Friday Miscellanea

Let's start with one of the most sensible things I have seen in the mass media lately: "Mindfulness is stopping the world from thinking." You bet! I live in a new-age zone and have met a number of people who are trying to clear their minds from thinking and you know what, you can tell! They aren't thinking much. But over at The Telegraph, Professor Theodore Zeldin of Oxford University takes the time to point out a few things:

“I think mindfulness and meditation are bad for people, I absolutely think that. People should be thinking.”

“Everyone is amazingly interesting,” he told the audience. “Life is about living, it’s about going out there and meeting people and hearing their thoughts and opinions.
He said people should stop believing they could be anything they wanted to be and instead start appreciating the value of those around them.
“One of the beliefs of this time is you’ve got to be yourself and develop your own potential, but only thinking of oneself is a feeble and cowardly activity.
“Our potential on our own is very limited. We go to these motivational speakers and they say you can be anything you want to be. You can’t. Your potential is very limited.”

Yep. Well, to be slightly more precise, your potential is what it is. It might be enormous, like mine! But the bottom line is that if you spend much time sitting around meditating and trying to clear your mind, you will never find out what your potential actually is. Now go out there and compose something!

* * *

I've never been much of a Rolling Stones fan, but I just read an essay (with some reminiscences by Mick Jagger) about the song "Moonlight Mile" from Sticky Fingers and it was pretty interesting. Amazing what you find in the Wall Street Journal. That's a pretty good song, y'know?

Thinking back, I realize that the only Stones album I ever bought when it came out was Beggar's Banquet. Pretty good, but not their best.

* * *

The Guardian has a very nice review up of a posthumous release of a recording of Schubert's "Great" C major symphony with Claudio Abbado conducting his Orchestra Mozart. You wouldn't have to twist my arm very far to get me to admit that this could be my very favorite symphony of all:

* * *

Bloomberg Business has a big article on Jay-Z's new business venture Tidal, a streaming music service. Apparently things are not doing so well. In fact, one gets the sensation that here is a case where the soulless commercialism of today's pop music has come back to bite it:

It’s too early to write off Tidal. But if the company does fail, it may be because Jay Z didn’t anticipate the skeptical response to his claim that he was working for some greater good of all musicians. He’s fundamentally a cynic. How could he not be treated that way, after dumbing down his music and attaching his name to everything from Budweiser to Microsoft? No wonder people have questioned his motives with Tidal. As Jay Z himself once put it, “I sell ice in the winter. I sell fire in hell. I am a hustler, baby. I sell water to a well.”

* * *

Here is a haunting story about the man who is perhaps the only musicologist in Afghanistan. Dr. Ahmad Sarmast, whose hearing was seriously damaged by a Taliban suicide bomber, continues his work in Afghanistan providing music education to children and young people without regard to means or gender:

Not only did he create a symphony orchestra, which soon played some of the world’s largest venues including the Kennedy Centre in Washington and the Royal Festival Hall in London, but he also deliberately reserved a number of slots in the orchestral institute for orphans, street children and, most controversially in Afghanistan, girls.

This is in defiance of the hard-line Taliban, of course, as women are forbidden to be educated in their ideology--and, of course, music in general is forbidden!

* * *

Speaking of soulless commercialism, here is an article in Salon about just how thoroughly product placement has invaded the music world.

Music fans sometimes cringe when one of their favorite songs turns up in a TV commercial, especially songs that seem to be about rebellion or fighting the Man. But there’s a whole different level of ickiness going on these days – since approximately the turn of the century. As a new Music.Mic story about research into music and branding puts it, “Brands and advertising are creeping in at all levels of the creative process: Your favorite songs and music videos are becoming advertisements.”

“Universal Music Group has begun rolling out a program to retroactively insert advertisements into older music videos, whose artists didn’t think to monetize every inch of their art.”

So what's wrong with this? For me, personally, it causes me to instantaneously lose interest in the whole aesthetic project. Do what you want as long as I don't have to listen to it or watch it.

* * *

Here is a story that is a nice, a very nice, antidote to the last one. Members of the Kansas City Symphony performed a program of chamber music for inmates at the Lansing Correctional Facility--a prison. The results were excellent:

Several times during the concert, inmates burst into boisterous, spontaneous applause. And at concert’s end, the prisoners gave the players a standing ovation.

Justin Elnicki, in prison for rape, said he had only heard classical music as background music at Dillons grocery store.

His tastes run more toward Lynyrd Skynyrd and Journey, but as he sat and listened and occasionally closed his eyes, he felt … calm.

“I didn’t really understand it,” Elnicki said. “But I really enjoyed it.”

 I visited a Canadian prison once, not, I'm sorry to say, to perform, but to hear a performance by the inmates of a Shakespeare play! There is so much silly stuff written about the arts these days, but we should not forget that the fundamental function of art is to humanize.

* * *

I'm on about my third journey through all the Haydn symphonies (all 106 of them!) and ran across this absolutely haunting Andante that is the second movement of his Symphony No. 4 in D major:

The symphonies are just filled with extraordinary movements like this.