Friday Miscellanea

Further to the controversy about the Journal of Schenkerian Studies is this thoughtful article in Quillette: The Attack on Timothy Jackson Is an Assault on Liberal Education.

Philosophy, Plato wrote, begins in wonder. At the beginning of thinking there is an affect of astonishment. Will students who grew up with hip hop music experience wonder and astonishment if they’re just taught about hip-hop, its history and its internal grammar? Some may perhaps be surprised that hip hop has a history, as well as historical antecedents, and that there is also a technique of composition, at times complex. But compare that with the radical defamiliarization entailed by exposing the same students, say from urban areas, who listen to pop or hip hop, to the French baroque or to the Art of Fugue. Are we so sure that students who chose to attend music school want to hear and analyze what they are already familiar with? Are we so confident that students in literature want to read and reflect on rap lyrics or Beyoncé rather than Faulkner or Melville or Samuel Beckett? Should colleges and universities situated in rural America teach country music and reality TV? Should they not instead fulfill their mission of exposing students to Fellini and Bergman and urban culture, their mission of taking their students to a different intellectual and aesthetic space?

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 The Guardian has this interesting piece. Caroline Shaw: what next for the Pulitzer-winner who toured with Kanye? Opera – and Abba.

When Caroline Shaw became, at the age of 30, the youngest ever winner of the Pulitzer prize for music, she described herself as “a musician who wrote music” rather than as “a composer”. Partita, her winning score, is a joyful rollercoaster of a work, encompassing song, speech and virtually every vocal technique you can imagine. It was written for Shaw’s own group, Roomful of Teeth.

Eight years on, she’s still wary of defining herself too narrowly. “Composer, for some people, can mean something very particular,” she says, “and I’m trying to make sure I don’t get swallowed up into only one community.” Not that Shaw’s range shows any sign of narrowing: even a small sample of her work over the past few years throws up an array of names not often seen together: rappers Kanye West and Nas, soprano Renée Fleming, mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry, pianist Jonathan Biss. She has written film scores, sung on others, was the soloist in her own violin concerto, and even managed a cameo appearance as herself in Amazon Studio’s comedy drama Mozart in the Jungle. A year ago, Orange, a recording of her string quartets, won the Attacca Quartet a Grammy.

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From Slipped Disc comes this clip of gangnam-style conductor Yuri Simonov:

 Also from Slipped Disc (where else?) is this collection of iPhone sound effects. Sung. A capella.

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A question that seems more and more exigent: Can branding help save classical music? Follow the link for some samples of the San Francisco Symphony's new look.

The modern approach plays out in its new look, which patrons will see on everything from posters outside the box office to tickets to the website and social media. The static typeface of yesteryear, which looks the same no matter where it’s applied, is gone. In its place is a new custom, variable typeface called “ABC Symphony” that evokes the sensation of singing. The typeface “has all the qualities of traditional classical music: sophistication, elegance, slight grandeur,” says Mikolay, but with a key difference: The team gave it a contemporary behavior, so “it can react, stretch, and skew and bend in reaction to sound.” Letters in the same word might be incrementally shortened or attenuated, so the logo, which reads “SF SYMPHONY,” arcs from left to right like a crescendo. Some words lean forcefully to the right for emphasis, like a pianist playing forte.

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Here is a very practical article from NewMusicBox: COMPOSER COMMISSION PAY IN THE UNITED STATES.

The major conclusions we were able to draw from our study are as follows:

The median commission fee for all compositions was $1500, or $150 per minute.

While commission fees were generally under $10,000, there was a sizable portion of outliers – around 11 percent of works – whose fees were between $10,000 and $50,000, or sometimes even greater.

Commissions for small groups or soloists were more likely to be unpaid, or for small fees. Commissions for large ensembles were more likely to be paid, and to command larger fees. Most outlier fees were for large ensemble commissions. The best paying large ensemble was the large choir.

Composers with more experience tended to receive higher fees.

Without taking into consideration factors such as experience level, female composers had a higher per-minute pay rate than males, and white composers had a higher per minute pay than non-white composers (as a group).

The article is a long one with a lot of hard data, so worth having a look at the whole thing.

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For our envoi today, let's have some thing different, a string quartet by Caroline Shaw. This is Entr'acte with the Calidore String Quartet.