Friday Miscellanea

All Gibson electric guitars are now going to come with built in self-tuners. Yep, just push a button and tiny motors will tune each string automatically. It is kind of a guitar-players dream. Now, will they be able to do the same for the Baroque lute, whose players were said to have spent half their lives tuning?

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There are excellent reasons why the arts should not rely on government subsidies and here is one of them from Slipped Disc: "Labour leader: "Cut the arts." Political leaders will always throw the arts under the bus if it seems politically expedient. And it often will.

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Courtesy of Norman Lebrecht is this note about a new ballet at the Bavarian State Opera on the biblical story of Jephtha. The dancers are mostly nude. What is it with the Germans? The most disturbing thing I saw on television when I was in Germany was a late night jazz program with a trio of middle-aged guys playing nude. Ewwhheeeggggh!

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This article talks about things classical music needs to do to survive in a way that is not entirely off-putting. I especially like #1:

1) Never dumb down anything

"People can always tell when they are being patronised, and the only way classical music will manage to survive is to reach wider audiences by believing in what it has to offer, and not by trying to change what it is."

Well, yeah. The other ideas aren't that bad either.

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This is an interesting read about how Columbia records picked up four great jazz musicians in 1971 and dumped them all in 1973--apparently because fusion was becoming the Big Thing and they were non-fusion. And people say there are no fashionable trends in music!

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This sounds like it might be a good idea: an app for portable devices that is a technological upgrade of the program note. In the example pictured there is even some fancy musical notation using the tenor clef:

But, like the program note, it really depends on the quality of the content, doesn't it?

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And here, for classical musicians at least, is the most depressing news of the year. When truly great musicians like Hilary Hahn are selling a few hundred albums per week, Katy Perry, last year's biggest earner, made $135 million dollars over the year. She even beat out mega-sellers like Taylor Swift. Let's have a listen to what a $135 million dollar star sounds like:

Geez, it's ALL about the look, isn't it? Take the video away and this is just generic bubble-gum pop.

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Yes, it's a long read, but it is a pretty interesting analysis of what is the better predictor of future success, The Data or the Hunch. Lots of stuff about music. All I can say is that no amount of data will help you compose music. It's pretty much 100% hunch.

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I include this item because of the Eagles' reference and because, well, how often do you see a Finance Minister for a European Union country who has managed to destroy his own economy? Also, a Marxist. If the article is behind the paywall, just Google the headline.

“Those who understand the profound difference between a currency union and a fixed exchange rate also understand what I call the Eagles-doctrine. The Eagles-doctrine? In their hit Hotel California, the Eagles’ last verse was: “You can check out any time but you can never leave”. Thus the… Eagles-doctrine for a currency union (like the eurozone).” 

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Alex Ross has a discussion of Apple Music up over at the New Yorker that is definitely worth a read. Sample passage:

Classical music has long been a kind of black hole in the streaming universe. Spotify, Pandora, and the others organize their libraries around artists, albums, and tracks; the existence of beings called Composers, who write music but may not be involved in its performance, confuses matters. Last summer, I described a few of the struggles of listening to classical music on Spotify: sorting through randomized movements of symphonies; scrutinizing tiny reproductions of an album cover for clues about who is playing; searching elsewhere on the Internet for information.

UPDATE: Forgot to include the link.

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Are there people who simply do not know who Beethoven is? Why yes, yes there are--and they are attending Yale. From an interview with David Gelernter highlighted at Instapundit:

My students today are much less obnoxious. Much more likable than I and my friends used to be, but they are so ignorant that it’s hard to accept how ignorant they are. You tell yourself stories; it’s very hard to grasp that the person you’re talking to, who is bright, articulate, advisable, interested, and doesn’t know who Beethoven is. Had no view looking back at the history of the 20th century – just sees a fog. A blank. Has the vaguest idea of who Winston Churchill was or why he mattered. And maybe has no image of Teddy Roosevelt, let’s say, at all. I mean, these are people who – We have failed.

Yep.

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The Wall Street Journal has a little item up about the genesis of that classic song by Janis Joplin: "Mercedes Benz." And that gives us our envoi for today: