Friday Miscellanea

There is something oddly compelling (and certainly audience-pleasing) about this rendition of the theme from Shaft by the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain:

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Over at Vulture there is a piece on pop plagiarism: Welcome to the Age of Pop ‘Plagiarism’

...attitudes toward borrowing in music have changed incrementally since the end of the 20th century. The shift dovetails with hip-hop’s growth and the ways that rap producers have been able to morph and even break existing stigmas about quoting and sampling other artists’ work. ’80s rap was a Wild West period of collage art made through mostly uncontested cribbing. Sampling lawsuits made the practice expensive; by the ’90s, producers used chunks of old hit records to shore up their chances at charting and to flaunt their wealth. In the aughts, rappers tried each other’s beats and flows out to prove their proficiency and versatility. Listeners who came of age in the last three decades were, in effect, groomed into a new and evolving understanding of originality in music.

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The New York Review of Books has a review of a new biography of composer Elliot Carter.

Carter has been well served by those who love his music. Bridge Records alone has recordings of fifty-six of his pieces in its catalog, more than half of these performances supervised by the composer himself. His most significant work for solo piano, Night Fantasies (1980), has been recorded not only by the four artists for whom it was written (Paul Jacobs, Gilbert Kalish, Ursula Oppens, and Charles Rosen) but by at least half a dozen others, and now ranks with Fredric Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated as one of the most popular large keyboard works of recent times.

I'm sorry to say that I have, despite repeated attempts, never managed to really enjoy Elliot Carter's music, especially, oddly enough, his piece for guitar. Let's have one more try. Here is a performance by Paul Jacobs:

Interesting, I guess. I just can't hear anything there except structure.

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Ok, ok, I am almost as skeptical of success stories as I am of gloom and doom stories when it comes to symphony orchestras. Let's have a look at this one: Shaking Up the Symphony: How a millennial who believes in both Mozart and metrics saved a California orchestra, redefining the classical concert experience as we know it. This makes sense:

“People think that to bring in younger audiences you need ‘The Symphony Meets the Beatles,’ but a Beethoven symphony is amazing to anyone. You don’t have to ‘symphonize’ pop music,” Cabrera says. “We needed to change the experience, not the repertoire.” 

Bergauer tested this hypothesis by creating a survey project to collect information on the symphony experience. She called it Orchestra X, a nod to Google’s experimental research arm in Silicon Valley, and invited culturally minded millennials and Gen Xers to $5 concerts in exchange for their honest feedback. Their findings indicated that, indeed, only one person thought the music itself was the problem. The rest were in awe.

Yep. The reason it makes sense is that she did the research. All too often it seems that administrators are just trying out whatever suits what they conceive as The Narrative, instead of trying to find out what is actually going on. Part of the article sounds like the usual diversity narrative, but the bottom line is they are doing enough good marketing to make a real difference.

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You will have to download a pdf, but it is worth it. The Raritan Quarterly Review has a piece on Charles Ives and his role in the formation of an American musical language:

Ives died of a stroke in 1954. Leonard Bernstein had premiered Ives’s Second Symphony with the New York Philharmonic only three years previous. Ives declined Bernstein’s invitation to travel to New York. As he did not own a radio, he listened to a broadcast in a neigh- bor’s kitchen. When it was over, he spit in the fireplace and walked home. His wife Harmony wrote Bernstein an appreciative note. She added that Charles had found the fast movements “too slow.”

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The Guardian gives us a glimpse into the world of young YouTube artists: ‘Be urself’: meet the teens creating a generation gap in music.

For want of a better name, you might call it underground bedroom pop, an alternate musical universe that feels like a manifestation of a generation gap: big with teenagers – particularly girls – and invisible to anyone over the age of 20, because it exists largely in an online world that tweens and teens find easy to navigate, but anyone older finds baffling or risible. It doesn’t need Radio 1 or what is left of the music press to become popular because it exists in a self-contained community of YouTube videos and influencers; some bedroom pop artists found their music spread thanks to its use in the background of makeup tutorials or “aesthetic” videos, the latter a phenomenon whereby vloggers post atmospheric videos of, well, aesthetically pleasing things.

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Now here is a tired meme: The Myth of the Composer-Genius. Here is how the writer explains the myth:

Take a moment to picture a composer-genius in your head. What do they look like? Chances are, they are a male of European descent, someone like Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven. Or maybe even Stravinsky, Schönberg, or Boulez. Whether implicitly or explicitly, the Western canon of Classical music presents a lineage of composers who received the artform from their forefathers and advanced it through innovation and experimentation. This lineage also either implicitly or explicitly excludes women and people of color.

Ok, well, that comment about excluding women and people of color assumes facts not in evidence. Just because some composers are very highly-regarded in no way proves that some mysterious agency excluded others.

To clarify, I have no interest in disproving that composers of the Classical canon were geniuses. I have not searched dusty archives and found long-lost IQ tests taken by the likes of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. Rather, I argue that the persistence of this label is unnecessary to appreciate music by these individuals, and that it is a dangerous myth that great art can only be the product of genius. Such a myth is not only harmful to those of us who write music—poisoning us with constant imposter syndrome and anxiety that our work will never be enough—but it has allowed musical culture to become ossified around the work of a select few composers–those worthy enough to be elevated to the status of genius.

That's a kind of passive-aggressive argument. Musical genius may have nothing to do with IQ. But yes, sticking a "genius" label on is really unnecessary. So why is the writer obsessing about it? I don't care what label you stick on Mozart or even if you bother to stick one on at all. Pretty much irrelevant. But sticking the label on and then calling it "dangerous" and "poisonous" is rather a foolish and pointless project is it not?

I see this kind of thing as being related to Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours silliness. Both writers want to exclude the idea of native ability so they can say that achievement is just a matter of practice, practice, practice. Sorry, folks, you can practice all you want, but a Mozart only comes along very rarely.

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Now let's see, what shall we have for our envoi? Here is Leonard Bernstein conducting the Bavarian Radio Orchestra in the Symphony No. 2 of Charles Ives. Bernstein gives a lengthy introduction (in German) and the performance itself begins at the 19 minute mark.