Friday Miscellanea

Lots of musical Photoshop memes lately:

That's always been the argument for the bagpipe.

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Yes, I know that I am normally very critical of these so-called 'scientific' studies of music that usually seem to turn up something we already knew (or something likely false) but here is one study I kind of want to believe: Smarter people listen to instrumental music: study.

A new study published in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences suggests that those who prefer instrumental music tend to be more intelligent.

Study author Elena Racevska, a PhD student at Oxford Brookes University, became interested in how musical preference is tied to personality traits as she learned about the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis, which presumes that more intelligent individuals seek more novel experiences compared to less intelligent people.

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Musicology Now has sprung back to life with three new postings in May. One of them is on the promotion of Avengers: Endgame and the music therein, one of many posts on the site dealing with popular culture. Another is on music in Paris and still another is about jobs for musicologists in academia. The situation seems as dire as in English departments.

Since 2008, the number of tenured and tenure-track faculty at higher-education institutions has declined by 35%. The Delphi Project reports that contingent (adjunct) instructors now teach 73% of courses (AAUP Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, p. 3; Delphi Project). Working conditions for contingent faculty vary widely; most work on one-semester or one-year contracts with no promise of renewal. The pay and working conditions for part-time contingent laborers are especially poor: pay may be as low as $1800 per course, and more than 70% of institutions that employ part-time faculty do not contribute to their health insurance costs (AAUP op. cit., and AAUP Annual Report, Appendix III). Part-time contract work is the fastest-growing part of the academic work force (Coalition on the Academic Workforce). The few musicologists who do find tenure-track jobs in the academy see increasing workloads and declining research support at all but the most elite institutions.

And what they don't mention is that the growth of administrative positions has outpaced that of faculty for a couple of decades. If you want a job in academia your chances are best if you are a diversity specialist or member of a "bias response team." Administrative bloat on campus has replaced full-time faculty and resulted in the decline of quality in education.

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I've posted about the Grace Notes series at the Times Literary Supplement before, noting that its basic premiss biases it towards seeing composers as "pioneers," that is, as fundamentally innovators. This is an assumption taken from the modernist manifesto, of course, and I believe I cited composers like Mozart and Bach as being ones who tend to disprove the theory. Now they have a piece in the series on Mozart so let's see how they spin it!

A more familiar instance is the A major piano sonata, K. 331, conveying the musical sense of the word “rational” in its reliance on an utterly transparent series of ratios. Phrase answering phrase, two shorts followed by a long, and so on, contrast followed by return.

And then, within this tightly structured geometry, an explosion of invention, as idea follows idea, each seemingly fresher and more original than the last.

This is the problem that Mozart poses for our contemporary ears. His music is so balanced, clear, rational in its order, especially in comparison to the music that has come after, that it is easy – for performers as well as listeners – to miss the drama. Which is why we have to turn to the one place where drama cannot be ignored: opera.

In the original, they embed musical examples. The writer, Stephen Brown, goes on to discuss Beethoven's views on and uses of themes from Don Giovanni, which gets quite away from the issue, which is, was Mozart in any sense a "pioneer" or innovator in the radical way that, oh, Beethoven was? Instead, he focuses on how Mozart creates musical drama. Quite so! But that is a slightly different question. I think that Mozart's real role, somewhat akin to J. S. Bach's before him, was to look at all the advances in musical language discovered or invented by people like J. C. Bach and Joseph Haydn, and then to work out the possibilities, create a new synthesis and generally just to perfect what everyone else was doing.

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What would a Friday miscellanea be if we didn't have a look at what is new in the avant-garde? One new figure that seems to be getting attention is Christopher Rountree:

At the vanguard of new music, composer/conductor/curator Christopher Rountree, who is also a music director and founder of the renegade ensemble wild Up, is certainly having a moment. A seventh-generation Californian, the 36-year old Rountree is the curator of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Fluxus Festival (in conjunction with The Getty Research Institute), a celebration of the anti-establishment interdisciplinary art movement that emerged in the ’60s. The year-long bash is part of the orchestra’s centennial season, with the festival culminating in two very different 12-hour marathon concerts (May 25 at REDCAT; June 1 at Walt Disney Concert Hall). The programs aptly mirror Rountree’s audacious, forward-thinking philosophy.

A graduate of Cal State Long Beach, where he studied trombone performance and education, Rountree earned a master’s degree in orchestral conducting from the University of Michigan and has been on a musical tear ever since. In 2010 he created wild Up, whose eccentric blend of new music, pop, and performance art has been lauded by critics across the board, with The New York Times’s Zachary Woolfe writing in 2015, “Boisterously theatrical and exuberantly talented, the group barnstormed its way through works written by its own members, and a couple of punk-rock arrangements, too.”

Isn't it odd how the CVs of just about every musical renegade these days sound just like all the other musical renegades? And there always has to be some punk rock in there somewhere.

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Across the pond The Guardian continues its never-ending quest to erase all high culture, School music lessons should cover hip-hop and grime, says charity: Youth Music calls for a focus on ‘Stormzy rather than Mozart’ to engage hard-to-reach pupils. Oh yes, by all means, replace Mozart with hip-hop in music classes because the students would certainly never run into hip-hop in their everyday lives!

A national charity has called for school music lessons to be overhauled to include grime, electronic music and hip-hop after research found that more inclusive music-making improves attendance among pupils at risk of exclusion.

A four-year study by Youth Music concluded that too many schools fail to include current musical genres and recommended that lessons should focus on “Stormzy rather than Mozart” in order to engage hard-to-reach young people.

That really doesn't need comment does it?

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Hilary Hahn phones in an encore. No, it's not what you think! Usually the phrase indicates an indifferent, lackluster performance perhaps delivered with professionalism, but with little enthusiasm. That is never the case with Hilary Hahn. No, what happened was that she was not given sufficient time to play an encore after a performance with the Chicago Symphony because it would have resulted in unaffordable overtime charges by the musicians' union. Follow the link for both the lovely clip of the Gigue from the E major violin partita and for some illuminating comments.

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I have been nervously waiting to see if my tickets to the Salzburg Festival will make it through the somewhat unreliable services of the Mexican Post and this week they did! Austrian efficiency delivers once again. The procedure, in case you were wondering, for obtaining tickets to the Salzburg Festival, reputedly the biggest music festival in the world with around 250,000 tickets sold every year, begins in December of the previous year when programs are announced. I ordered tickets in January to several concerts online and surrendered my credit card information. Then in March or April you are "allotted" your tickets (I seem to have gotten all that I requested) and your card is charged. They then mail the tickets, priority post, to your home address and I received them late last week. Yahoo! For one of the concerts I am inviting my German ex-wife, her new husband and their daughter to a concert of the Vienna Philharmonic, a pretty good up-and-coming orchestra. For our envoi today, here they are with the Leonore Overture No. 3 from Fidelio by Beethoven conducted by Franz Welser-Möst in a performance from the 2015 Salzburg Festival.