Friday Miscellanea

The trend continues: Neil Young joins rights harvest with sale of half his songbook.

Singer-songwriter Neil Young has sold a half share of the rights to his entire catalogue of 1,180 songs to London-listed specialist investment firm Hipgnosis Songs Fund, the company said on Wednesday. The rise of streaming services means artists such as Dylan and Young are able to reach an ever-expanding audience of fans from a younger generation.

Well, that is the point, I suppose. It is partly about making a lot of money--in another article it was estimated that the deal puts $150 million in Neil Young's pocket--but equally important is that the catalogue be marketed through the new streaming media.

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The Boston Globe muses on the aftermath of the changes in the music world: Classical musicians, don’t play the finale on these COVID-era changes.

Classical music thrives on collective encounters, but even concerts experienced in large crowds — remember those? — are particularly meaningful when they simultaneously address the more private precincts of the self. Yes, musical organizations will talk about learning pragmatic lessons from this pandemic. But as the industry begins the long march back toward some semblance of normalcy, let’s hope the lessons internalized also include keeping sight of the art form’s unique modes of immediacy, of intimacy, of direct expression, and of vulnerability. These qualities carried classical music through 2020 — and many of the rest of us too.

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The Metropolitan Opera in New York has been going through a particularly fraught time: Orchestra Members Fire Back at Metropolitan Opera’s Decision to Hire Non-Met Musicians for Virtual Gala.

The Met Orchestra Musicians have issued a statement in response to the Metropolitan Opera’s decision to utilize European musicians for its upcoming gala showcase.

In the statement, the musicians noted that they have been unpaid for 10 months and that the Met’s actions have been an “outlier” in the industry.

“Every other major orchestra has been compensated since the very beginning of the pandemic. Met management is using the pandemic opportunistically. They are not seeking a short-term crisis-plan to balance out pandemic circumstances. They are seeking permanent cuts. The cuts they seek are so deep that the orchestra would need unrealistic salary gains over the next quarter-century just to get back to current salaries,” says the statement.

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The New Republic has a piece musing about how creativity can be saved. The Artist Isn’t Dead:Eulogies for the creative class are premature. Art workers can organize—and survive.

Art workers are but a slice of the art world, which itself is a portion of the wider culture industry that is verging on collapse. Many creative people today are swimming barely above the poverty line. The walls are caving in everywhere: Book publishing is contracting and consolidating; the music industry is taking huge blows in the transition to streaming; and journalism, as The Observer reported recently, shed 260,000 jobs between 2000 and 2018 (far outstripping the losses in coal mining, it adds). 

Contemporary critics often attribute this downward spiral to the rise of exploitative tech platforms: Musicians can release an album on Bandcamp, but they’re still broke; documentarians can distribute their film online, but people can easily watch for free; journalists can blog until their fingers fall off, and never see a cent.

The article poses some possible solutions based on collective bargaining and investment in infrastructure and education, but the problem is larger than that. The basic truth, as Jordan Peterson has pointed out, is that it is very hard to monetize creativity. At least, until you have achieved the heights of pop stardom, in which case you can sell your back catalogue for hundreds of millions.

Maybe the problem lies in seeing creativity as being only a component of something we call the "cultural industry" instead of thinking of it as one component of being human. Creativity is an essential in solving all the problems of life, not just ones involved in putting paint on canvas or notes on paper.

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James Wood in the London Review of Books takes a look at the current batch of books on Beethoven: A Great Deaf Bear.

It wasn’t till my early twenties that I started listening to the piano sonatas as they demand to be heard: evenly, carefully. Later, I worked through a few on the piano, cold-fingered after years of keyboard hibernation. The Beethoven who emerged turned out to be closer in spirit and practice to Tallis and Byrd than I had imagined. This was a Beethoven not of overwhelming symphonic force but of delicate counterpoint and relentless chromatic logic, a composer who explores the subtlest harmonic developments, who delights in exploring fugues, dissonance, form. I was struck above all by Beethoven’s contradictions – he was a conventional master of the unexpected, an explosive student of tradition. The strictest complexity is placed alongside the fiercest simplicity: a flaying double fugue will suddenly give way to a clear and lovely melody, flowing like water.

I didn't start listening carefully to the Beethoven piano sonatas until after I had moved to Mexico--not that many years ago in fact. They are so central to the whole sweep of Western European music that it is astonishing to me that we never studied them in my university years. Many professors take them for granted and think of them as "old hat," music that everyone knows. But if you are making a New Year's resolution to spend more time listening to music, I can only suggest buying the very inexpensive Dover edition of the piano sonatas and picking up an integral recording. I would recommend Friedrich Gulda or the new one by Igor Levit. You really can't have a more fulfilling musical experience.

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Which brings us to our envoi and, of course, a Beethoven piano sonata. Here is Friedrich Gulda with op. 111 recorded in 1967: