Friday Miscellanea

Who killed the American arts? Which I think would be better phrased "Who killed the arts in America? But never mind, here is their point:

The arts are quarantined on campus, where the highest common denominator is theoretical pretension, and where no art of any worth is ever made. Entertainment is ghettoized on the internet, where the lowest common denominator, and the only sure way to make money, is sex and violence, and the even surer way is to combine sex and violence in the same image. No more Jackson Pollock and Elvis Presley. Today, the world looks to American ‘art’ only for pimps and porn — the imagery of slavery. 

The idea that Americans could educate their own sensibilities to international standards lasted little longer than Emerson and Whitman. By the late 1800s, the United States had adopted a university system along German lines, and ambitious Americans were funneling themselves into its specializing disciplines. By the early Sixties, University of California administrators were boasting that they had created a ‘multiversity’ geared to the needs of technocracy, while University of California students were rioting about an alleged lack of free speech.

By the end of the Sixties, students and administrators had arrived at a Westphalian peace. The students permitted the university to stay in the business of training specialists and technicians. The university let the students redefine the humanistic curriculum. Henceforth, the purpose of liberal education was to prevent the education of classical liberals.

Some huge claims there, but I'm not entirely sure they are wrong. Something went wrong, that's for sure.

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The New York Times has weighed in with a substantial article on the incident where violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter stopped a performance to demand that an audience member stop recording and videoing her performance. There was a lot of controversy at the time and this piece takes a broader look at the issue and contains some comments from Mutter. The article is headed with a photo of a cast member of a musical snatching a phone out of the hands of an audience member and tossing it under the risers.

Both artists were cheered — first in person, later on social media — for taking a stand against the growing ranks of smartphone addicts who cannot resist snapping pictures and making recordings that are often prohibited by rule or by law, that are distracting to performers and patrons, and that can constitute a form of intellectual property theft.

And here is the counterpoint:

One dissenter argued on Twitter that “people who wholly submit to and enforce outdated/archaic concert rituals that require insane amounts of cultural capital to begin with are going to be completely irrelevant in about 15 years’ time.”

Mutter commented:

Ms. Mutter, the German violinist who stopped mid-concerto, said she was in favor of sealing phones at concerts. In her first interview about the Cincinnati incident, Ms. Mutter said that she had grown distracted as she played the first movement of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto because a woman in the first row was holding up her phone and filming her. After Ms. Mutter shot her stern looks, she said, the woman put down her phone.

“The first movement is over, and I’m trying to concentrate and stay calm,” Ms. Mutter recalled. “Then she takes out a second phone, and a power bank. I continued the second movement, but it’s already boiling in me. I’m totally out of the flow.”

“I feel violated in my rights, of my artistic property,” she said, noting that unauthorized filming is illegal. “As an artist you take such care when doing a recording — that you have your own sound engineer, that the mics are hung in the right spots. The sound is a part of you, you want your voice replicated in a way that really represents what you have worked on for an entire life.”

Should a serious artist like Mutter be accorded a minimum of respect? Beyond question, in my view. Should that extend to doing nothing to disturb the performance or the performer? Yes.

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 Speaking of being disturbed, The Atlantic has a big piece on the ubiquitous noises of high-tech civilization: Why Everything Is Getting Louder. It is hard to excerpt, but the bottom line is that there are places, especially in Arizona, where they are  building huge data storage centers with "chillers" that keep the equipment at a constant cool temperature, and the consequence is that there is an ubiquitous hum that permeates everywhere. It drives some people up the wall.

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Norman Lebrecht's album of the week is a box of five discs of Dmitri Shostakovich playing his own compositions. We don't usually have this much from a composer of his stature, plus he was an excellent pianist. Lebrecht calls the album "indispensible". Maybe so, maybe so.

But the truly shattering experience is saved for the final disc where Shostakovich sits down in 1954 with his friend and neighbour, Mieczyslaw Weinberg and plays his new symphony, the tenth, four-handed on his home piano. Mark the date. Stalin has been dead for a year and Weinberg has been sprung from an NKVD cell by the brave intervention of Shostakovich. The tenth symphony draws a line under an era of sheer terror and moves tentatively into light, barely daring to imagine a better future. I listen open-mouthed. Rarely has music so accurately reflected a moment in history, projecting and preserving it for all time. Indispensable? That might be an understatement.

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 Why is it that every headline in the newspaper turns out to be, more or less, an untruth? For example, in the New York Times: The Unsingable Music That Stumped a Diva. Well, of course it didn't. She just worked on it until she mastered the technical problems:

On paper, John Zorn’s “Jumalattaret” — which has its New York premiere at the Park Avenue Armory on Oct. 15, with Ms. Hannigan joined by the pianist Stephen Gosling — looks impossible: breathless vocalise; abrupt transitions from head-spinning complexity to folk-song simplicity; and, within the span of a single measure, whispering, squeaking and throat-singing like a winter storm.

It’s the kind of piece that leaves you asking, repeatedly, over the course of its 25 minutes: Can a voice even do this? The answer, for Ms. Hannigan, is yes. It took a lot of practice, a thwarted summer vacation, and a well-timed email to get there. But once she and Mr. Gosling gave the first performance of “Jumalattaret,” it was clear Mr. Zorn had created something special.

Every story like this follows exactly the same template. It would be much more interesting if someone wrote a piece that really was impossible and they did an article on why it was impossible.

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For today's example of psychobabble we offer this item: Why music has such profound effects on the brain.

We are essentially pattern-recognizing machines. Every great musician knows that a great performance involves building up tension to an eventual release. And that's because that taps into our pattern recognition apparatus in the brain. Our brain is trying to figure out what's going to happen next. So often, we love music that has a predictable pattern, maybe that we've heard before, but that either delays that release of tension like Barber's Adagio for Strings. You know the melody just weaves around the final climax over and over and over again.

Well, yes, but this describes only one type of music: that which follows a typical narrative pattern. For nearly a hundred years, composers have been finding other ways of structuring music that avoids this pattern. So again, a psychological theory that goes wrong because it simply starts with an incorrect assumption.

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The answer is "no." Is there a case for considering New Age music as art? Or, as The New Yorker avers: The Case for New Age Music as American Folk Art.

How did New Age end up carrying so much baggage in our musical memory? Its fall from grace, when it once soared, might be due to New Age’s status as one of the most heavily marketed musical genres, making it the equivalent of aural snake oil, to be sold on the yoga-conference circuit and in corporate supplement chains. It’s not often that an emerging style of music becomes indistinguishable from a wellness product—one with excessive claims promising listeners reduced anxiety, altered biorhythms, and the soothing of inflamed prostates.

Alternatively, the aural equivalent of tapioca or tofu. And it tends to inflame, not sooth my prostate. Or soul, to make a more salubrious metaphor.

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And now the moment you have been waiting for, the much anticipated Friday Miscellanea envoi of the week. Today we shall have two. First, the Beethoven Violin Concerto that Anne-Sophie Mutter was playing, or trying to, when she was disturbed by the amateur videographer.

And here is Shostakovich playing the last prelude and fugue from his set of 24 Preludes and Fugues: