Why did Rihanna and Calvin Harris’s “We Found Love” top the charts for 10 weeks? Partly because of the song’s unconventional structure, say podcasters Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding. The two examine “We Found Love”—and more than a dozen other 21st-century hits—in their book, “Switched on Pop,” which comes out Friday.The volume borrows its title from the podcast the two 33-year-old friends began five years ago about the subtle techniques shaping today’s Top 40 hits. Mr. Sloan is a University of Southern California musicologist and Mr. Harding is a songwriter and musician who plays the guitar, drums and keyboards, as well as other instruments. Their podcast and book are filled with sophisticated but accessible discussions of pop hits from the 2000s and 2010s, from the catchy hook of Ariana Grande’s “Break Free” to Drake’s use of simple rhymes in “God’s Plan.”
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The Guardian, on the other hand, takes a look at the characteristics of English music: This isle is full of noises: the trouble with 'English music'
When Arnold Schoenberg died in 1951, Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote that the composer “meant nothing to me – but as he apparently meant a lot to a lot of other people I daresay it is all my own fault.” To English composers working in the 1920s – such as Vaughan Williams, Herbert Howells and Gerald Finzi – the sounds of European modernism, and especially the 12-tone music of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, came to symbolise disorder and chaos. Following the first world war, stability and reassurance, folksong and archaic modality, the refuge of unspoilt rural idylls, had become the prevalent direction of English music. Folksong earthed music in fundamental truths – the very same roots that Schoenberg’s atonality, apparently, weeded out.
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There is something going on at the Grand Teton Music Festival, but what it is ain't exactly clear:
There are some hints in the comments.The Board of the Grand Teton Music Festival met last night and decided to reinvite three musicians who had been dismissed for ‘disruptive behaviour’. Two of the musicians, Kristen Linfante and Juan de Gomar, are members of the orchestra’s Players’ Committee; the third, Jennifer Ross, was principal second violin of the Pittsburgh Symphony.Their dismissal provoked widespread protests, together with a threat from conductor Donald Runnicles to quit the festival. Runnicles Donald flew in to attend this board meeting.High-profile coverage on Slipped Disc and local media have forced the festival director, Andrew Palmer Todd, to back down.
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I'm not the only one to be critical of the Grawemeyer Award: THE WORLD’S TOP COMPOSER PRIZE HAS TURNED INTO A SORRY IN-JOKE.
The Grawemeyer Award – a life-changing $100,000 prize for the best composer of the year – hit rock bottom this week with the selection of a Californian academic, Lei Liang, who had a climate change piece performed in Boston.But lots of people in the comments think this was an unfair characterization.
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Sometimes really creative promotion can go--horribly--wrong: Cameron Carpenter and the Feedback Loop of Notoriety.
In November 2014, Sony Masterworks released a documentary called “Cameron Carpenter: The Sound of My Life.” Intended to accompany the American organist’s album “If You Could Read My Mind,” released that August, the film included footage of Carpenter ripping off his T-shirt to reveal a sculpted chest; dancing at the once-legendary Berlin gay party Chantal’s House of Shame; and moodily smoking a cigarette while leaning against an electrical pole. And that’s just the two-minute trailer. The footage looks like a cringe-worthy attempt to create the mythology of a rock star—if everything the director knew about rock stars was gleaned, say, from a former groupie’s nephew.
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I'm not finding many items for the miscellanea today, but NewMusicBox has something interesting: TEACHING INEQUALITY: CONSEQUENCES OF TRADITIONAL MUSIC THEORY PEDAGOGY.
Western art music is not a universal language. It does some things well, other things not as well, and many things not at all. And yet, although the majority of undergraduate students do not listen regularly to this style of music, the standard theory curriculum continues to privilege it at the expense of all other styles. Given this disconnect, how can we justify our near-exclusive reliance on traditional pedagogy, especially in situations where it isn’t necessary to do so? What biases do we create in our students when we declare Western art music to be mandatory knowledge for anyone pursuing formal studies in music? What biases does this reveal in us?There are some characteristic kinds of arguments that are frequently used these days that one should beware of. A typical strategy is to put your most glaring assumption right up front and hope that no-one will notice that it is just an assumption. This is a type of "begging the question" that has become so prevalent that one forgets it is a logical fallacy. Apart from the first sentence in the above quote, which is somewhat true, everything else here is a concocted assumption thrown against the wall in hopes that it will stick. Let's list some of them:
- the majority of undergraduate students don't listen regularly to Western art music? Really? Why oh why are they enrolled in music school then?
- "standard" theory "privileges" Western art music in university music departments because they are university music departments. The word "privileges" is a smear because it replaces the correct words "focuses on" or "gives foundational place to."
- "disconnect" is another clever smuggling in of assumptions through special vocabulary--what is disconnected from what?
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Time for our envoi. The Guardian article mentioned a piece by Vaughan Williams I didn't know, his Flos Campi, an elegy to the fallen in WWI. Here is a performance by the Bournemouth Sinfonietta:
Western musical literacy as it developed from the customs and systems developed since Carolingian consolidation of liturgical music could definitely be construed as a long history of white music. The elephant in the room is making a point of arguing that mechanically/electronically derived musical literacy, music literacy based on the consumption, imitation, adaptation, and modification of norms and customs of musical literacy mediated by recording technology, is something I can agree should be a factor in music education.
ReplyDeleteUndergrad and grad school level instruction can't "catch up" for people who haven't spent ten to twenty years already learning to master instruments or singing along the way. This might be why music education courses for non-majors vs majors developed. I was able to take a survey of popular music course that music majors couldn't take but because I was a music minor I could take it.
Some things sort of stick out for me in this:
"A curriculum based nearly exclusively on the music of dead white European men is not politically neutral. The only reason Western art music is the benchmark by which other styles are validated or repudiated is because whites made it so. When Beyonce’s triads are as legitimate as Beethoven’s, reproducing without critique a system that excludes black music from the basic theory sequence is a political choice. This denial of the legitimacy of black music contributes to the ongoing denial of the legitimacy of black people. Injustice unchecked remains injustice."
White people who invented the university system in Western education as we know it and developed written music conventions might have a historical advantage ... but it's not as though there aren't written musical systems in Asian music traditions, for instance. The implicit take that notational systems favor white music traditions makes a sort of "gut" sense but it's not necessarily accurate. Thai music has notational conventions of its own.
The denial of the legitimacy of black music depends on a still latent assumption that black music primarily refers to music recorded on machines. The written-down and published scores of George Walker, Florence Price, William Levi Dawson, William Grant Still, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Joseph Bologne Chevalier St. George, Scott Joplin, James Scott, and more recently Julius Eastman exist in score form, right? I am wondering whether a musician whose background comes from jazz and rock may be forgetting the legacy of black musicians who wrote scores. AfriClassical is a blog dedicated to exploring and demonstrating how long-standing and rich the musical works made by black musicians can be. We guitarists can hardly forget the Afro-Cuban composer Leo Brouwer, for instance. The Gallen CD set is amazing, by the way. :)
The Wesley Morris piece at the NYT 1619 project seemed to tilt in a similar direction to the NMB piece quoted, and that tilt seems to be toward defining black music as recorded over against notes on the page. I am supportive of musicians learning both notes-on-the-page literacy and recording techniques literacy. I am concerned that the NMB contributors can create an artificial dichotomy between these two conventions of musical literacy. The Baroque era had first practice and second practice, we can have a first practice and second practice of a different sort in the 21st century.
Fans of black American popular music can risk obliterating any space for black composers across the world who have contributed to the "classical" music traditions if they define black music strictly in terms of the recording technologies of the commercial music industry.
I'm trying to not write quite as much because I just got Asya Selyutina's recording of Koshkin's preludes and fugues 1-12 today and I may be a hermit from blogging for a while as I soak up the musical glory of that CD and the Ourkouzounov sonatas CD I should have by next week and study the Brouwer sonatas a bit more.
ReplyDeleteBut I couldn't resist commenting about the NMB article. Music education that's geared toward the idea that students will be making a living recording music actually seems like a more pernicious myth than the myth that Western music notational conventions are somehow "white" when we have more than enough classical music composed by black composers to prove that's not the case. For that matter, when there are classical composers from Asia and of Asian American descent who use the Western musical notational systems; when the first published musical work in Western notation by a Native American was back in 1863 with Thomas Commuck's Indian Melodies hymnal; I don't think it's even historically fair or accurate to say Western musical notation is "white". This seems like another fusilade against the negative impact of German dominance in Anglo-American music education programs that has been transformed into a white vs black narrative that simplifies in harmful ways. When Thomas A. Dorsey was plugging his songs in the 1930s and 1940s he was touring with star singers to help promote the publication of his sheet music.
There can be erasures in the mechanical music traditions and practices. Charles Tindley wrote a lot of hymns but because he was not prone to writing them down in score form and people recorded them the nascent music industry credited the performing artists as having written hymns that gospel specialists such as Anthony Heilbut have documented were written by Charles Tindley. That's to say Mark Burford's book Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field is proving to be a fantastic, informative read.
At the risk of commenting away, what can happen with appeals to Beethoven or appeals to Beyonce is the survivorship bias can dominate in both simplified appeals. I was writing about that a little on a recurring trend of "worship wars" over church music, battles between advocates of popular styles and traditionalist/literate styles. Wrote about that a bit over here:
ReplyDeletehttps://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2019/12/why-pop-music-is-so-bad-these-days.html
Now Beyonce is no less top of the pyramid in popular music than Beethoven is in the prestige system of concert music. If the NMB contributor were comparing The Knack to Simon Molitor then at least the comparison wouldn't be between peak and peak in terms of brand recognition.
What can make the Molk polemic seem in bad faith is the reality that you can go find transcriptions of Robert Johnson and Stevie Wonder and John Lee Hooker songs. You can get sheet music for Hank Williams Sr. songs, too. Music that is popular enough has proven time and again to be popular enough that it gets transcribed into music notation.
Thanks Wenatchee for going into the trenches in a way that I didn't really want to. My view is that all projects that involve turning questions of aesthetic quality into questions of identity politics are crap.
ReplyDeleteRalph Vaughan Williams is an interesting case because he is in a certain way the opposite of Schoenberg. Schoenberg had the courage to follow the implications of his musical development (even if it turned out less well than he hoped) while Vaughan Williams pulled back from that and kept to a more limited safe path. To his credit VW's symphonies are all very individual works but I made the mistake of actually reviewing the scores of some of them years ago. Doing that made it clear why they don't travel outside of the UK in the concert hall.
ReplyDeleteWhen I say pulled back what I am referring to are pieces such as Flos Campi that are quite original but were not pursued or toughened up. The fatal turn I think occurred with the Symphony 2 where the original version (recorded for the first time by Hickox 20 years ago) and the later revisions. The original was a bit disorganized but had many striking and beautiful passages. Instead of figuring out how to retain those in a tighter structure VW excised them and made a conventional programmatic Symphonic tone poem that veers close to film music at times.
But there's another aspect to VW's music which as I noted doesn't travel well in the concert hall. Nonetheless it seems to live quite well in the world of the CD/LP. There are a few artists like that who are not played much in concerts but have many recordings. Perhaps the music is more suited to home or background listening.
I suspect the whole history of music in the 20th century is going to see some profound re-evaluations. I took a "History of 20th Century Music" course in 1976 when the century was only 3/4 along and the view from now is very different. Back then the big names were Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartók and Ligeti. Stockhausen was mostly ignored, probably because no-one was quite sure what he was up to. Shostakovich was complete anathema because everyone did know what he was up to: nothing more than the old, barnacle-encrusted tonal forms like the symphony. The minimalists were just starting to be known, but theorists and historians certainly didn't take them seriously.
ReplyDeleteI took another course in graduate school 20 years later called "20th Century Theory and Analysis" and, as it was taught by the same professor, it covered much the same ground. There were a couple of names that got a lot more attention: Olivier Messiaen for one, and Morton Feldman. I analyzed his Rothko Chapel as a final assignment.
What will the historians and theorists be saying in 2050? Will the dust have cleared and the really important composers be easily seen? Or will a course on 20th century music start with this introduction:
"Up until the mid-century music was largely dominated by traditional styles like the so-called "classical" music though more and more blues and jazz became predominant. By the 1960s the main wave of modern music in the persons of the Beatles and Rolling Stones had come to dominate the airwaves and concert venues. By the end of the century the more language-based styles like hip-hop and rap were the leading musical forms as their creators came to dominate not only popular culture but also fashion and design..."