Friday, February 2, 2018

Friday Miscellanea

Philip Glass, one of our most prolific composers, is premiering a new symphony, a homage to David Bowie, in May 2019. The Guardian has the story:
London Contemporary Orchestra and organist James McVinnie will perform Glass’s Lodger symphony, a work the composer had discussed with Bowie before his death, but only now has been realised. Based on Bowie’s 1979 album of the same name, it completes Glass’s reimagining of Bowie’s Berlin trilogy, following 1992’s Low symphony (Glass’s Symphony No 1), and 1996’s Heroes symphony (Glass’s fourth). 
The two musicians were friends and mutual admirers for many decades. “The two symphonies were of course originally intended to be part of a trilogy, just as Bowie and Eno’s Berlin albums are,” Glass told the Guardian in 2016, shortly after Bowie’s death. “We talked, years ago, about doing the third symphony based on Lodger, and the idea has not totally disappeared.”
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Slipped Disc has an item on the classical awards at the Grammys.

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Speaking of the Grammys, one winner was pianist Daniel Trifonov and the Globe and Mail has a profile of him:
Trifonov's postvirtuosic playing has its capacity to surprise, though. Listeners blown away by brilliant passage work in one section aren't prepared for the sensuousness of the next. The repertoire chosen for his Toronto concert – much of it taken from his new Chopin Evocations album on Deutsche Grammophon – heads deep into the heart of the Romantic Era, allowing for about as much heartfelt playing as can be imagined.
Yes, maybe this does represent a turn back to the romantic repertoire. But channelling Chopin is in itself sending a signal – rather like those newer, smarter businesses encouraging their employees to get plenty of sleep – that slow and soft may be the new fast and furious.
I want to take the opportunity to point out that the Globe and Mail last month decided to kill their comments completely until further notice. As I see it the problem was that every time the Globe published an obviously biased or simply false item they were repeatedly lambasted in the comments by people who were better-informed. This happened with such a high number of articles and opinion pieces that I guess they just couldn't take it any more. They could either strive for a better newspaper or simply suppress all the comments and, to their shame, they chose the latter. This frees them up to be even more biased and vicious, of course. There is an excellent example today. Jordan B. Peterson is pretty much a nightmare to every member of the Canadian establishment, whose voice is the Globe and Mail, so the more famous he becomes, the more pressing the need to smear him at every opportunity. The thinly veiled conceit of this item is Peterson's "paradox": The Jordan Peterson paradox: high intellect, or just another angry white guy?
Where other academics rise on the strength of their ideas, Peterson's fame has crested on their sheer proliferation. As with his online lectures, his new book is rangy and digressive, addressing a wide range of subjects (history, theology, critical theory, evolutionary biology) well outside his realm of professional expertise. He can skip from the journals of the Columbine shooters to Goethe within three sentences; and within three pages skips to Tolstoy, to Cain and Abel, to Christ Himself, and back to "the Columbine boys." If psychology has always been the smorgasbord of soft sciences, Peterson's brand of profundity is the sprawling, all-you-can-eat Mandarin buffet – a medley of undercooked ideas warmed under the heat lamp of his own faintly flickering intellect.
I would pay good money to witness a debate between this nonentity, John Semley, and Prof. Peterson. In days past a transparently biased article like this in the Globe would have been pummeled and slashed to ribbons by dozens upon dozens of commentators, but no more. They have solved their problem at last! In Canada, this is how we roll.

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Finally classical music finds its niche in the 21st century: Classical Music on the London Underground. It is used to control anti-social behavior on the London subway:
The use of classical music to deter anti-social behavior began on the District Line in 2003, which over the next 18 months saw a reported reduction of 25 percent in assaults on staff, and a 37 percent reduction in graffiti within the station. Subsequently, the scheme was rolled out to over 40 stations in 2008, and has been subtly altering moods ever since.
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And finally, the Atlantic has a think piece about the question of the universality of musical language. The first problem is that music, while it has some language-like properties, isn't really a language.
Imagine that you’re a researcher who has unlimited time and resources, and a time machine that can travel anywhere in the world. You use these wondrous gifts to get a recording of every song that has ever been sung, whether by people in big cities or those in small hunter-gatherer groups. You play these recordings to random volunteers, and ask them to guess the behaviors that were associated with each tune. Was the song used for dancing? For soothing a baby? For healing illness? Could people guess what songs are for by their sound alone, without any knowledge about their cultural context?
Yep, that's the question all right. The researchers did what I would call begging the question by severely limiting the song-types to just four out of a huge number of possibles:
Their collection—the Natural History of Song discography—represents music of four types: dances; lullabies; expressions of love; and healing songs intended to cure the sick in ceremonies.
Let's compare these categories to the songs on a CD of Nootka music we were listening to the other day: Canoe Paddle Song, Entrance Song, Medicine Man Song, Whale Song, Farewell Song, Echo Song, Welcome Song, Warrior Song, Wolf Song, etc. The only one that looks like it might fit in one of their categories is the Medicine Man Song, and that might not even be a "healing" song. So, right away, we see how the categories chosen map very poorly on at least one body of traditional music. Musicologists have tended to be skeptical of this project for different reasons:
“While music is universal, its meanings are not,” adds Anne Rasmussen, an ethnomusicologist at the College of William and Mary. And those meanings are created both by the people making and hearing the music, and by the entire cultural package that surrounds it. A Bach cantata that was composed to celebrate God, for example, means something very different when played in a 21st-century concert hall or in a New York deli. The meaning of music, in other words, “is not something you can perceive while listening through a pair of headphones,” says Rasmussen. 
Yes, musical meaning is really only comprehensible within a particular cultural context--in the absence of words, that is.

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YouTube has just about everything, including Machaut's tour-de-force rondeau, "Ma fin est mon commencement" that is a crab canon over a palindrome, meaning, well, that its beginning is its end. This video clip of the score shows exactly how that works:


The best description I can find on the web of what Machaut is up to with this piece is in the Wikipedia article on Retrograde Music.

5 comments:

Christine Lacroix said...

I've been enjoying watching YouTube videos of Gordon Peterson ever since you introduced him to us on your blog. He's an interesting character. That was a brutal Globe and Mail critique and it has me wondering why so much ire. A 'faintly flickering intellect'? Wow. Have you seen these videos analyzing Peterson's communication style?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsQLksbfDSo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS9W-wlJHPA

Bryan Townsend said...

Thanks, Christine. I'm really glad both that you are enjoying Peterson's videos and that you made this comment. My respect for the Globe and Mail has fallen considerably in recent years and this just illustrates why. They do have one or two good commentators, but far too many like this. There was no actual argument there, nor did he cite much that Peterson actually says. It was a smear job pure and simple.

Thanks for those two clips. I had not seen them and the second one in particular is a very good analysis of a certain kind of tactic used a lot in debate these days. But Peterson is in rather a different league. He not only knows these tricks, but he is also a genuinely profound thinker. What he thinks comes from his own research--he is not parroting ideology like Cathy Newman.

Bryan Townsend said...

To be fair to the Globe and Mail they followed that very mean-spririted piece on Jordan Peterson with a much fairer one from their best commentator, Margaret Wente:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/how-awful-is-jordan-peterson-anyway/article37864567/

Christine Lacroix said...

I had just written this comment when your new article came in. Yes, much more reasoned and fair.

Yes, as I said, I've enjoyed his presentations and he is very impressive. I wouldn't say Cathy Newman is 'parroting ideology'. She seemed to me to be sincere in her concerns. Too emotional to be reasonable maybe. She wasn't the right person to be debating with Peterson. It would have been more interesting to see him debate someone with a similar knowledge base but dissimilar views. I have been wondering why he has inspired such anger. I had a group of anthropologists and other social scientists in class one day years ago and I never forgot what one of them said. She said that from the first time humans banded together there has been tension caused by the need to deal with the needier members of the group in one way or another. The opposing views on how to manage the natural inequality in health, strength etc have never ceased to cause dissension. According to her, it was even reflected in the evolution of language with the appearance of words such as 'lazy’ 'selfish' etc. But coming back to Peterson, if you accuse the 'bleeding heart' team of being Marxists and if you say that their bleeding hearts are really just resentment then the bleeding heart team will accuse the 'every man for himself' team of being selfish, lacking in empathy and so on. Most people know what their motivations are and don’t need to be informed. Peterson is basically dissing about 50% of the population of Canada with some of his comments even if he is right about the futility and dangers of legislating on what pronouns people must use or government intervention in general. I imagine that could be one reason for the wrath of the Globe and Mail author and other assorted YouTube trolls.

Bryan Townsend said...

Christine, this is a very welcome and thoughtful comment. I think that Peterson's fame or notoriety stems from an imbalance in our society. The left, who usually start out with the best of motives, always seem to end up at an extreme. Peterson's passion comes partly from his perception that the characterizing of great swaths of the population as victims of some sort is profoundly damaging psychologically. The reason for doing this is that it is very useful, politically, to a certain group in society that finds it gives them political power. They are going to keep on doing it until it stops working. To misquote Peterson slightly: "Socialists are always just a few executions away from utopia."

Peterson is saying what is forbidden to say in Canada's political environment, and this is exactly why it needs to be said. As you say, there are two teams, but one of the teams has been running scared for a long time now, which lets the other team get away with a lot of nonsense.