Friday Miscellanea

I have been challenged in the comments when I have made the claim that there is such a thing as "cancel culture" that seeks to replace classics with more contemporary and "diverse" offerings. I offer this essay from The Washington Post to be taken into consideration: Howard University’s removal of classics is a spiritual catastrophe.

Academia’s continual campaign to disregard or neglect the classics is a sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture. Those who commit this terrible act treat Western civilization as either irrelevant and not worthy of prioritization or as harmful and worthy only of condemnation.

Sadly, in our culture’s conception, the crimes of the West have become so central that it’s hard to keep track of the best of the West. We must be vigilant and draw the distinction between Western civilization and philosophy on the one hand, and Western crimes on the other. The crimes spring from certain philosophies and certain aspects of the civilization, not all of them.

There is a lot more so I encourage you to read the whole thing. One comment to the article mentions that because of declining enrollment the university really had no choice. You can't offer courses if no-one signs up for them. This fails to take into account a longstanding campaign against the classics, both of the ancient world and in literature generally. The reasons are subtle and complex, but I think we can see the cancellation of classics departments as the final stage in a successful campaign to, frankly, dumb down education.

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LONDON CONCERTMASTER IS DRIVING AN UBER

The violinist Raffaele Pagano, concertmaster of the London Arte Chamber Orchestra, is keeping up his practice in the car while driving a 70-hour week on Uber hires.

Raffaele, 34, from Naples, moved to London for its musical life, but Covid has thwarted his hopes.

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UK QUARTET SPENDS 1/3 OF ITS FEES ON VISAS

Sara Wolstenholme is a violinist in the Heath Quartet, which normally tours Europe year-round. The quartet has an invitation to appear at a concert in Spain in May 2022, but with four work visas costing £232 ($320) apiece (over 30% of their fee), it is a significant pay cut.

But that's not even the main story: if $320 US is 30% of their fee then the fee for the quartet only amounts to a little over $1,000 US. That sounds more like a fee for a wedding or funeral gig than an actual concert fee.

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Do We Deprive Music Of Its Mystery By Writing About It?

Assessing how musicians play a score, classical-music-speaking, is the only question of live performance. Such as well compels the critic who’s hoping to capture the next day’s readers. How spirited, how dull, how spryly, how sluggishly—how I, the evening’s soothsayer, at least, in writing, must exemplify those how’s. In that moment, it struck me, like a man seeing a dog fighting for its life in a swollen river. No assessing its weakness, no praying for its strength. I had to leap in and save the animal from the churning water, dead set on taking the performance under. Perhaps my authorial attentiveness might throw a life preserver to the sinking canine.

This is the oddest sort of essay, one that scarcely even glances at its topic until the very end. The sample of the writer's prose quoted above is, I'm afraid, typical: overwrought metaphor, awkward phrases, excessive adjectives and finally the metaphor collapsing in confusion. This is not only bad writing about music, it is just bad writing period. I don't think you deprive music of anything if you write about it well.

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Does Spotify pay artists a fair rate? Here’s what musicians, managers and Apple Music have to say

As of the first quarter of 2020, about 400 million people worldwide subscribed to one or more music streaming services. With an estimated 32% share of the market, Spotify is the dominant service; its closest competitor, Apple Music, has an 18% share, as tallied by media tracking firm Midia Research.

Mark Mulligan, managing director and streaming analyst at Midia, has followed the Justice at Spotify protests and Ek’s response to them, and he’s got bad news for the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers. “There is nothing you can do about streaming royalty payments that will make it look like record sales again.

“Streaming works for record labels,” says Mulligan. “It works for publishers. It works if you’ve got thousands or millions of songs — it all adds up,” Mulligan says. “But if you’ve only got 20 or 30 or 100 songs then it doesn’t. You need scale of catalog to benefit.”

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One of the things that The New Yorker's classical music critic Alex Ross does well is report on leading edge music festivals: The Sonic Extremes of the MaerzMusik Festival

On the stage of an empty concert hall, the Austrian-born composer Peter Ablinger sits in a chair and begins to tell the time. “At the third stroke, it will be twenty o’clock precisely,” he says, adhering to the hallowed formula of the BBC’s Speaking Clock. He accompanies himself with a simple C-minor sequence on a keyboard. After continuing in this vein for twenty minutes, Ablinger cedes the floor to the young German actress Salome Manyak, who speaks over an atmospherically bleeping soundtrack by the Finnish experimental musician Olli Aarni. The ritual goes on for nearly twenty-seven hours, with an ever-changing team of artists, curators, composers, singers, and d.j.s announcing the time in German, English, Italian, French, Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, Farsi, Oromo, Mandarin, and twelve other languages. A rotating assortment of prerecorded tracks, usually electronic, provide accompaniment. Most of the reciters maintain a crisp, cool demeanor, even when their Web sites lead one to expect something more uproarious. The Swedish dancer and costume designer Björn Ivan Ekemark, for example, gives no sign that he also performs under the name Ivanka Tramp and leads a “sticky and visceral cake-sitting performance group,” called analkollaps.

You do almost feel that you are there, in Ross's clear and detailed prose.

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The Strange Undeath of Middlebrow: Everything that was once considered lowbrow is now triumphant.

But what happens if you ask the director of one of those local theater companies, or the percussionist of one of those regional orchestras, whether tragedy or classical music is an “inherently” worthier form than, say, comic strips? Whatever their feelings, they will remember that scrap of Pierre Bourdieu that someone forced them to read in college—for he, too, is canonical—and say “No.” (We will leave aside, as this conversation generally does, the vexing questions of what inherent and great mean or could possibly mean in this context.) If pressed, they will say that the works that embody these traditions remain important because, due to a once common but mistaken belief in their inherent worth, they have influenced the culture. In other words, these works’ value comes from the fact that misguided people once valued them. Not a ringing defense.

Well said: is the fact that misguided people (like myself) once valued them the only thing worth noting about the great works of music and literature? It is like the inverse of Bertrand Russell's famous comment on moral relativity that "I refuse to believe that the only thing wrong with wanton cruelty is that I don't like it!" There is a lot more interesting stuff in that essay if you care to follow the link.

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That absurd metaphor about a dog fighting for its life in a swollen river was, believe it or not, used to describe a faulty performance of an early Mozart symphony. So let's have as our envoi one of those early symphonies. This is the Symphony No.9 in C major, K.73/75a, written when Mozart was twelve years old: