Friday Miscellanea

It is taking a while, but everyone is finally coming around. Here is Norman Lebrecht talking up Mieczyslaw Weinberg whom I have posted about:

The more I hear, the more I am convinced that Mieczyslaw Weinberg deserves to be ranked with the other two giants of the 20th century [he is referring to Prokofiev and Shostakovich].

Of course, he completely forgets about the most prominent figure in Russian music in the 20th century, Stravinsky.

* * *

What if another Mozart was born today and we just ignored him?

* * *

The Globe and Mail have a review up of a Toronto Symphony Orchestra program of newish music. Worth reading just to demonstrate that yes, living composers do get played now and then. I say "newish" because one of the pieces, the Doctor Atomic Symphony, arranged from John Adams' 2005 opera, is actually a few years old. Here is a performance of part 1 from the 2008 Cabrillo festival:

* * *

I was afraid we were going to get to Carl Nielsen sooner or later in Tom Service's trek through the symphony and here it is, an article on Nielsen's Symphony No. 4 the "Inextinguisable".

If you listen to the big symphonic music written from around 1900 to the outbreak of the First World War, you can almost sense a cataclysm around the corner. I wonder if the music of today is telling us anything?

* * *

Thanks to Norman Lebrecht I discovered this short clip from a Soviet documentary about Shostakovich working on his Piano Trio in E minor.

And here is the finished product--the last movement, at least:

* * *

According to Alex Ross, Finnish composer Leif Segerstam is currently at work on his 270th symphony!! My goodness, I didn't realize that Joseph Haydn, with his 106 symphonies, was such a slacker! Here is the first movement of Segerstam's 212th Symphony:

* * *

Now this is pretty funny, but I wonder if he might just have something...

It’s all very well until the oboist blows a rotator cuff

...orchestral and big-band music is a killer app of Western civilization, but one whose frontline practitioners, in the form of regional orchestras, are said to be in a state of permanent crisis. Sports fans love Sam Spence’s lumbering NFL Films soundtracks and still wriggle orgiastically at the sound of “Brass Bonanza”. There would appear to be space for creative enterprise here: I wonder, for example, if Mr. Denler’s contract would allow him to sell a full-on three-movement Rockies Symphony once his main theme becomes familiar to fans. Different variations for different game situations is a good idea, but perhaps only a first step; maybe each inning should have its own theme? Individual players represented by their own Wagnerian motifs?

If the sports guys have all the money, why don't we write music gilding their lilies? Worked for the French composers writing for the aristocracy in the 18th century. Obviously knuckle-ball pitchers and quarterbacks who can really deliver are the aristocracy of our time.

* * *

This just has to be wrong, doesn't it?

The music genre of jazz is commonly associated with creativity. However, this association has hardly been formally tested. Therefore, this study aimed at examining whether jazz musicians actually differ in creativity and personality from musicians of other music genres. We compared students of classical music, jazz music, and folk music with respect to their musical activities, psychometric creativity and different aspects of personality. In line with expectations, jazz musicians are more frequently engaged in extracurricular musical activities, and also complete a higher number of creative musical achievements. Additionally, jazz musicians show higher ideational creativity as measured by divergent thinking tasks, and tend to be more open to new experiences than classical musicians. This study provides first empirical evidence that jazz musicians show particularly high creativity with respect to domain-specific musical accomplishments but also in terms of domain-general indicators of divergent thinking ability that may be relevant for musical improvisation.

* * *

It's true, absolutely everything is on the Internet. Here is a map showing the number of heavy metal bands per 100,000 population:

Click to enlarge

Now, could we get this for string quartets? And would the distribution be similar?

* * *

And finally, the reason why popular music seems more and more like industrialized product and less and less like an individual artistic vision. A new report on digital music services that shows how more and more revenues go to fewer and fewer "superstar" artists.

Music industry analyst Mark Mulligan’s MIDiA Consulting has published a new report exploring the ‘superstar artist economy’. It suggests that while artists’ share of total recorded-music income has grown from 14% in 2000 to 17% in 2013, the top 1% of musical works are now accounting for 77% of all those artist revenues thanks in part to a “tyranny of choice” on digital services.

All commodification of musical product seems to push in the same direction: a smaller and smaller percentage of artists make a greater and greater share of revenues. I think this has been going on ever since the first recordings were marketed over a hundred years ago. One famous tenor can only sing one concert a night to a limited number of people. But once the recording was invented, the amount of records of his singing that could be sold skyrocketed. An internationally-famous tenor like Enrico Caruso, the first big-name recording artist, could make a lot of money while slightly less famous tenors still made the relatively small amounts they did before recordings came along.

Just for comparison, I ran across a fascinating number recently. Mozart, who was a celebrity superstar musician from when he was a child, made a significant amount of his earnings from selling tickets to subscription concerts in Vienna. How many people attended these concerts? Around 120 people. True, these were largely aristocrats and the tickets were not cheap. But still... Everything about the way mass media and network effects works seems to be pushing us toward fewer and fewer celebrity musicians making more and more money for, frankly, duller and more predictable music.

* * *

Let's listen to a little Caruso. Here he is singing "La Donna e mobile" from Rigoletto recorded in 1907: