Friday Miscellanea

Let's start with a photo:

What famous musician is this? Select the line below for the answer.

George Harrison in Hamburg, 1962

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Here is something really astonishing: the dance of the four little swans from the Tchaikovsky ballet done in Chinese acrobatic style.

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Over at NewMusicBox Brandon Lincoln Snyder has some interesting things to say about time, music and the Internet:

Compared to performance spaces in the “real world,” the internet is not a normal place for music. The scrubber bar in digital media players gives listeners a particular control over their listening experience, making it markedly different from any live circumstance. On one hand, some music made for live performance becomes more difficult to listen to on the internet. It can feel unnatural to listen to a piece without pause, to not click away before the end. On the other hand, this new relationship between listener and music opens the door to aesthetic avenues rarely exploited in the corporeal realm. The visuals, development, and interactivity of music are three components drastically redefined online.

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Over at On an Overgrown Path, we are warned that Classical music must beware of its new elitism:

A disturbing strand of elitism and snobbery is creeping into classical music, particularly in the UK. Country house opera is the new big thing and an increasingly condescending attitude is prevalent towards rock and other non-classical genres. Leading the charge with a recent online polemic is composer James MacMillan. In this he uses the term 'Left-wing' (his capitalisation) as a pejorative, a distasteful use overlooked by classical music's champagne activists who happily tweeted their approval of his views - "Well said Sir James". 

James MacMillan is dismissive of the emblematic Glastonbury Festival and in the same sentence denounces popular music for "the elevation of the decidedly mediocre and banal to iconic genius status". He then goes on to plead the case for classical music as "a struggling, hard-pressed cottage industry", which conveniently ignores the fact that the top five music directors of American orchestras earned a total of US$11.6 million in 2018. He also denounces how the "pop-dominated, mass-produced culture industry and big business are inherently bound together to make a large-scale system of control and exploitation". Which overlooks the fact that the industry leading classical labels of Decca and Deutsche Grammophon are owned by pop-dominated Universal Music. In this very big business - 2018 turnover of US$ 7.1 billion - classical musicians of the moment such as Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla sit, presumably comfortably, alongside the non-classical artists dismissed by MacMillan as "decidedly mediocre and banal".

MacMillan and other classical artists are accused of hypocrisy:

The reality is that the output of those artists denounced as mediocre and banal fund admirable recording projects such as Gražinytė-Tyla's Weinberg Symphonies. And also conveniently overlooked is that what Sir James describes as corporate music's "large-scale system of control and exploitation" facilitated the recording of his almost certainly loss-making The Lost Songs of St Kilda for Decca, and that he took the proverbial thirty pieces of silver from Universal Music's Deutsche Grammophon when he conducted a recording of violin concertos for them.

It's complex, of course, and, depending on how you frame it and what facts you select, you can make the case either way. In a world where a free market has given billions of dollars in revenue to pop artists and a tiny fraction of this to classical artists, it is hard for classical musicians not to feel ashamed that they are being subsidized by pop artists. Either that or they consciously avoid making any unfavorable aesthetic judgements about their pop colleagues. There is a lot to be said for just throwing up your hands and saying--perhaps even believing--that you love all music equally like you love all your children equally. I'm not temperamentally suited to take that path, however, so I think that you have to make individual judgments and make them as accurately as possible. Also, if you want a career in music, you are going to have to make a lot of pragmatic compromises.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education has a piece on an upcoming four-day academic conference on Bob Dylan: All Along the Ivory Tower.

The majority of the conferees split evenly between two camps — though it’s difficult to say just what these camps should be called. "Amateurs" and "professionals"? There’s probably something to that distinction, but "amateurism" in this instance doesn’t really indicate a disparity in scholarly interest or skill so much as it separates those who were getting paid from those who were paying out of their own pockets. Most uncharitably, to both parties, the division might be described as "geeks" versus "nerds"; more conventionally, I suppose, the participants could tentatively be grouped into "fans" and "scholars."

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The Guardian relates a new instance of the weaponizing of music: Florida city constantly plays Baby Shark to deter homeless from civic building.

City officials in West Palm Beach, Florida, are using extremely catchy children’s music to try and drive away homeless people from one of its civic buildings.

The city’s mayor, Keith James, confirmed to Fox News that the songs Baby Shark and Raining Tacos were being played at the patio of the Waterfront Lake Pavilion, where homeless people have been living.

At least they're not using Vivaldi or Mozart!

The city has previously attempted to use classical music to deter drug dealers, but the unit powering the speakers was smashed.

One homeless man Fox News spoke to said the children’s songs hadn’t been enough to move him on. “I still lay down in there,” Illaya Champion said. “But it’s on and on, the same songs.”

So they really hated the classical stuff?

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 I've been waiting for someone to mention this problem: Burnout: What musicians in 2019 are 'perpetually terrified' about.

Musicians burning out "is an age old story", Sam says, but social media and feeling like "you have to be on top all the time" adds extra pressure on the mental health of modern artists.

"Back in the day, you could have a crap gig and nobody would film you.

"Now everybody's got an iPhone - you have a bad day and it's going on the internet."

The 25-year-old says it's easy to become vain as a musician.

"It's so vacuous this job.

"You're constantly looking at pictures of yourself, talking about yourself. Then I come back home and all my mates want to talk about is me because I've been hanging out with Elton John and stuff."

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The world's newest opera house looks like an iceberg and it's in China:

Click to enlarge 

Henning Larsen designed the white angular volumes of Hangzhou Yuhang Opera to look like ice floes on a lake.

The waterfront performance venue in Hangzhou, China, contains a 1,400-seat auditorium, a 500-seat black box theatre, and an exhibition centre. Henning Larsen completed the building in May and it is now open to the public.

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For our envoi, let's listen to the Symphony No. 4 by James MacMillan. This is the BBC Scottish Orchestra conducted by Donald Runnicles.