Friday Miscellanea

Here is a headline designed to provoke: In praise of cultural elitism. The subhead explains that "We have become so tolerant of each other’s taste that taste no longer matters."

At present we have a series of ‘culture wars’ over a wide range of issues — race, gender, sexuality, power and privilege. But the one culture war we don’t have any more is over culture.

Yes, we fight about the ideological messages of literary texts, but not about matters of personal taste. We scrutinise and interrogate works of art for their latent — or blatant — sexism and racism. Often what matters is what the work in question says about marginalised groups — not what it says about us as cultured individuals.

It hasn’t always been so. There was a time when we judged people, labelled them, loved them or hated them because of their taste in literature, art and even pop music.

Yep, and here at the Music Salon we still try to evaluate music and musicians with musical criteria only. Read the whole thing for more disquieting but truthy statements.

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Last week was the 50th anniversary of the release of the Abbey Road, the Beatles last album. Hard to believe. The Wall Street Journal has a nice piece on it and the release of a new deluxe version of the album with remixes and previously unreleased outtakes.

The pity is, “Abbey Road” captures the Beatles on the cusp of a new maturity in their music-making. Their playing is more fluid than ever, with probing, contrapuntal guitar lines, and some fresh timbres, including those of a primitive but inventively used Moog synthesizer. Their vocal harmonies, always a hallmark, had become both more sophisticated and more playful.

All four contributed songs that covered vast musical ground—from Lennon’s soulful, proto-Minimalist “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” and his otherworldly fantasies, “Sun King” and “Because,” to Ringo Starr’s child-friendly “Octopus’s Garden” and Mr. McCartney’s popsy but sociopathic “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” George Harrison’s “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun” are among the best of his Beatles contributions.

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Here is an incident open to debate: Should a musician ever shout at an audience member?

This occurred during the second movement of the Beethoven violin concerto. Anne-Sophie Mutter said that she could not perform while watching someone illegally film her entire performance from feet away (not an exaggeration). The individual filming did talk back, though English was not their first language and there was some confusion. They would not put down their phone or leave (even after the audience booed). The president of the Cincinnati Symphony eventually stepped in to escort this person out. After all of this ASM told the audience that they could enjoy the beautiful introduction by the winds a second time.

There are 81 comments over at Slipped Disc.

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If you are unfamiliar with the use of classical style music in video games, you might want to have a look at this article: Game On: How Classical Music Helps Create the World of Online Role-Playing Games.

Today’s video games feature electro/symphonic scores by composers like Austin Wintory (the first composer to receive a Grammy nomination for a video game score); Andrew Skeet (who has released two albums of his video game music recorded with the London Philharmonic Orchestra); Jeremy Soule (who has composed the scores to more than 60 video games); and Chad Seiter (who has scored games from Tabloid Tycoon to Pokémon: Symphonic Evolutions. There are worldwide concert tours of video game music that attract audiences large enough to fill the 17,000 seats of the Hollywood Bowl.

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At the Washington Post, Anne Midgette talks about what conductors do: What does a conductor do, anyway? A music critic lays it out.

Fritz Reiner, a 20th-century Hungarian autocrat, famously conducted with gestures so restrained and small that once, a musician in the back of the orchestra brought in a pair of binoculars. (Reiner responded by writing “You’re fired” on a piece of paper and holding it up when he saw the binoculars come out.) Leonard Bernstein, by contrast — who was one of the most beloved conductors of the Vienna Philharmonic — leaped around the podium, gesticulated and thrust his pelvis in Elvis-worthy contortions. Yet there’s also a video of Bernstein conducting a movement of a Haydn symphony while standing, his arms folded, using his eyebrows and flicking motions of his eyes.

That video, which I have posted here, was Bernstein's tribute to the Vienna Phillies.

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For our loony item I offer this on the Arts Council of England (ACE) ACE urged to declare climate emergency.

Protesters say the funder’s draft strategy “neither addresses the urgency of the climate and ecological emergency, nor grasps the chance to trumpet boldly the pivotal role arts and culture play in bringing about societal changes”.

To which I reply: 500 Scientists Write U.N.: ‘There Is No Climate Emergency’

“There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm,” they note. “We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050.”

“If better approaches emerge, and they certainly will, we have ample time to reflect and adapt. The aim of international policy should be to provide reliable and affordable energy at all times, and throughout the world,” they state.

In particular, the scientists criticize the general-circulation models of climate on which international policy is currently founded as “unfit for their purpose.”

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The ideal pair of envoi today, I feel, would be Become Ocean by the very environmental John Luther Adams:

Followed by "Here Comes the Sun" by George Harrison from Abbey Road: