Friday Miscellanea

One of the last serious classical music critics around is Arthur Kaptainis at the Montreal Gazette. In his latest column, "Beethoven and Coldplay, together at last" he waxes doubtful about the steady popization of classical concerts. Regarding the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra he says:

Fire up the PSO website and you are besieged by banners flogging FUSE@PSO; the Fiddlesticks Family Concerts; the comedy duo Igudesman & Joo (“Scary Concert at Heinz Hall”); Disney in Concert (The Nightmare Before Christmas with live accompaniment); Sinatra and Beyond with Tony DeSare; Wow! It’s the Pops; and, as a concession to all those artsy-fartsies in Steel City, the Spanish guitarist Pablo Villegas.

FUSE@PSO, according to the documentation, is “a mash-up of Beethoven’s famous Eroica Symphony with songs from the Coldplay catalogue, from A Rush of Blood to the Head to Mylo Xyloto.” Once again, it is best to render judgment after the experience, not before, but I suspect my reaction to this concert would involve a mash-up of what I had for lunch.

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Speaking of Pablo Villegas, who I am hearing about for the first time, his website is a pretty accurate picture of what an aspiring soloist needs to project these days.

Male model looks:

Celebrity appearance in major magazine:

Pablo is a “New New Yorker” in Departures Magazine

“My mission is to connect people through music. New York is an environment where I find all the inspiration I need. It’s the whole world in a small city,” Pablo tells Departures in the May/June issue. The Spanish guitarist is featured in the magazine’s article, “The New New York: A Fashion Portfolio by Bjorn Iooss”. Model and actress Chanel Iman, Principal Dancer from New York City Ballet Sara Mearns, soprano Ailyn Perez, and actress Caitlin Gerard are just a few of the influential New Yorkers that join Pablo in this feature styled by Kareem Rashed and Ahnna Lee.

Hangin' with the Dalai Lama:

And I'm sure that he plays well too. But that doesn't seem to be the priority...

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Here is an account of how one flutist was treated at Chicago's O'Hare airport by TSA agents. Is there no way to make people like this accountable? Immunity for government employees and officials is long overdue to be revoked, in my view.

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Here is a very long essay on Olivier Messiaen that begins with a discussion of Pierre Boulez' attitude towards his teacher:

At what point did Pierre Boulez say his teacher’s music made him want to vomit? The teacher, of course, was the great French composer Olivier Messiaen, and Boulez was his ex-student. Scholars have been trying to track down that unkind cut for decades but details remain clouded. Boulez has denied that he ever used the word. Others say he did. It’s one of those tantalizing puzzles in music history that may never be solved

At Slipped Disc, where this essay was linked, the first comment is this:

What was it about Messiaen that made Boulez want to vomit?

Envy. Forgotten as a composer within his own lifetime, it must have come hard to little Pierre that his career has ground to a halt as a second-rate conductor of the music of others. Meanwhile Messiaen’s reputation continues to grow.

Remember the time you left a Boulez concert with the melodies coarsing through your mind? No, nor does anyone else either.

What most people remember about this vengeful little man was how he abused his position to skewer the careers of others. He’ll go down in history as France’s Khrennikov – rather than for his output.

Nice!

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Pop music always seems to have a host of advocates who are ever ready to rave about every new band as being newer, cooler and better than ever. Oddly enough, when you listen to them, they pretty much sound like all the other pop music: bland and formulaic. But have a listen and hear for yourself. It's the Newbury Park Sound!

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Apparently highly-educated young people are getting more and more idiotic when it comes to music. At least that's my conclusion after reading "What the Music You Hate Says About You":

"The most obvious change (over the 20 years) consists of the steep declines in the probability of younger persons to reject rap and heavy metal," Lizardo and Skiles write. "Only about one-fifth of young Americans reject rap and hip-hop, a figure that is lower than that observed for country, bluegrass, gospel or opera for this age group."

The biggest shift in this regard came from young people with the highest education levels. This suggests they are using rap and hip-hop to differentiate themselves from the older generation of well-to-do Americans.

These same "high-status newcomers" were more likely than their counterparts of 20 years ago to declare their distaste for classical music and jazz, as well as rock 'n' roll. "While in 1993, a college-educated person between the ages of 25 and 29 had an 8 percent chance of disliking classical (music), in 2012, a respondent in that same age-education group had a 15 percent chance (of doing so)," the researchers write.

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Aha! Now we know who to blame. Most successful pop songs are written by a small group of middle-aged Scandinavians. Huh? No, really. The Atlantic has the story: Hit Charade: Meet the bald Norwegians and other unknowns who actually create the songs that top the charts. Here it is in a nutshell:

Sonically, the template has remained remarkably consistent since the Backstreet Boys, whose sound was created by Max Martin and his mentor, Denniz PoP, at PoP’s Cheiron Studios, in Stockholm. It was at Cheiron in the late ’90s that they developed the modern hit formula, a formula nearly as valuable as Coca-Cola’s. But it’s not a secret formula. Seabrook describes the pop sound this way: “ABBA’s pop chords and textures, Denniz PoP’s song structure and dynamics, ’80s arena rock’s big choruses, and early ’90s American R&B grooves.” The production quality is crucial, too. The music is manufactured to fill not headphones and home stereo systems but malls and football stadiums. It is a synthetic, mechanical sound “more captivating than the virtuosity of the musicians.” This is a metaphor, of course—there are no musicians anymore, at least not human ones. Every instrument is automated. Session musicians have gone extinct, and studio mixing boards remain only as retro, semi-ironic furniture.

Yep, and that's exactly what it sounds like, too.

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One of my commentators was giving me a hard time because I chose anthropogenic climate change as an example of ideology in a post this week. His point was that I am not an expert on climate science, which is certainly true enough. But if that is the operating principle, then can we get Neil deGrasse Tyson to shut up about art? He is an astrophysicist, after all.

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Another side of music education in France, offered without comment.

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Courtesy of Slipped Disc is this comedy of errors. In under two minutes both the violinist and the pianist suffer page-turning mishaps:

Before watching I was sure this had to be wind-related and I was going to say the solution is clothespins, the standard method of coping with the wind blowing your music around when playing out-of-doors. But no, in this indoor concert both the violinist and the pianist manage to throw their own music on the floor to be rescued by the calmest person on stage, the page-turner Anna Reszniak. Let's have a round of applause for Anna!

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And that brings us to our envoi for today. Let's listen to Pablo Villegas play the Prelude No. 1 by Villa-Lobos:

Now that I see this, I realize that I have heard of him before. Just looking at the clips on YouTube tells quite a lot about him: Gran Jota by Tarrega, Recuerdos de la Alhambra by Tarrega, Tango en Skaï by Dyens and Las Bodas de Luis Alonso. If you really know your guitar repertoire then you would guess that the guitarist who chose this repertoire would be heavy on the technique and, well, a little light on the musicality. And you would be correct. Musically this sounds like an average grad student in performance. Also, the rhythms of the middle section are tossed off with fervor rather than accuracy.