Friday Miscellanea

The Remodern Review is an interesting place to visit for an oblique perspective on modernism in the arts: April 10 is Slow Art Day. Establishment Art Can’t Stand Up to Such Scrutiny.

It’s an often quoted statistic that the average museum goer only spends 30 seconds looking at each artwork they encounter. 

The sad truth is, regarding much of modern and contemporary art, that’s about 27 seconds longer than needed.

The visual arts are in a crisis of relevance, largely due to dire mismanagement by our cultural institutions. Instead of being encouraged as a communion for all, for over a century many art administrators have favored art as a divider, an opportunity to flaunt elitist attitudes. Officially sanctioned art often emphasizes theoretical formal matters and sociological notions designed to exclude, rather than engage, the general public.

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 In Big Giant Wave, a film about the all-encompassing power of music, it all comes back to Montreal

Director Marie-Julie Dallaire’s new film has arrived at just the right time. After a year and change of being worn down by a pandemic that distances us from one another, Big Giant Wave (Comme une vague in French) explores how we are affected and connected by music.

“It feels strange to see people in concerts, collected; we’ve taken that for granted all our lives,” Dallaire says when looking back on the film’s footage of packed concert halls and busy streets. “The purpose of the film was to make people aware of all the music that surrounds them… to take an hour and half just to think about it. We always listen to or play music, but rarely do we stop and ask ourselves ‘why is music so powerful?'” 

In theatres since April 2, Big Giant Wave is a film that has the trappings of a documentary in how it explores how music is experienced by a variety of points of view, ranging from its anthropological and religious roots to its quantifiable, scientific effects on the brain and the simplicity of when music plays out in nature through birdsong or the rhythm of waves.

Now that sounds interesting!

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From Slipped Disc an anonymous blogger suggests: IS MUSIC SCHOOL NOW IRRELEVANT?

The highest caliber of artistic education would give us clear and usable tools to help us navigate the paperwork-strewn networking maze that is the life of a freelance artist.  The highest caliber of artistic education would teach us why we should matter.  Instead, we are lectured on Gregorian chant, scrutinized for our knowledge of scale degrees and soprano clef, and applauded for our performance of complex polyrhythms.

Sounds like this kind of music school is indistinguishable from Harvard Business. The 21st century is turning out differently than I expected...

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'We Will Never Break': In Iraq, A Yazidi Women's Choir Keeps Ancient Music Alive

DOHUK, Iraq — With rows of white tents filling a windswept hillside, the Khanke camp in northern Iraq shelters about 14,000 men, women and children from the Yazidi religious minority. They have been stuck here since ISIS invaded their home villages in 2014.

With its dirt roads and drab dwellings, the camp can be a bleak place. But the beat of a daf, a drum sacred to Yazidis, throbs underneath loud, energetic singing, rising over shouts of children in a trash-strewn playground.

Inside a small building, a dozen young Yazidi women are rehearsing folk songs. They sing about the dawn, the harvest and the Sinjar mountain the Yazidis consider holy. Sometimes their voices harmonize gently, sometimes they rise almost to a shout as the women chant.

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Writing songs in lockdown: 'It was an escape'

"I'd never written a song before," he said. "But I came home from work and said: 'I need to write this down.' I sat down, wrote some lyrics and put together a melody on my guitar. Putting it down on paper… I definitely found that helped."

His song is one of several lockdown-themed tunes to feature in a BBC project. Now That's What I Call Lockdown is a collection of songs and music written by BBC Radio 5 Live listeners.

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Reviews of some new books on music: Symphony of a Thousand Millennia

The first note known to have sounded on earth was an E natural. It was produced some 165 million years ago by a katydid (a kind of cricket) rubbing its wings together, a fact deduced by scientists from the remains of one of these insects, preserved in amber. Consider, too, the love life of the mosquito. When a male mosquito wishes to attract a mate, his wings buzz at a frequency of 600Hz, which is the equivalent of D natural. The normal pitch of the female’s wings is 400Hz, or G natural. Just prior to sex, however, male and female harmonise at 1200Hz, which is, as Michael Spitzer notes in his extraordinary new book, The Musical Human, ‘an ecstatic octave above the male’s D’. ‘Everything we sing’, Spitzer adds, ‘is just a footnote to that.’

Don't you love the astonishing arrogance of scientists when talking about art?

Nicholas Kenyon’s The Life of Music, which is primarily a survey of the classical repertoire from the 12th century to the present day. Kenyon presents the classical tradition in part as a centuries-long musical conversation, through which composers far distant in time speak to each other. Kenyon cites by way of example the manner in which the 15th-century Franco-Flemish composer Johannes Ockeghem looks forward to the serialism of the 20th century and how the contemporary composer Thomas Adès has found inspiration in the French Baroque composer François Couperin.

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I think today's envoi calls for some Ockeghem, who is a much-neglected composer. Here is his Missa Prolationum with the score: