Friday Miscellanea

Another busy week so posting has certainly suffered! Let's do a big Friday Miscellanea to compensate. First up, a study about gender bias in orchestral auditions turns out to not tell us what we thought: Orchestrating false beliefs about gender discrimination.

we know from other studies that there is widespread, large gender discrimination, right? For instance, there is that study about classical orchestras, where blind auditions massively increased the chance of women to get hired.

Here is The Guardian about this study:

Even when the screen is only used for the preliminary round, it has a powerful impact; researchers have determined that this step alone makes it 50% more likely that a woman will advance to the finals

This study has 1388 citations. It has also been featured on Freakonomics, TED talks, Reddit, Slate, New York Times, Wikipedia, and I’m sure countless other mediums.

Ok, we have all heard stuff like this. So what's the problem? Follow the link and read the whole thing, but the reality is that the study showed exactly the opposite of what was publicized:

The value for relative female success is the proportion of women that are successful in the audition process minus the proportion of men that are successful. The values for non-blind auditions are positive, meaning a larger proportion of women are successful, whereas the values for blind auditions are negative, meaning a larger proportion of men are successful. So, this table unambigiously shows that men are doing comparatively better in blind auditions than in non-blind auditions. The exact opposite of what is claimed.

Just about every week brings us examples of why we should not believe what the mass media tell us. But for some reason we tend to keep believing what we read and hear.

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Composer Dominick Argento just passed away, aged 91:

DOMINICK ARGENTO generated a large and varied output of predominantly vocal music during his long creative life. In addition to his fourteen operas, he composed song cycles, choral pieces and musical monodramas, establishing himself as one of the most adept practitioners of text-setting within his generation of American composers. Though his polystylistic idiom ranges from opulent Romanticism to acerbic dissonance, his melodic lines are unfailingly well suited both to the voice and to the straightforward delivery of the words. “The composers I admire, I think, wrote music to touch the listener,” he said. “There’s no other reason for me.”

I knew his work largely through his interesting song cycle "Letters From Composers" for voice and guitar based on texts from Puccini, Mozart, Schubert, Chopin, Bach and others. A charming and also comic work. The Bach song, based on a letter complaining about not getting paid for providing music for a wedding is going to hit home with many musicians.

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Here is a lengthy critique of the way Apple Music handles the classical "genre." The bottom line is that it is just as bad and unwieldy as it ever was.

Last August, Apple Music was updated with a new section in Browse curated by Deutsche Grammophon, one of the biggest classical music labels in the world. While classical music fans welcomed the specific focus of the area, many of our readers quickly pointed out the numerous issues that remain for classical listeners on a daily basis within Apple Music, and the fact that they've been there since the launch of the service with seemingly no correction in sight. 

To help break down and highlight these problems, we reached out to a few experts in the classical music field, including professor Benjamin Charles, who wrote a blog post about his frustrations with streaming music services last October. We also spoke with Franz Rumiz, a classical music fan whose article "Why Apple Music fails with classical music" struck a chord with the community in early 2017.

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I've criticized music critic Anne Midgette a few times lately, but most of what she does is very good. Take for example this item about how listeners and musicians approach a piece differently:

There’s a big gap between the way classical music is introduced to lay listeners and the way musicians experience it. We tend to offer classical music to audiences like a history lesson, in explanations studded with names and dates that are useful enough as context but that don’t really get to the heart of what you hear. Musicians, however, experience it differently. So I went in search of a new view of the Emperor Concerto by talking to some of the artists who have played it recently, and although I’ve heard it dozens of times, I learned more than I ever dreamed I was missing. And there’s no one “right” way to approach it. 

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When it comes to opera in Vienna, they don't fool around: Tough Love: Vienna Opera Evicts Sports Star for Coughing.

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If you didn't already know, Bach is big, big, BIG! Gods, Gurus, and the Search for the Holy Grail: Bach Recordings from 2018:

Two hundred sixty-eight years after the death of Johann Sebastian Bach, and the composer is a bigger celebrity than ever. Just this past year, the New York Times has run stories with titles such as “A Pop-Up Shop that Offers Bach Preludes, Fugues and Condoms” (November 23), “Bach Was Far More Religious Than You Might Think” (March 30), “Strapping on His Cello for a 600-Mile Bach Pilgrimage” (May 9), and “Yo-Yo Ma Wants Bach to Save the World” (September 28). 2018 also witnessed the release of several high-profile recordings, including Bach 333 (Deutsche Grammophon and Decca), the “largest composer project in recording history,” and Yo-Yo Ma’s third and purportedly last recording of the complete Bach Suites for Unaccompanied Cello (Sony Classical). Alongside these were dozens of other recordings ranging from John Eliot Gardiner and the Monteverdi Consort’s Magnificat and St. Matthew Passion to an interpretation of Bach’s “Ciaccona with Just Intonation” by violinist Josh Modney on his album Engage (New Focus Recordings). The Bach of today—as portrayed in recordings, newspaper articles, books, and physical paraphernalia—is as multifaceted as current tastes and fashions, contradictions be damned. He is at once the “Fifth Evangelist”; a passionate humanist; a cool-blooded scientist; a spiritual guru; a college roommate; a fellow garage band remixer. But amid the myriad faces of Bachism, I perceive certain family resemblances. I explore them here.

It's a big article and worth reading all of it. I've long been of the opinion that the proper way to start the day is by playing some Bach every morning.

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Musicology Now has two interesting new posts up. Most recently one on the connections between folk music and fascism:

Lurking under the surface of folk culture’s celebration of the past is a call not to international solidarity, equality, and brotherhood but to blood and soil nativism. This contradiction plagues the folk revivalist project, its songs and dances always endeavoring to reconcile the conflicting pull of history and locality with human unity.

You should read the whole piece to get a sense of the argument. The other post is on Apple's use of the term "musicologist" in its promotion of the HomePod which purports to "reinvent music in the home."

Amidst his delivery of Apple-typical claims of reshaping the world, Schiller enumerated three key innovations of the product: 1. high quality speakers; 2. adaptive spatial acoustic functions; and 3. a musicologist.

Reactions were immediate as Schiller announced that the “built-in musicologist”—working with the virtual assistant, Siri, as something between an AI disc-jockey and a fact finder—would “help us hear the music we love, or discover the music we’re going to love” through the music streaming service, Apple Music. While many people reacted to the company’s high aspirations or the product’s functionality, others were struck by the word “musicologist.”

Jacques Dupuis offers an interesting historic background to the use of some sort of aesthetic expertise in the marketing of artistic products:

What I want to spotlight here about the figure of Henry Canby and middlebrow products is the strong customer appeal of the guiding expert. Products like the Book of the Month and radio lectures by university experts took shape from a demand for cultural cache, not unlike human or algorithmic curators of streaming music playlists and radio stations. While tech companies’ adoption of the term “musicologist” came as a jolt of humility to those of us who lay claim to that title professionally, offering a patina of expertise and pre-packaged access to elite culture is the actual work that the word “musicologist” does for Pandora, Apple and others. This resonance with historical middlebrow products, I would argue, is a primary reason the term carries any significance at all. Consumers buying legitimacy buy the supposed privilege of being in the know, much like the connoisseur outlets of Pitchfork or Fanfare Magazine. 

Taking a step back, applying the term “musicologist” to a digital assistant puts the face of an expert on the thing; more simply, it puts a face on a thing, humanizing and warming it. It seeks to resolve a problem that in March of 2018 Washington Post pop music critic, Chris Richards, saw in platforms like Spotify, where “algorithm-generated playlists often feel like mix tapes made by bots,” which they are. The appeal of humanity explains why, when devising the Book of the Month, Harry Scherman’s decision to cultivate images of personalities to sell his products rather than curate a faceless catalog listing worked as well as it did. Humanization sells.

Subsequently however, Apple dropped the term "musicologist" from its marketing. Oh well...

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Let's have a multifaceted envoi today. Here is the song by Dominick Argento using a letter by Bach to the City Council:

After reading about the Bach Chaconne in just intonation I just had to have a listen. This is violinist Josh Modney:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0i68ifRkitA

That demonstrates quite effectively just why musicians adopted equal temperament! One last clip: this is Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5, nicknamed the "Emperor" concerto. The pianist is Hélène Grimaud and Paavo Järvi conducts the Seoul Philharmonic: