Friday Miscellanea

The grandeur of the Beyoncé years continues with the release of a 600 page coffee table book on the making of Lemonade.

Love the fur.

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Why is pop music slowing down? Rolling Stone has all the answers and, inadvertently seems to illustrate the industrial formula nature of the creation pop music:

All are in agreement that sedate tempos reign supreme. "You got a formula for a pop thing right now," asserts Felix Snow, who produced Kiiara's Top 15 hit "Gold" and is a member of the ascendant pop group Terror Jr. The ingredients: "Some sort of quirky bell thing going on around 100 bpm, a bouncy energetic vocal flow over that, obviously the snap on the two and four, and a pretty simple bass line that's going around the same three or four chords the whole song."

Pop music works with formulas that change direction like a flock of baby trout. The much-maligned "concert," "art," or "classical" genre is more about NOT following a formula. See how that works?

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The world's first album composed and produced by AI. Heh! Of course the song at the link sounds exactly like every other pop diva of the day because the AI was programmed by musicians who write and produce that sort of material. Artificial intelligence obviously means constructed, phony, shallow, formulaic and derivative. Oh, and by the way, if there is no human agency, then there is no art. So if there is art here, then it is entirely the product of human agency, i.e. the guys who programmed it. Better luck next time.

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I've been of the view that the structure of the classical music world in society largely came about, for better or worse, with the ascendence of the middle class in the 19th century. But John Butt in The Guardian, begs to differ:

The art of music, which used to be the analogue of the proportions of heaven and the harmony of the entire cosmos, was increasingly brought down to earth, with the focus more on the human spirit and body. It would be simplistic to claim that all this was caused by the Reformation, but it is unlikely to have happened without the debates about faith, devotional practice and personal responsibility that the Reformation inaugurated.

Musical styles too began to change and diversify in the decades following the Reformation. How was the music actually heard? We will never know for sure, but Roland Barthes may well have been on to something when he suggested that Lutheranism inaugurated a culture of listening. Luther certainly developed a practice in which music took on a more highly charged value, consolidating the drama and struggles of belief within the mind of the believer rather than in the multi-sensory panoply of traditional Catholic practice. It is perhaps no surprise that Bach once related the presence of God and his grace specifically to music – something that cannot be seen or touched, but which permeates the believer’s world and mind. Scripture and faith coalesce in the believer’s own mind through the practice of listening.

Perhaps something of modern music culture was inaugurated through this intensification of listening, by which music ultimately became the elevated, autonomous art of what is so often termed “classical music”.

Now that's an interesting argument.

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 Slipped Disc, classical music's leading obituary section, announces the death of Aloys Kontarsky, brother of Alphons, who passed away in 2010. Together they were an extraordinary piano duo. Their recording of the two piano arrangement of Brahm's Haydn Variations was my favorite Brahms ever. Perhaps their most astonishing accomplishment was their performances of Boulez' Structures for two pianos, a work of total serialism--from memory!

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The New York Times has a piece on the Salzburg Festival, currently in progress. I'm hoping to spend a week or two there next summer. The article is oddly non-musical as its focus seems entirely on celebrities, the fortunes of the recording industry and backstage gossip.

SALZBURG, Austria — The curtain had just come down on Anna Netrebko’s highly anticipated debut as Verdi’s Aida here earlier this month. But her next performance was already beginning.

As the elegant Salzburg Festival audience filed out of the theater — the men in black tie and traditional Austrian jackets, the women in long gowns and dirndls — Ms. Netrebko was upstairs in her dressing room, changing out of her black wig, costume and makeup. When she emerged, she was blond and in a gala-ready black dress, and she made her way through a narrow hallway packed with well-wishers, managers, record company executives and fellow singers.

Plácido Domingo was waiting by the stage door to praise her performance as “perfection.” Ms. Netrebko paused to sign some autographs and pose for a few pictures and then left for the opening-night party in a nearby Baroque palace where Mozart, born just a few blocks away, once performed.

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Pianist Stephen Hough offers some words of wisdom about classical music in the Pacific Standard:

There's an argument that, in the pre-electronic era, humans had more access to their inner lives, and the great composers incorporated those feelings into their music. Thus listening to Mozart or Brahms provides access to emotions that we've largely lost touch of in this era of constant distraction. Do you think that's true?

I do. Music helps us find our way into that inner world. It actually takes up the time. You can glance at a painting, but if you listen to a five-minute-long piece, it forces you to be in that space for five minutes. Also, it teaches discipline—a word that too often has negative connotations, like you're being rigid.

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For our envoi today let's listen to the Kontarsky brothers. Oddly, Blogger won't embed so just follow the link:

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