Friday Miscellanea

Articles in the mass media tend to fall into specific narrative groups. This one is a member of the group we might title "pop music today is just not as good as it used to be." The New York Times has the story: They Really Don’t Make Music Like They Used To.

For decades, musicians and engineers have employed dynamic range compression to make recordings sound fuller. Compression boosts the quieter parts and tamps down louder ones to create a narrower range. Historically, compression was usually applied during the mastering stage, the final steps through which a finished recording becomes a commercial release.

Yes, this article is about the "loudness wars" we have posted about before. More and more the dynamic range of pop music is compressed and wedged up into the top of the spectrum. This has implications for the aesthetic depth and emotional range as well, of course. There is a similar trend with videos on YouTube I have also noticed. More and more we find the people narrating videos on cooking, commentary, education and a host of other topics delivering their thoughts in a high-energy rant with no breaths (they are edited out) in the most raucous voice possible. Agh!

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Didn't we do a post like this for composers a while ago? The 10 Most Overrated Musical Artists of All Time. The really inexplicable thing about this list is that it includes The Doors, but does not include U2. Weird...

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This is a very odd sort of YouTube clip. It is a short discussion of an artwork Jordan Peterson created called The Meaning of Music.

One thing for sure, this brief clip will get you thinking.

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Alex Ross has a piece up at The New Yorker on trends in the performance of Baroque music. He calls it The Dizzying Democratization of Baroque Music:

In recent years, the Baroque repertory has undergone a dizzying democratization, as two midwinter concerts in New York made plain. At Weill Hall, the Polish countertenor Jakub Józef Orliński sang music of Nicola Fago, Domènec Terradellas, Gaetano Maria Schiassi, and Johann Adolf Hasse, alongside a little Vivaldi. In the Fuentidueña Chapel, at the Cloisters, the ensemble Sonnambula based a program around the Flemish composer Leonora Duarte. The absence of historical celebrities hardly hurt attendance; both events played to full houses.

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The American Scholar has a piece on Charles Griffes, a composer who, had he not died very young, might have been a great American impressionist:

Mysterious, haunting, and beautiful, The White Peacock (like Kubla Khan and other works) compels us to imagine precisely how Griffes might have developed had he not succumbed to an early death. Would he have worked on a larger canvas, perhaps attempting a symphony? Would his aptitude for vocal music have led him to write an opera? Harmonically speaking, would he have continued to explore the dissonant sound worlds of his 1918 Piano Sonata? Might he have taken a turn in the direction of Stravinsky? So many unanswerable questions. At any rate, it might be facile to speak of Griffes as an American Debussy, but had his life not been so frustratingly short, had he indeed reached full artistic maturity, we might today be speaking of some other 20th-century composer as the French Charles Griffes.

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And for the provocative and scurrilous part of our program today we turn to Slipped Disc where we are treated to the naughty bits from a review of the immersive film experience Dau. As usual the comments are particularly fun.

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A big viral hit on YouTube is a bluegrass tribute to atonal music. I kid you not. You have to hear the atonal banjo solo. And the John Cage tribute.

 

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An appropriate envoi might be the Sinfonia No. 1 of Leonora Duarte followed by the Sinfonia No. 5:

I do not have an explanation for the Darth Vader mask the performer on the left is wearing in the second clip.