Friday Miscellanea

There is a lot of dispiriting news out there, much of which I will try and avoid on your behalf! But once we eliminate the outing of randy organ professors and the obituaries and the rediscovery of very obscure operas by composers not known for being opera composers like Franz Liszt, what do you have left? Well, there is this item: new politically correct criteria for Opera North in the UK: Only BAMEs need apply to Opera North. For those of you unfamiliar with the nomenclature, "BAMEs" are people of "black, asian and minority ethnic" backgrounds.

Opera North is seeking applications from music-makers from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds living in the north of England, for its second programme of Resonance residencies, supported by the PRS Foundation.

Launched in 2017, Resonance offers professional artists in all genres the opportunity to develop new performance ideas. Successful applicants will receive up to a week of free rehearsal space in central Leeds in March and April 2019, a grant of up to £3,000 to cover fees and other costs, support and advice from technicians, producers and other specialists, and an optional ‘work in progress’ performance.

As is usual with Slipped Disc, the comments are worth reading. But it should be pointed out that these kinds of initiatives are typically defended by saying that diversity and balance, by which they mean some close correspondence between the percentage of the population that are members of a particular group and the percentage that are working in a particular field, are desirable. But as Jordan Peterson, among others, has pointed out, you can approach all questions of merit and competence from the perspective of either the individual or the collective. If you choose the latter you are simply reverting to tribalism. For a very succinct discussion go to the 11:45 mark in this clip:

And here is another related item: Saskatoon Choreographer Reflects on Cultural Appropriation Claims.

Koroliuk and his ensemble ignited a debate about cultural appropriation after a routine where dancers performed Indigenous dance in clothing resembling traditional regalia.

"If you ask me if I regret when I created Kaleidoscope, if I would do it again — I would do it again. 

"That was my way to say thank you … and be proud and try to build bridges instead of walls."

The Kaleidoscope dance included segments from French, Scottish and other cultures as a tribute to Canada's history.

Koroliuk said at the time that the dance was created to honour Indigenous people. But it faced backlash on social media after a video was posted online by an Indigenous powwow dancer who was watching from the crowd.

"Cultural appropriation" is just another ill-conceived consequence of political tribalism.

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I have to say that those stories of commercial establishments and malls using classical music to discourage undesirables from hanging out have always made me a bit uncomfortable. The idea that Mozart and Vivaldi actually drive people away is rather disconcerting. On the other hand, there is lots of music that, if played in public spaces, would certainly be enough to drive me away. Most of the stuff I hear in public spaces, in fact! But this story is a bit different: Berlin station turns to atonal tunes to deter drug users.

Germany's national rail operator, Deutsche Bahn (DB), is planning to pipe "atonal music" into the Hermannstrasse station in Berlin's Neukölln district in an attempt to drive away people who use the place to take drugs.

I found this item via Slipped Disc where we can find the usual entertaining comments! The concern is expressed that perhaps atonal music will actually attract drug dealers.

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For a really sizzling comment section, have a look at this item: To Those Who Pretend That El Sistema Is Unpolitical.

Sometimes one is stupefied by the willing myopia of classical music administrators. The recent history of Venezuela has shown El sistema to be an instrument of a terror regime in Venezuela that is reducing many citizens to the choice of starvation or emigration.

Yet useful idiots in western democracies continue to pretend that El sistema is politically neutral, untouched by politics and of overwhelming (if unproven) benefit to mankind.

The quote is from Norman Lebrecht and you can find many agreeing and many disagreeing in the comments. It seems obvious that El Sistema has had excellent musical results. The question is, how compromised is it through association with an undeniably vicious regime in Venezuela?

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 From the BBC we have this item: Can Data Reveal the Saddest Number One Song Ever?

Spotify has built an algorithm that aims to quantify the amount of sadness in a music track. The streaming service has collected metadata on each of 35 million songs in their database, accessible through their web API, that includes a valence score for every track, from 0 to 1. “Tracks with high valence sound more positive (eg happy, cheerful, euphoric), while tracks with low valence sound more negative (eg sad, depressed, angry)”, according to Spotify. There are similar scores for other parameters including energy (how “fast, loud and noisy” a track is) and danceability, which is exactly what it sounds like.

The first problem here is that many readers will see the word "valence" and think, wow, this is really scientific! In reality the term "valence" comes from chemistry and biology and simply has no meaning whatsoever with regard to music. The mystery is how do they come up with a numerical score for musical qualities and who assigns it?

But how can an algorithm – which cannot feel a thing – tell the difference between a happy song and a sad one? “It’s an initially challenging concept, that you would be able to quantify the sadness that a song evokes”, says Charlie Thompson, the data scientist who developed the Radiohead ‘gloom index’ who blogs as RCharlie.

Nope, no actual explanation there! It turns out that the "data" doesn't actually do the job:

The saddest song ever to top the charts since 1958, according to the data, is The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face by Roberta Flack, which was number one for six weeks in 1972. It is not a sad song. It is a tender, soulful love song.

So I think we can heave a sigh of relief that Spotify has not yet succeeded in "datifying" music.

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Alex Ross has a review of an interesting new book on contemporary music in The New Yorker titled "The Sounds of Music in the Twenty-first Century."

Writing overnight history is a perilous task, but the British critic Tim Rutherford-Johnson manages the feat in “Music After the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989” (University of California). In fewer than three hundred pages of cogent prose, Rutherford-Johnson catalogues the bewildering diversity of twenty-first-century composed music, and, more important, makes interpretative sense of a corpus that ranges from symphonies and string quartets to improvisations on smashed-up pianos found in the Australian outback (Ross Bolleter’s “Secret Sandhills”). By the end of the book, definitions seem more elusive than ever: to compose is to work with sound, or with silence, in a premeditated way, or not. What, then, isn’t composition? Conversations around the term often focus on either erasing or redrawing the boundary between the classical and the popular. Rutherford-Johnson makes us think about other borders: between genres, between ideologies, between art and the world. “Music After the Fall” is the best extant map of our sonic shadowlands, and it has changed how I listen.

Here is another bit from the review:

The seventies and eighties saw the gradual return of tonally based composition, in the form of minimalism, the New Simplicity, and the New Romanticism. These developments aligned with postmodern trends in other art forms: the return of ornament in architecture, of figuration in painting, of episodic narrative in fiction. The first work that Rutherford-Johnson discusses in his book is Steve Reich’s “Different Trains,” from 1988, which incorporates a live string quartet and a digital soundtrack of speaking voices, prerecorded string tracks, and ambient sounds. Its chugging motion and repetitive gestures present an invitingly smooth surface, even as the recorded material pivots toward stories of the Holocaust. The piece typifies the late-twentieth-century return to fundamentals—what McClary describes as “composing for people.”

Sounds like a book well worth our attention.

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Most musicians are neither famous nor wealthy and the reason is that only 12% of music industry revenues go to musicians:

There are more people who want to make art than the market would support, and the arts are a highly concentrated industry: combine those two facts and you get a buyers' market for artists' work, controlled by intermediaries, who take almost all of the money generated by the work.

This is true in lots of industries, but it's especially pernicious in entertainment markets, because copyright helps fight competition. Once an intermediary corporation (like a record label) captures an important part of the distribution market, it can demand that artists sign over all or some of their copyrights as a condition of being distributed by the company. 

When Big Content met Big Tech, the deal was sealed. The highly concentrated tech sector and the highly concentrated entertainment sector may squabble over how much of the money from art goes to which industry, but they're both in firm agreement that as little as possible of that money should go to the artists who created the work that they're selling.

Yep.

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The American Scholar has an article on one of the most famous public aesthetic disputes in recent musical history: Who’s the Boss? When conductor and soloist clash, a concerto performance can turn into a contest of wills.

For a conductor to address an audience prior to a concert is nothing out of the ordinary. But for that conductor to essentially disavow the performance, before a single note is played? That would be almost unthinkable. And yet, this is precisely what happened at Carnegie Hall on April 6, 1962, at a matinee concert of the New York Philharmonic. Glenn Gould and Leonard Bernstein were scheduled to perform the Piano Concerto No. 1 by Brahms, but after intermission, only Bernstein emerged onstage. Gould, who played infrequently in public, was notorious for canceling concerts at the last moment, and at first, Bernstein had to reassure the audience that the afternoon’s soloist was indeed in the house. Then, the conductor went on to deliver a highly controversial speech that has since become part of musical lore:

A curious situation has arisen, which merits, I think, a word or two. You are about to hear a rather, shall we say, unorthodox performance of the Brahms D Minor Concerto, a performance distinctly different from any I’ve ever heard, or even dreamt of, for that matter, in its remarkably broad tempi and its frequent departures from Brahms’s dynamic indications. I cannot say I am in total agreement with Mr. Gould’s conception, and this raises the interesting question: “What am I doing conducting it?” I’m conducting it because Mr. Gould is so valid and serious an artist that I must take seriously anything he conceives in good faith, and his conception is interesting enough so that I feel you should hear it, too.

But the age-old question still remains: “In a concerto, who is the boss: the soloist or the conductor?” The answer is, of course, sometimes one, sometimes the other, depending on the people involved. But almost always, the two manage to get together by persuasion or charm or even threats to achieve a unified performance. I have only once before in my life had to submit to a soloist’s wholly new and incompatible concept, and that was the last time I accompanied Mr. Gould. But this time the discrepancies between our views are so great that I feel I must make this small disclaimer.

Go read the whole thing, which has all sorts of interesting observations.

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 For our envoi today, let's have a listen to Different Trains by Steve Reich. I gave a lecture on this piece once and in preparing it, I really came to appreciate a lot of what he was doing. It is a far cry from his early "minimal" compositions.

This version is interesting because you can distinguish between what is prerecorded and what is live. But for those who really don't like Steve Reich, and that's ok, here is something I have listened to several times this week. It is just so gorgeous! The Flower Duet from Lakmé by Delibes sung by Sabine Devieilhe & Marianne Crebassa. I have already posted this, but it is such a lovely example of musicians at work doing what they do that I can't resist putting it up again!