Friday Miscellanea

 The Marketwatch section of the Wall Street Journal weighs in on the economics of musicians selling their catalogues:

And while Levine noted that he can’t speak to what’s actually going on in Dylan’s head, the legendary artist is 79 years old. And selling your entire catalog, or deciding whom to leave it to, is a complicated transaction at any age, at any time. “It’s not the kind of thing you want to wait to do when you are not in good shape,” Levine said.

As noted, Dylan is in a league of his own when it comes to his catalog sale — except for the Beatles, of course. But the Beatles’ situation was also more complicated because one person didn’t own the rights to all of the songs, the way Dylan owned the rights to most of his work.

“A lot of creators are known for two big songs or three big songs … with Dylan, there’s ‘The Times They Are A-Changin,’ ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,’ ‘Forever Young,’ ” Levine observed. “Universal bought everything, all the rights, all the songs — it’s incredible.”

“It’s a win for Universal, and I think it’s a win for Dylan, too,” he added. “I can’t imagine he needed to sell this; I think he wanted to sell it, and he wanted his songs owned by somebody who would take care of them.”

Read the whole thing.

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This was inevitable, I suppose. Beside the Pointe: Diversity and bias obsessions come for Swan Lake.

Classical ballet has largely escaped the revisionist destruction that hit the opera and theater stages years ago. Amazingly, audiences could still see Swan Lake and La Bayadere as their choreographers and composers intended them, with all the conventions and costumes of nineteenth-century fairytale intact. To be sure, feminists have been agitating against the ethereal body type championed by choreographer George Balanchine, sadly to intermittent success. But the adolescent politicizing that has been inflicted on defenseless operas has been absent from the ballet stage. That immunity has undoubtedly now ended. Expect to see classical ballets wrenched awkwardly into dumbshows about social justice.

It is worth having a look at the whole article for some interesting points about classical dance traditions.

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Sometimes one gets the feeling that knowledge and learning itself has become not only dispensable, but entirely unfashionable. So it is reassuring to read that the modern growth of the fantasy genre was founded by two quite knowledgeable and scholarly people:

The heart of fantasy literature grows out of the fiction and scholarly legacy of two University of Oxford medievalists: J R R Tolkien and C S Lewis. It is well known that Tolkien and Lewis were friends and colleagues who belonged to a writing group called the Inklings where they shared drafts of their poetry and fiction at Oxford. There they workshopped what would become Tolkien’s Middle-earth books, beginning with the children’s novel The Hobbit (1937), and followed in the 1950s with The Lord of the Rings and Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series, which was explicitly aimed at children. Tolkien’s influence on fantasy is so important that in the 1990s the American scholar Brian Attebery defined the genre ‘not by boundaries but by a centre’: Tolkien’s Middle-earth. ‘Tolkien’s form of fantasy, for readers in English, is our mental template’ for all fantasy, he suggests in Strategies of Fantasy (1992). Lewis’s books, meanwhile, are iconic as both children’s literature and fantasy. Their recurring plot structure of modern-day children slipping out of this world to save a magical, medieval otherworld has become one of the most common approaches to the genre, identified in Farah Mendlesohn’s taxonomy of fantasy as the ‘portal-quest’.

What is less known is that Tolkien and Lewis also designed and established the curriculum for Oxford’s developing English School, and through it educated a second generation of important children’s fantasy authors in their own intellectual image. Put in place in 1931, this curriculum focused on the medieval period to the near-exclusion of other eras

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Do they never tire of beating this dead horse: The Stubborn Classism of Classical Music. Yes, classical music is patronized by, largely enjoyed by and created by a rather select group of people. That's because it is emphatically not popular music. But there are always those who want to spin a more morally fraught narrative:

Few art forms on earth are more indebted to class privilege than Western classical music. For most of its history, it has relied on monarchs, aristocrats, and wealthy patrons even to exist. We have Haydn because of a prince, Mozart and Beethoven because of a baron, Stravinsky and Copland because of an heiress, and Wagner because of a king. We have an entire genre largely because, at Versailles in the seventeenth century, the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully was willing to indulge his employer, Louis XIV, by writing operas that glorified the splendors of the throne. Philanthropists, corporations, and trusts have displaced the kings and barons of yore, but as givers of grants and commissions, they might as well wear a crown.

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2020: The year the music died.

“It’s always a hard way to make a living, and now it seems almost impossible,” said singer-songwriter Inara George.

The costs of this year in music have been both systemic and intimate. Artists such as singer-songwriter John Prine, Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger, Afropop titan Manu Dibango, jazz paterfamilias Ellis Marsalis and composer Harold Budd succumbed to COVID-19. Countless others have quietly struggled with addiction, mental health, isolation and financial ruin. Independent L.A. venues such as the Satellite have closed for good, and others — including the Troubadour, Bootleg Theater and Zebulon — say it’s a matter of time, depending on whether federal help ever arrives.

Meanwhile, talent agencies and booking firms like Paradigm slashed staff, and even global companies such as Coachella promoter AEG cut salaries and laid off employees. “We’ve simply never experienced times like these, in which our operations have come to a complete stop due to a force beyond our control,” AEG’s chief executive Dan Beckerman said in June. Live Nation, America’s largest concert promoter, saw its quarterly revenues annihilated by 98% over the summer and 95% in the fall.

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Here is a piece of unquestionable good news: DUBAI SIGNS ON WITH JERUSALEM ACADEMY OF MUSIC AND DANCE.

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More good news: WIGMORE HALL STAGES 36 CONCERTS IN JANUARY.

On January 8 the hall will launch its self-funded ‘Wigmore Soloists’ led by the British clarinettist Michael Collins and Dutch violinist Isabelle van Keulen. The ensemble will announce itself with Schubert’s Octet for clarinet, bassoon, horn, double bass and string quartet.

On January 9, new music group Apartment House will stage a day-long celebration of the music of Morton Feldman (1926–1987).

On January 29, British tenor David Webb will join a Schubert marathon, having just arrived from a 300mile cycle ride from Cornwall on a ‘Winter Journey’ to raise funds for mental health charities MIND and Music Minds Matter.

And much more.

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Let's give that Schubert Octet a listen, shall we? It is not a brief work!