Friday Miscellanea

Because we haven't had enough whimsy in the Friday Miscellanea recently.

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A long time ago on this blog I said something like every Rihanna music video reminds me of a brassiere commercial. I meant that as a criticism, but boy, was I out to lunch. Have a look at this: Rihanna on Her Latest Lingerie Collection and Becoming a Billionaire. Yes, Rihanna is now a billionaire!

Like many of us, Rihanna has been stuck at home for much of the last year, but her net worth has skyrocketed to $1.7 billion, according to an estimate by Forbes. Outside of the Savage x Fenty lingerie line, her empire also includes her skin care line, and her makeup line, Fenty Beauty.

But before any Rihanna fans ask: Yes, she says she is working on new music and, no, she doesn’t know when she will be ready to drop it.

Back in the day, I pursued my career avoiding material temptations in order to achieve aesthetic goals. That was all wrong, apparently. This item, by the way, was in the Style section of the Times, not the Music section.

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As regular readers know, the role of aesthetics in the modern world is a frequent topic here. In that area I ran into an interesting essay over at substack: Whither Tartaria? What is that about?

Some people don’t like modern architecture. How many? I sometimes see claims like “nobody really likes it”, and certainly it feels intuitively incontrovertible to me that the older stuff is more beautiful. But I know some people who claim to genuinely like the modern style. Are the modern-is-obviously-worse folks just over-updating on their own preferences?

The best source I can find for this is a National Civic Art Society survey, which finds Americans prefer traditional/classical buildings to modern ones by about 70% to 30% (regardless of political affiliation!). In a poll of America’s favorite architecture, 76% of buildings selected were traditional/classical (establishment architects said the poll was invalid, because you can’t judge buildings by pictures). A study of courthouse architecture determined that “[our] findings agree with consistent findings that architects misjudge public likely public impressions of a design, and that most non-architects dislike “modern” design and have done so for almost a century.”

I offer this as having a different perspective on a debate about contemporary music that has been going on for a while. There is a lot of stuff in that piece, including some photo illustrations, so go have a look.

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Over on his blog, Ethan Hein explains No, Rolling Stone, D minor is not the saddest of all keys.

But so, let’s stipulate that minor keys do tend to be sadder in general than major ones. It is simply untrue that any particular minor key is sadder than any other. In twelve-tone equal temperament (12-TET), all the minor keys feel the same (as do all the major keys, and all the modal keys, and all the blues keys.) The keys are all at different absolute pitch heights, but absolute pitch doesn’t make a difference in musical meaning. The important thing in music is the ratios between the frequencies, and in 12-TET, those are all identical across keys, by definition.

This is absolutely true for any electronic musical instrument. But it is variably less so with acoustic instruments. For example, D minor, the key of the Bach Chaconne, is a dark and resonant key on guitar (especially with a low-D scordatura). D flat minor, on the other hand, would be written as C# minor and would have a quite different brighter resonance. On the piano remote keys like B flat minor or G# major are very accessible, but much less so on other instruments. There is a reason so many violin concertos are in G or D major.

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German Concert Series Uses Sniffer Dogs as COVID-19 Precaution

At the Hanover concert, each of the 500 attendees will be asked to provide a sweat sample on a cotton pad. The dogs will then inspect all the samples for any traces of COVID-19. However, since this is a trial, concertgoers will also be expected to provide a negative COVID-19 test.

In October 2020, a Finnish study found that dogs could be trained to sniff out COVID-19 in only seven minutes, and for a time, sniffer dogs were employed as a method of COVID detection at Helsinki airport.

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Ok, "I'll be Bach!" in a thick Austrian accent inspires a little Bach envoi. Here is the Bach A minor violin concerto with Shunske Sato violin and the Netherlands Bach Society:

 Here is another concert from this year's Salzburg Festival: Andris Nelsons conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in Mahler, Symphony No. 3: