Friday Miscellanea

This is really miscellaneous: apparently all species of perching birds (distinguished by having three toes pointing forward and one back to facilitate perching) originated in Australia!

According to a new study, all perching bird species — the majority of the world’s bird population — originated in Australia.

These perching birds — called passerines — make up more than 60 percent of all birds. There are more than 6,000 species of passerines – distinguished from other birds by the arrangement of their toes (three pointing forward and one back), which facilitates perching – including familiar birds like cardinals, warblers, jays, and sparrows.

In similar news, all hot peppers come originally from Mexico.

The chili pepper (also chile, chile pepper, chilli pepper, or chilli[2]), from Nahuatl chīlli (Nahuatl pronunciation: [ˈt͡ʃiːli]), is the fruit of plants from the genus Capsicum which are members of the nightshade family, Solanaceae.[3] Chili peppers are widely used in many cuisines as a spice to add heat to dishes. The substances that give chili peppers their intensity when ingested or applied topically are capsaicin and related compounds known as capsaicinoids.

Chili peppers originated in Mexico.[4] After the Columbian Exchange, many cultivars of chili pepper spread across the world, used for both food and traditional medicine.

Cultivars grown in North America and Europe are believed to all derive from Capsicum annuum, and have white, yellow, red or purple to black fruits. In 2016, world production of raw green chili peppers was 34.5 million tonnes, with China producing half of the world total.

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Wenatchee the Hatchet is a prolific blogger who posts a lot about music. Here is a post where he provides links to his music posts. His interests are quite different from mine, but he does write a lot about the guitar repertoire.

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I've had violinist Rachel Podger's integral recording of all the Bach Sonatas and Partitas for years and years and now she has released a recording of the six Cello Suites on violin. Of course, as a guitarist, I've been stealing them for decades. The Cello Suite No. 1, written in G major, is usually played in D major on guitar (probably mostly due to the arrangement by John Duarte). I ended up transcribing it in A major where it lies a lot better on guitar. Rachel plays it in D major and it seems to work well. Here is a clip of the prelude:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmd7XMYDZMk

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Here is an interesting premiere: Iranian composer Niloufar Nourbakhsh's Veiled for cello and electronics. The title refers not only to veiled timbres, of course.

“This work was inspired by the Girls of Revolution Street movement in Iran … it was a beautiful and peaceful instance of resisting one of the most prevalent discriminatory laws of the Islamic Republic … the compulsory hijab (veil) for all women …” Niloufar has told The Violin Channel.

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Musicology Now update. The site seems to have fallen back into its usual desuetude. No new posts since the one in February on folk music and fascism.

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We have posted a few times on composer Mieczysław Weinberg and today a recording of two of his symphonies, nos. 2 and 21, is scheduled to be released by Deutsche Gramophon. Here is a live performance of the Symphony No. 21 from a different orchestra:

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Aha, now we find out who to blame! From the New Yorker:

In June, 1987, four men met at the Empress of Russia, a pub in London, and reinvented world music. Scholars and archivists had been documenting non-Western musical traditions for at least a century, as had, later, record labels such as Folkways and Nonesuch. Many technological innovations in film stock and sound recording had been spurred by the desire to record the cultural customs of the distant other. The men at the pub, all involved in the music business, were inspired by more modest aims. For one thing, they were frustrated that some record shops were filing the Nigerian guitarist King Sunny Adé, famous for his sparkly, ecstatic West African juju tunes, in the reggae section. At other shops, Adé’s records were tossed into the undifferentiated mass known as Rock/Pop, where they were overshadowed by abba. The men began sending stores materials for promoting artists from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. World music was meant to make the consumer experience easier.

So basically they figured out better ways of marketing music that was largely influenced by Western pop music:

Their efforts paid off. In 1988, an article in Newsweek described world music as an unlikely fad, a harbinger of where pop was going, now that rock was, as one d.j. put it, “totally dead.” Yet “world music” took on icky connotations, as a too easy way to convey that you were a cultured and cosmopolitan listener. And it relied on a kind of legibility. Rock may have been dead, but marketing musicians to listeners in America and Europe still required Caetano Veloso to become “the Bob Dylan of Brazil” and Adé “the African Bob Marley.” 

In the early two-thousands, the Bishops and the sound recordist Hisham Mayet started the label Sublime Frequencies. It was initially a response to the reigning approach of ethnomusicology, which they perceived as prizing a kind of detached, academic expertise. Sublime Frequencies’ early releases revelled in zealous naïveté and randomness. Its CDs skirted legality—adherence to copyright would have made releasing many of the recordings, full of unknown performers, practically impossible. One early compilation comprised Cambodian pop songs culled from the Oakland public library.

"Icky?" It was inevitable, I suppose. But I do occasionally want to hear some music that has not been influenced by Western pop.

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Bowing to the inevitable we begin our envoi with a song by King Sunny Adé:

And continue with Ravi Shankar, playing the classical music of Northern India, not influenced by Western pop music. I bought this album on vinyl in the late 60s.