Friday, February 22, 2019

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 FreakonomicsTED talksRedditSlate, 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:


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:


12 comments:

Wenatchee the Hatchet said...

the article on classical music and Apple music reminds me that, twenty years later, the problem is still what is known in the field as "metadata", i.e. what gets listed where for track listing information. Since one of my numerous temp jobs back in the dot com boom was data entry for track listings for a company that served some of the larger online retailers, I got a chance to find out through the bottom level scut work of track listing data entry that it's at this level that classical music is ill-served by the era of online and digital music. If you ever look at a digital download album, for instance, you might find that in a four movement work the name of the symphony and its opus number are on track 2 but for tracks 1, 3 and 4 it will be "Allegro", "Presto" and "Allegro" type stuff for the other tracks. The whole practical notion of metadata is built around the song and its place in, say, a concept album. That works out for Alan Parsons, for instance, but less well for a Bernstein recording. The article about Apple and classical stopped short of pointing out the obvious for anyone who worked on track listing data entry, that the problem with classical and digital platforms is that the very idea of metadata was practically anchored to the popular styles it was considered most likely to be used with. That's not a knock on popular music, more an observation about how much more dominant popular music is. Music educators who talk about classical as somehow dominating pop in the academy might want to think about this, though, because it could speak of a difference in industries, namely of the music business and education as, so to speak, a business.

Bryan Townsend said...

"The whole practical notion of metadata is built around the song" Yes, exactly. Your comment spells out what I was trying to get at by putting "genre" in quotation marks. Classical music has to be conceptualized differently. I can't quite see why this can't be done. Why not build a metadata format specifically designed for classical music? What do the classical specific streamers do? (Sorry for my ignorance, but I don't subscribe to any streaming service.)

Wenatchee the Hatchet said...

at the risk of just using an NPR link as a springboard ...

https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/04/411963624/why-cant-streaming-services-get-classical-music-right

was planning to blog about this topic as it was but seeing it indirectly come up in your Friday posting has gotten me inspired to try to tackle it as a post.

Bryan Townsend said...

I'll look for it on your blog!

./MiS said...

Although not at all about classical music and only marginally mentioning the issues of metadata, this post sheds some light on hurdles related on having one's music on streaming services: https://www.salon.com/2019/02/17/what-happens-when-you-create-a-fake-music-record-label-and-upload-bad-music-to-spotify/

Bryan Townsend said...

Thanks, Wenatchee, for the NPR link. That is an excellent survey of exactly what the problem is. Thanks also ./MiS for the Salon link. Very interesting from the point of view of someone trying to upload music to a streaming service, something I might be doing in the near future.

Maury said...

The passivity of classical music organizations is partly to blame here. I mean Julliard or The Kennedy Center etc could put pressure on the straeming services to create a different categorization process for classical music but members whine about it and never do anything. Amazon is different in that it uses bots to organize the music section and I'm using the term organize very loosely. So I saw recently Bob Marley as the composer of Cosi Fan Tutte. Such things happen by bots hitting an unfamiliar name and substituting something they know. If you search for something on Amazon now using phrases a bit out of the ordinary it will preempt you and give you something similar but quite different. It is simply trying to steer you to something with a lot of items rather than a few.

The streaming services don't want to spend the money to reprogram something that generates a few percent of sales.

Bryan Townsend said...

Very good point. I think the days when we felt we should always apologize for being lovers of classical music should be declared over. If someone accuses us of being elitist, we should say YES in a loud voice. I usually tell people that I am a hard-core elitist when it comes to music. They rarely know how to deal with that!

Maury said...

The problem is that we piping canaries are not supported by any of the music organizations these days. As you have noted they are increasing rushing to add hip hop to the classical canon. Can they be blamed? The Nobel Prize for Lit went to one Robert Zimmerman, I assume the richest person to ever get that prize.

Bryan Townsend said...

Having just come back from Europe, I think that classical music is very well supported in general there. However, all the new social media and streaming services that have been built in the US are based on the pop music model and to the extent they rule the whole media world, classical music will continue to suffer. Like all historical trends, it is complex.

I wasn't taken aback by the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan. His lyrics have been pretty significant over the years, certainly as much so as a lot of academic poets. But then, I grew up with Leonard Cohen who was always accepted both as a literary poet and a songwriter.

Maury said...

Dylan's lyrics are always associated with music so there is an issue with awarding a prize supposedly to honor literature as an autonomous art. To be clear this is not an issue with Dylan, but the Nobel Prize for Lit which I guess is acknowledging that Lit is no longer an autonomous art. To go with your example why didn't they cite Leonard Cohen? I assume because he wouldn't generate the same number of media articles. Kanye West will be next.

Bryan Townsend said...

They gave the Pulitzer Prize in music to a hip-hop artist last year.