1880s to the 1920s, the United States experienced a huge influx of European Jewish immigrants. They weren’t readily welcomed into American society. Many universities had strict Jewish student quotas, and many industries weren’t keen on hiring Jews.

The music industry, however, was wide open, and Jews excelled in it. From about the dawn of the 20th century until the advent of rock and roll in the 1950s, pop music was dominated by Jewish songwriters. Most of it was done behind the scenes, with many songwriters changing their names to sound less Jewish.

* * *

Yes, it is possible to make a good income with classical music. Case in point, André Rieu: André Rieu: ‘I see a lot of jealousy around me’

We shouldn’t be surprised that Rieu is a box office sensation. In an era when, we are told, nobody sells DVDs and CDs anymore, Rieu has sold more than 40 million of them. Last year, the Dutch violinist and conductor sold more than 700,000 tickets to his concerts, bringing in $55.9 million (€50.6m) from 71 shows. It’s an impressive haul for someone who has seldom been the beneficiary of media hype.

* * *

It simply wouldn't be Christmas without the traditional bemoaning of the loss of prestige of classical music. Nationalist Anthems: Remembering a time when composers mattered more

To be sure, the dwindling interest in classical music in the latter part of the twentieth century flowed from a number of sources, not least the ubiquitous appeal of more vernacular genres such as rock and other forms of pop music; a decline in music education curriculums, which no longer offered a broad musical education in elementary through high school; and the pervasive attraction (and distraction) of television and digital culture. At the same time, the end of the convergence between the world of classical music in the United States and international political developments meant the music no longer exercised the powerful hold on the American people that it had from the Great War through the Cold War.

* * *

I've been saying this for years: Why 10,000 hours of practice won’t make you an expert.

If you met a genie who offered to grant you one musical skill for the rest of your life, a skill that would flow effortlessly and masterfully from you whenever you needed it, what would you choose? Stage charisma? The ability to move your audience? Technical prowess? If you are wise, you might choose the skill of practice. Because mastering the skill of musical practice could mean mastering all musical skills.

We all know that quantity of practice is important. The popular claim that 10,000 hours of practice is the key to becoming an expert in any task holds some truth – you don’t get to Carnegie hall without spending a sizeable chunk of your waking hours cranking out scales and etudes.

However, music psychology studies have shown that quantity of practice alone doesn’t tell the whole story. Expert players vary a lot in the number of practice hours they put in, and on average amount of practice can only account for about 30% of variation in performance quality, meaning that 70% of the story about musical expertise remains untold. Here we turn to the real topic of interest: quality of practice.

* * *

Here is a pragmatic look at things: A full-time singing career costs a million dollars. Seriously.

Imagine you have a million dollars, and someone offers you a wager. ”Invest it all with me,” she says. “We’ll wait 10 years, at which point you’ll have nothing 99 times out of a hundred.”

“Hmm,” you think, “that 1% must be one hell of a payoff with those odds.

“Oh,” she says, “you’ll get nothing that time, too. Actually, not quite.” She pulls out a calculator, punches in a few numbers, and smirks. “That 1% of the time, you’ll owe me…$600,000.”

Would you take that bet?

If you’re a full-time performing artist, you already have.

Read the whole thing for the details. But the sad truth is:

For full-time performers, the game is rigged. There is simply no chance of making it given the start-up costs of building an arts business and maintaining it over time in a high cost of living city. The best-case scenario is you walk away early and have time to rebuild. The worst-case scenario is you have a middling career, strung along with a few opportunities every year, just enough to keep you going, and you are staring down the barrel of 40 at a mountain of debt with no other skills.

Except for the 1/10th of 1% who do manage to achieve an international virtuoso career, of course.

* * *

Our envoi really needs to be André Rieu doing "White Christmas" does it not?

Ok, I have tortured you enough! Here is the Quatuor Ebène doing the String Quartet No. 4 by Bartók:

Adieu to the Avant-Garde

Adieu to the Avant-Garde is an old, old essay in Reason that is still worth reading.

"Exactly a hundred years ago," Wolfe is saying, "there was a survey taken by a French newspaper–they used to love to take this kind of survey–in which they asked leading French art dealers, critics, curators: Who would be the French artists of the 19th century who would still be the giants of art in the year 1997? By the standards of that day, it was a huge survey. And the results were, number one, Adolphe William Bouguereau; second, Jean-Louis Ernest Meissonier; and, third, Léon Gérôme. They were looked upon as the giants."

Who? Wait, there's more. "Even after the era of Andy Warhol, who left an estate of $510 million, we cannot begin to comprehend the scale on which these artists–Bouguereau, Meissonier, Gérôme–lived." Wolfe sketches in some detail. "Two- and three-story-high studios. Belgian hangings on all the walls. There were always Persian rugs strewn wherever you could strew one: on top of the piano, on top of the balcony railing, on the bed, everywhere, even on the floor." 

"By 1920, all these people were forgotten. They had become, overnight in terms of the passage of history, zeros, grand zeros in art history." Why that happened–the coming of the various movements of modernism, from the Berlin Secession to Cubism–is not Wolfe's subject. Regime shifting is.

"The `Regime Shift,'" says Wolfe, "is a term that I'm borrowing from economics. It refers to a situation in which suddenly the rules are changed. And when that happens, suddenly a lot of assets are lost, chaos results….Well, such things oddly enough can happen in art. Not quite as rapidly, but they have happened extremely rapidly."

I'm not entirely sure that this is true, but the really interesting question is, why isn't it true in music? The great names in composition around 1919, Mahler, Richard Strauss, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, are just as big today.

Friday Miscellanea

The Wall Street Journal has a piece on the music theory of pop music: The Secret Sauce Behind Pop-Music Hits.

Why did Rihanna and Calvin Harris’s “We Found Love” top the charts for 10 weeks? Partly because of the song’s unconventional structure, say podcasters Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding. The two examine “We Found Love”—and more than a dozen other 21st-century hits—in their book, “Switched on Pop,” which comes out Friday.

The volume borrows its title from the podcast the two 33-year-old friends began five years ago about the subtle techniques shaping today’s Top 40 hits. Mr. Sloan is a University of Southern California musicologist and Mr. Harding is a songwriter and musician who plays the guitar, drums and keyboards, as well as other instruments. Their podcast and book are filled with sophisticated but accessible discussions of pop hits from the 2000s and 2010s, from the catchy hook of Ariana Grande’s “Break Free” to Drake’s use of simple rhymes in “God’s Plan.”

* * *

The Guardian, on the other hand, takes a look at the characteristics of English music: This isle is full of noises: the trouble with 'English music'

When Arnold Schoenberg died in 1951, Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote that the composer “meant nothing to me – but as he apparently meant a lot to a lot of other people I daresay it is all my own fault.” To English composers working in the 1920s – such as Vaughan Williams, Herbert Howells and Gerald Finzi – the sounds of European modernism, and especially the 12-tone music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, came to symbolise disorder and chaos. Following the first world war, stability and reassurance, folksong and archaic modality, the refuge of unspoilt rural idylls, had become the prevalent direction of English music. Folksong earthed music in fundamental truths – the very same roots that Schoenberg’s atonality, apparently, weeded out.

* * *

There is something going on at the Grand Teton Music Festival, but what it is ain't exactly clear:

The Board of the Grand Teton Music Festival met last night and decided to reinvite three musicians who had been dismissed for ‘disruptive behaviour’. Two of the musicians, Kristen Linfante and Juan de Gomar, are members of the orchestra’s Players’ Committee; the third, Jennifer Ross, was principal second violin of the Pittsburgh Symphony.

Their dismissal provoked widespread protests, together with a threat from conductor Donald Runnicles to quit the festival. Runnicles Donald flew in to attend this board meeting.

High-profile coverage on Slipped Disc and local media have forced the festival director, Andrew Palmer Todd, to back down.

There are some hints in the comments.

* * *

I'm not the only one to be critical of the Grawemeyer Award: THE WORLD’S TOP COMPOSER PRIZE HAS TURNED INTO A SORRY IN-JOKE.

The Grawemeyer Award – a life-changing $100,000 prize for the best composer of the year – hit rock bottom this week with the selection of a Californian academic, Lei Liang, who had a climate change piece performed in Boston.

But lots of people in the comments think this was an unfair characterization.

* * *

Sometimes really creative promotion can go--horribly--wrong: Cameron Carpenter and the Feedback Loop of Notoriety.

In November 2014, Sony Masterworks released a documentary called “Cameron Carpenter: The Sound of My Life.” Intended to accompany the American organist’s album “If You Could Read My Mind,” released that August, the film included footage of Carpenter ripping off his T-shirt to reveal a sculpted chest; dancing at the once-legendary Berlin gay party Chantal’s House of Shame; and moodily smoking a cigarette while leaning against an electrical pole. And that’s just the two-minute trailer. The footage looks like a cringe-worthy attempt to create the mythology of a rock star—if everything the director knew about rock stars was gleaned, say, from a former groupie’s nephew.

* * *

I'm not finding many items for the miscellanea today, but NewMusicBox has something interesting: TEACHING INEQUALITY: CONSEQUENCES OF TRADITIONAL MUSIC THEORY PEDAGOGY.

Western art music is not a universal language. It does some things well, other things not as well, and many things not at all. And yet, although the majority of undergraduate students do not listen regularly to this style of music, the standard theory curriculum continues to privilege it at the expense of all other styles. Given this disconnect, how can we justify our near-exclusive reliance on traditional pedagogy, especially in situations where it isn’t necessary to do so? What biases do we create in our students when we declare Western art music to be mandatory knowledge for anyone pursuing formal studies in music? What biases does this reveal in us?

There are some characteristic kinds of arguments that are frequently used these days that one should beware of. A typical strategy is to put your most glaring assumption right up front and hope that no-one will notice that it is just an assumption. This is a type of "begging the question" that has become so prevalent that one forgets it is a logical fallacy. Apart from the first sentence in the above quote, which is somewhat true, everything else here is a concocted assumption thrown against the wall in hopes that it will stick. Let's list some of them:

• the majority of undergraduate students don't listen regularly to Western art music? Really? Why oh why are they enrolled in music school then?
• "standard" theory "privileges" Western art music in university music departments because they are university music departments. The word "privileges" is a smear because it replaces the correct words "focuses on" or "gives foundational place to."
• "disconnect" is another clever smuggling in of assumptions through special vocabulary--what is disconnected from what?

I could go on, but these tactics are so common and so ubiquitous and never lead anywhere useful, so why bother?

* * *

Time for our envoi. The Guardian article mentioned a piece by Vaughan Williams I didn't know, his Flos Campi, an elegy to the fallen in WWI. Here is a performance by the Bournemouth Sinfonietta:

"Dark Dream" (2018) for violin and guitar

Dong Qichang, Eight Views of Autumn Moods, dated 1620. Album of eight leaves, leaf five

I picked this painting by the great Chinese artist and scholar Dong Qichang to introduce this piece because I have become more aware that there is a significant Asian influence on my aesthetic. This includes Chinese art, philosophy and aesthetics as well as that of Japan and the music of both Japan and Indonesia. I don't mean anything like a direct influence, but rather a kind of aesthetic tendency. For example, where you might expect a resounding climax at the 2/3 or 3/4 point in "Dark Dream," instead there is a significant silence, a kind of negative climax. This roughly corresponds to the "negative space" that is often found in Chinese and Japanese art towards the centre of the image. You can see an example in the painting above. A large empty space occupies the center of the painting. I tend towards very spare and transparent textures, which also reflects more of an Asian sensibility. I think this probably came to me because some of the first aesthetically interesting artforms I encountered were the Japanese ukiyo-e woodcuts. In my teenage years I was living on Vancouver Island and the Asian influence was omnipresent including the books on art in the public library. Sure, there was lots of Western influence as well, but it was more ordinary and less striking in my eyes.

I encountered a lot of Asian music when I was young as well, both directly in the form of Folkways recordings of music from Java, Bali, India and Japan as well as indirectly through a composer friend of mine who studied with Toru Takemitsu in Tokyo. I encountered the music of Jō Kondo in a lecture he gave that I attended as a young undergraduate. I was also fortunate to hear Ravi Shankar in concert when I was still in high school.

Being aware of these influences actually helps me solve some aesthetic problems, particularly of structure, as it frees me from either conforming to, or consciously avoiding, Western structural concepts.

"Dark Dream" is, for me, a fairly long piece, its single movement coming in at over fourteen minutes. I wrestled with the structure a lot, re-writing the piece several times. One of the basic thematic ideas is an accelerating and decelerating repeated note figure that is played against itself. Another element is the octatonic scale which I use fairly freely. One section is aleatory, with both instruments playing individual cells in an order that can vary with each performance. Unusual timbres are also used which include a "snare-drum" effect on the guitar, playing with the wood of the violin bow, preparing the guitar with a paper-clip and frequent glissandi on both instruments. All this sets up a contrast between discrete, incremental passages and ones where there is sliding from one pitch or rhythm to another.

The piece is dreamlike in that it features unexpected transitions and timbres that tend to estrange the listener from the melodic and harmonic elements.

I hope that you will enjoy the piece!

Dark Dream (2018)

UPDATE: By the way, is everyone able to access the piece through the link ok?

Technical Difficulties

I promised to post my new piece Dark Dream today and I have been trying to do so. But when I try to upload it to YouTube it seems to just hang. I can't seem to find a reason for this in any manuals but I will keep looking. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know!

What Happened to YouTube?

I use YouTube clips quite a lot here at The Music Salon. And I used to browse around on it a lot more than I do now. A few weeks ago it seemed they made a big change in the algorithm. They used to divide suggestions up into different categories or streams and there was an option to delete streams and categories. I started deleting a lot of the ones I wasn't interested in like athletics, pop music, pet videos and so on. Then, recently, all that changed. Now there are four rows of suggestions at the top that correspond to what I tend to be interested in. Then below that are gazillions of videos most of which I have no interest in. Also, they took away the delete option. I have also noticed that there is more and more a predominance of videos that have nothing going for them except their click-baity titles. The actual content is less than moronic and most of them have the same extremely irritating narrator.  YouTube seems to be on its way to being unwatchable except for your own searches.

Some examples:

I swear, I have never searched for anything or viewed anything that would lead the algorithm to think I would be interested in any of those!

YouTube used to have lots of quirky and intriguing videos by people that often had something interesting to say. But now it is turning into a version of People Magazine and the most idiotic top ten lists you can imagine. Does this follow some kind of network mass distribution rule? Every mass media ultimately becomes horrible?

Mind you, they still have stuff like this, that just popped up today:

Friday Miscellanea

The world's top two earning musicians this year are Taylor Swift, number one at $185 million and Kanye West, number two at $150 million. This has to be the golden age of music, right?

* * *

Every now and then you can catch one of those retro tv shows out in an anachronism they are not likely to be themselves aware of. I've been watching Mindhunter lately, which is quite an interesting show. It is set in the late 1970s and as far as I can tell, there are no anachronisms in the cars, sets, fashions, etc. However in one early episode a character uses the phrase "to beg the question" in a way that shows that the show was written in the last couple of years. I am old enough to remember when people used to know the meaning of phrases like "to beg the question" and "to coin a phrase." But in the last ten or twenty years, this has all gone away and you almost never hear them used correctly. "To beg the question" refers to the logical fallacy that occurs when the premiss of the argument assumes the conclusion. But in recent years it has come to mean "to pose the question" which seems more common sense, even though wrong. Similarly, the phrase "to coin a phrase" meant to invent a new expression, but recently it has come to mean "to repeat a stereotypical sentiment." Ceteris paribus, I prefer the original meanings.

* * *

Norman Lebrecht has a lovely tribute to conductor Mariss Jansons who just passed away this week.

If you were fortunate enough to know Mariss Jansons, you soon became aware that he was one of the kindest men alive and that he had no interest whatsoever in the business of music.

I spent a morning with him once in a deprived area of Pittsburgh, where he devoted as much respect and attention to a classroom of welfare kids as he did to the Vienna Philharmonic in their finest suits. Respect was his watchword. He treated every person as his equal.

I had a ticket to see him conduct at the Salzburg Festival last summer, but sadly, that was a concert he had to cancel and so I saw Yannick Nezét-Séguin instead.

* * *

I found this interesting clip through Slipped Disc--a comparison of three great pianos: Steinway, Fazioli, Bösendorfer.

I have had this long-standing liking for Bösendorfer, based on a recording from long ago and I don't even remember which one! I am totally objective because I don't even play piano. Based on the first round, the Steinway sounds absolutely lovely in all registers, the Fazioli is really dry in the treble and the Bösendorfer is quite nice in the bass, but not as nice as the Steinway in the treble. Your thoughts?

* * *

I used to think the Grawemeyer Award was the best, or at least, the least-bad, composer award because of its multiple stages. It depended on more than the votes of a few cronies. Alas, I'm not sure if this is still the case: LEI LIANG WINS 2020 GRAWEMEYER AWARD FOR CLIMATE CHANGE-INSPIRED PIECE.

Chinese-American composer Lei Liang has won the 2020 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for an orchestral work that evokes the threat posed by climate change and the opportunity it offers for redemption. Boston Modern Orchestra Project commissioned the winning piece, A Thousand Mountains, a Million Streams, which premiered in 2018 in Boston’s Jordan Hall with Gil Rose conducting. 

“The world we live in today is dangerous,” explained Liang. “Our very existence is threatened by global warming, which is causing violent disruptions to the living things on our planet and being made worse by human irresponsibility. When creating the work, I wanted to convey the importance of preserving our landscapes, both physically and spiritually, to sustain a place where we and our children can belong.”

AGH! Sorry, that expostulation was solely for the well-massaged clichéed sentiments, not for the music itself, which I hope is a lot more creative. And no, our existence is not in the slightest threatened by global warming, which only exists in speculative computer models. Annual deaths in the US from falling down the stairs: 1,300. Annual deaths from global warming: 0. Ban stairs! Or, alternatively, my next piece is going to be a meditation on the danger of going down stairs.

I eagerly await your outraged comments!

* * *

Here is another reason to avoid streaming: Residuals can make up 75% of a musician's movie score paycheque — but not on streaming.

Professional violinist Joanna Maurer recently played on the film scores of both the comic book-inspired drama Joker and the holiday comedy Noelle. She did the same work, for equally prominent companies.

But the New York-based musician says she'll earn 75 per cent less for Noelle simply because it was released on Disney Plus, the new video-streaming service that launched on Nov. 14 and has already garnered more than 10 million subscribers.

* * *

I really believe this: Classics for the people: A Classical education was never just for the elite, but was a precious and inspiring part of working-class British life.

Working-class libraries and archives, the writings of autodidacts and the annals of adult education reveal a dynamic tradition of working-class access to the ancient Greeks and Romans, not only through language study but through translations and visual culture. Classical materials have been present in the identity construction and psychological experience of substantial groups of working-class Britons. Dissenting academies, Nonconformist Sunday schools and Methodist preacher-training initiatives all encouraged those who attended them to read widely in ancient history, ideas and rhetorical handbooks. Classical topics were included on the curricula of Mutual Improvement Societies, adult schools, Mechanics’ Institutes, university extension schemes, the Workers’ Educational Association, trade unions and the early Labour Colleges. These initiatives did much to counter the sluggish legislative response to workers’ demands for education: it was not until the Elementary Education Acts of 1870 and 1880 that even rudimentary instruction in literacy and numeracy, let alone access to classical culture, became universally and freely available to children under 13.

The whole article is worth reading for its detailed discussion. I came from a very lower middle class background. Both my parents never rose above Grade 8 in formal education. But I was always attracted to libraries and serious writing both fiction and non-fiction and never felt anything else other than encouragement my whole life in educational institutions. So you can imagine with what horror I regard the current attempts to ban authors because they are dead while males, to "de-colonize" literature, to ban every manifestation of Western Civilization that does not meet "woke" standards.

* * *

For our envoi today, let's listen to some of the Lei Liang piece. It is in many separate clips on YouTube. Here are the first three (and of course, Blogger won't embed):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj3JxTtNsjs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO9ZyY_ZsPA&list=OLAK5uy_kjso8fHnaZ2yIirFBmPmASzYvFAFQjHRI&index=9&t=0s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMwtocNg79E&list=OLAK5uy_kjso8fHnaZ2yIirFBmPmASzYvFAFQjHRI&index=9

I don't know about you, but I listened to several of these mini-sections and it reminded me a lot of Messiaen with extra Asian influence, but with more threat and less joy.