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I just ran across this box at Amazon: all of Esa-Pekka Salonen's recordings with Sony, sixty-one discs! And no reviews? Well, there will certainly be one as soon as I have listened to the box.
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We are sure talking about creativity a lot these days. Here is a piece over at Nautilus:
Is creativity a skill I can beef up like a weak muscle? Absolutely, says Mark Runco, a cognitive psychologist who studies creativity at the University of Georgia, Athens. “Everybody has creative potential, and most of us have quite a bit of room for growth,” he says. “That doesn’t mean anybody can be Picasso or Einstein, but it does mean we can all learn to be more creative.”I kind of doubt that. I'm pretty sure that one aspect of creativity is the quality of being very open. A lot of artists have said that ideas just come to them, float by, and all they have to do is grab them. This depends on being really open to that possibility. Also, they are leaving out all the work. Once an idea drifts into your ken you have to recognize what it is and figure out what to do with it. I suspect that not only can you not teach yourself to be creative, 6,000 self-help titles notwithstanding, I rather doubt that anyone can teach you. A lot of composers have stated pretty clearly that it is not possible to teach composition. Though you can certainly pretend to do so...
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Over at the Wall Street Journal there is an article about pianist Chloe Flower who, apparently, invokes the spirit of Liberace in her popular crossover efforts:
Ms. Flower grabbed attention online by posting videos of herself covering hip-hop hits by Drake and Kendrick Lamar in the style of Bach and Beethoven. She performs for her 237,000 Instagram followers in eye-catching outfits at her 63rd-floor apartment in Manhattan.More than a musical and stylistic influence, Liberace has been an accompanist of sorts to Ms. Flower’s career. She has the support of his estate, which lent her one of his bedazzled pianos. The co-star of her videos, it is a Baldwin with a see-through top and a 9-foot housing covered in mirrored tiles.
Let's have a look. This video is titled "Get What U Get":
For some reason Blogger won't embed. Well, that was certainly less, uh, interesting than promised. It is like a parody of bad crossover: take a prelude by Chopin (this is the E minor), use it as an introduction, then move to an upbeat tempo with a lot of gratuitous arpeggios. The video has every silly gesture and pose imaginable. And all the commentators love it! You know how sometimes critics talk about how a piece or a composer eliminates all the surface frivolity and goes right to the heart of a musical idea? Well, this is what it looks like when you do exactly the opposite.
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I check in over at Musicology Now every now and then, just to see it they have anything new up. Right now there is a new post attempting to nuance or problematize or something, country music with rap (or trap) influences or (t)rap music with country influences by black artists: Lil Nas X, the “Old Town Road,” and the (f)utility of genre labels.
On one occasion, reviewing an Alex Ross review of the Ojai festival I averred that he was more likely to punch knitting needles through his ears than give a critical comment on a piece of new music. But he seems to have overcome that failing:
Lil Nas X insists that his song is both country and trap—not one or the other<6>—Billboard is perhaps correct that, despite the eclectic mix of generic signifiers in the song, it is more of a hip hop/trap tune with country topoi (in both text and music) than the other way around.<7> We might use the same “it’s more blueish-green than greenish-blue” reasoning to argue that Run-DMC’s “Rock Box” is a rap song with prominent rock elements while Rage Against the Machine’s “Testify” is rap influenced rock. Yet conflating genre with style is of course a mistake; genre labels are notoriously unreliable at grouping music into coherent stylistic categories. True, if one uses historical style markers like the use of steel guitar and fiddle as a barometer, “Old Town Road” seems a poor fit for country radio. But the same can be said of songs by Sam Hunt and Florida Georgia Line, whose recent hits are indistinguishable from contemporary pop.There is a whole lot more similar prose, but it never seems to get close to talking about what genre and style are, let alone what the elements of a particular genre or style are. Is it just a reluctance to use musical terms or examples? That seems odd for someone who is an assistant professor of music theory:
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Alex Ross has a new piece up at The New Yorker that might be worth a look: Meredith Monk’s “ATLAS” and the L.A. Phil’s Extraordinary Season.
The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s centennial season, which recently ended with incandescent performances of Meredith Monk’s opera “atlas,” has no peer in modern orchestral history. More than fifty new scores shared space with classics of the repertory. Fully staged opera productions alternated with feats of avant-garde spectacle. The L.A. Phil, colossal in ambition and experimental in spirit, has redefined what an orchestra can be.I'm sorry I missed it! To cite just one example: "Esa-Pekka Salonen led one of the finest, most ferocious performances of “The Rite of Spring” I have heard". I'll bet it was something!
On one occasion, reviewing an Alex Ross review of the Ojai festival I averred that he was more likely to punch knitting needles through his ears than give a critical comment on a piece of new music. But he seems to have overcome that failing:
Not everything was a triumph. One commission, Philip Glass’s Twelfth Symphony, meandered interminably through material derived from David Bowie’s album “Lodger.” Bryce Dessner’s “Triptych,” another première, attempted to make an oratorio out of the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, with murky and often uncomfortable results. Tan Dun’s “Buddha Passion” wavered between visceral sensation and saccharine kitsch. Even when the L.A. Phil fails, though, it fails memorably. What the season resolutely lacked was the sort of cautious complacency that smothers so much of the classical world.Yes, let's not settle for cautious complacency!
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Something from the steady hands of Esa-Pekka Salonen would seem to be a logical envoi for today. Here he is conducting his own piece for orchestra Nyx (2011) with the Finnish Radio Symphony:
What are we intended to make of the woman in the bathtub? The drains were stopped one day last week and my bathtub filled with dirty nasty water. I did not thrash about in it.
ReplyDeleteThat is quite something, that AR criticized Phillip Glass and Tan Dun, even as obliquely as he did. The third fellow I've never heard of; as much as I like the idea of a contemporary oratorio one based on Mapplethorpe photographs doesn't sound very inviting; 'uncomfortable results' indeed.
I think I agree that 'creativity' is less taught than discovered within although habits can be taught and curiosity, liberal-mindedness, genuine tolerance for the unknown Other etc etc. Don't know if you saw it at Slipped Disc, but Norman L. noted an article by Sir James MacMillan in which the composer suggests-- following on last week's ridiculous article in the Guardian 'What is classical music for?'-- that there are probably well-intentioned people over there who find themselves asking 'What is the Guardian for?' after seeing such nonsense in print.
"I would expect to read in the Guardian-- a Left-wing journal-- constant probings of our ubiquitous pop industry and its umbilical link with the rich and powerful. But probings I find none. What I do find (which reminds me also of the BBC) is breathless, adoring praise for events such as the Glastonbury Festival and the elevation of the decidedly mediocre and banal to iconic genius status."
It's a thoughtful defense of music education in the schools & of what he calls "the grass-roots ecology of art music"; he goes on about his childhood in Ayrshire, reminding me of your own reminiscences.
Bryce Dessner is a guitarist/composer/songwriter with The National who has a few times previously wandered into contemporary classical composition. Yes, I was both surprised and pleased to see Ross critiquing three officially "cool" contemporary composers. Thanks for the link to the MacMillan article. Apparently what has happened at the Guardian, which used to have excellent classical music coverage (for example, Tom Service's year long surveys of the symphony and contemporary music), is a change of editor. The new one couldn't give a toss for the arts, apparently.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of "breathless, adoring praise" that is close to what the Wall Street Journal lavishes on its selected pop music icons--with remarkably little reason in the case of Chloe Flower!
When I think of Los Angeles I think of 'Hollywood', LAX, traffic nightmares, political corruption. So I missed following the wonderful season down there, too.
ReplyDeleteI deduced the existence of trap from graffiti on a traffic sign I see on my morning walks, where it existed along with house and I cannot at the moment remember what else. Went to the Internet and there it was. The close observation of nature returns many fruits.
The new editor at the Guardian does reeally think Glastonbury is super- super-fantastic, though. Maybe I should be paying more attention to their coverage of the Edinburgh Festival (know very little apart from the fact that MacMillan is featured at some point or another), if only to be able to compare it to that which'll accompany the Proms.
I suspect it was Salonen's tenure at the LA Phil that really turned them into a first-rate organization for new music.
ReplyDeleteInvoking Adorno in the Guardian to say there should be more Radiohead style music than Beethoven is kind of funny since in Aesthetic Theory Adorno wrote the following:
ReplyDelete... Recommending jazz and rock-and-roll instead of Beethoven does not demolish the affirmative lie of culture but rather furnishes barbarism and the profit interest of the culture industry with a subterfuge. The allegedly vital and uncorrupted nature of such products is synthetically processed by precisely those powers that are supposedly the target of the Great Refusal: These products are the truly corrupt. ...
So ... straight from Adorno jazz and rock merely bows before the corruption of the culture industry and ignores art. It's interesting this topic has come up because I was just writing about how it seems paradoxical that in their eagerness to defend high/low art distinctions Adorno's arguments live on more robustly in a notoriously conservative sort like Roger Scruton than in progressive poptimists and I make a point of quoting Adorno extensively to show what he had to say against jazz. He's been lambasted for how he denigrated jazz and I think, honestly, his Marxist-Leninist way of reading culture is the main thing. He did grant there were some capable jazz musicians later in his career but he was set on the idea that capitalism and administrative society doomed jazz to never rising above the level of commodity. That's the part that pop culture advocates invoking Adorno keep ignoring despite the fact that Adorno could probably not have been clearer. Wrote about that at some length over at the blog today.
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2019/07/at-mere-orthodoxy-brad-east-writes.html
Thanks, Wenatchee, I will have to hie myself over and have a read.
ReplyDeleteWenatchee's comment prompted me go read his post, which well repaid the effort (lots that I'm unfamiliar with over there). And also to re-read Taruskin's pages summarized by the clever expression 'polyphonic votive Masses were the deluxe models'. I won't dispute that that is true enough in the one respect: musicians cost money, certainly.
ReplyDeleteManchester Festival, not Edinburgh Festival, supra yesterday at 0959. Who knows how I can confuse Edinburgh and Manchester, tsk.
ReplyDeleteI noticed the Old Town Road Musicology Now post seems to be gone. It did seem a bit peculiar there was no discussion of the music in harmonic or textural terms, more just talk about how the song some how defies genre.
ReplyDeleteThing is, I've read a blog post discussing Old Town Road in musical terms written by Ethan Hein. He's a bit more progressive about everything than I am but what he did was discuss where the samples in the song come from, how the chord progression plays out, why it's in the key it's in and he gets into a bit of a history lesson on how the boundaries between what we call country and blues have been permeable, attempts by the recording industry to bracket out the musical styles by race withstanding.
http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2019/lil-nas-x-and-the-racial-politics-of-country-music/
Now you could go read his post and listen to the clips and decide, "Eh, it's not my cup of tea" but the thing is Hein actually discussed what's going on in the music.
The funny thing about use of the banjo is that it doesn't automatically signify country music. It often does, but if John Bullard plays Baroque music on the banjo it doesn't become country.
Yes, they seem to have revamped the site and dropped the last entry.
ReplyDeleteI think we had a debate with Ethan Hein in the comment section here a few years ago. He is most certainly one of those capable of really analyzing the contents of popular music!
And when Pauline Oliveros plays the accordion, it is not polka music!
Yes, the original Musicology Now post is vanished; hadn't read it and now the opportunity is gone, alas. He's familiar both here and from comments at Slipped Disc but Ethan Hein's post is a good read (although Lil Nas X, Billy Ray Cyrus, and 'Old Town Road' are unfamiliar territory). Listened to the unremixed 'Old Town Road' and then to a few more versions at random, more or less (DJ Glacier, Tempting Fate, Lil Pieo, Chop Daily-- for all I know those are teenagers in their basements hoping for 'the big break'). Done with it, but the cultural politics of race and their intersection with the different musics are in this instance a bit thought-provoking.
ReplyDeleteA brief moment of resolve to pay attention to contemporary popular music compelled me to read a notice in the local daily newspaper earlier this morning; alas, I missed the show last night:
ReplyDelete"Cuco is continuing to carve out a unique lane for himself through bilingual heartfelt stories about his own personal experiences.
'Ecstatic to put this song out after two years of working on it,' Cuco said in a news release. 'Finished it on my Apple headphones in the hotel room, off hydrocodone, post surgery, recovering from our accident.'"
The song is called 'Hydrocodone'. He has (on Spotify) three million monthly listeners, which I find truly worthy of head-shaking. (Lil Nas X has 48,575,726, which leads me to wonder who the eight artists are who have higher numbers of monthly listeners-- not Ann Hallenberg or Vivica Genaux, who are in the 5,000 range . I had somehow missed that he is renowned for the one song.)
FLASH DPRK News Service has tweeted this:
ReplyDelete"Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un politely declines offer by noted poet 'Lil Nas X' for remix of somewhat popular song 'Old Town Road', preferring original works."
DPRK News Service is indeed a parody account on Twitter. Sometimes amusing, sometimes not, as is the way of such things.
looks like the musicology now post on the old road is back up
ReplyDelete