I don't read The Economist very often, but they have a very interesting article on the prevalence of English in popular songs on Spotify: What Spotify data show about the decline of English. It is fairly heavy with statistics, but here are some take-aways:
Three broad clusters emerged: a contingent in which English is dominant; a Spanish-language ecosystem; and a third group that mostly enjoys local songs in various tongues. Across all, one trend emerged: the hegemony of English is in decline.
The drop over the past five years is mostly concentrated outside the English sphere. Within the Spanish cluster, English quickly lost ground—from 25% of hits to 14%—as native artists like Bad Bunny and Rauw Alejandro became internationally ascendant. Among the local-language cluster, in countries with strong, indigenous music cultures—like Brazil, France and Japan—English declined even more precipitously, dropping from 52% of hit songs to just 30%. Only in the English cluster did the language remain unfazed, dropping only slightly from 92% to 90%.
What would be more interesting, I think, would be to look at how deeply English/American and European musical structures dominate the world. In other words, is the global reach of platforms like Spotify causing popular songs worldwide to resemble more and more those of the US and the UK?
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Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen offers up a Simple Theory of Culture. The link goes to the ample comments, for the post itself, just scroll up.
Popular music was highly emotionally charged because so much of it was connected to ideas you really cared about.
Of course, by attaching an idea to a song you often ensured the idea wasn’t going to be really subtle, at least not along the standard intellectual dimensions. But it might be correct nonetheless.
Today you can debate ideas directly on social media, without the intermediation of music. Ideas become less simple and more baroque, while music loses its cultural centrality and becomes more boring.
Lots of interesting thoughts in the comments as well.
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Are we starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel: DENMARK, DISMISSING COVID, OPENS UP FOR MUSIC MENTORING
As of this week, the Danes have abolished all Covid restrictions – no facemasks, no crowd limits, no tests.
Two international music schemes have immediately been announced.
Fabio Luisi at the Malko Conducting Competition in Copenhagen has put out a call for musicians aged 18 to 25 to come and get mentored at his Academy.
And Nikolaj Znaider at the Nielsen Competition in Odense (pictured) has launched Espansiva Academy – ‘a new mentoring programme, specifically designed to offer industry insight through talks, workshops and one-to-one personal conversations for the contestants at appropriate moments during the 11 days of the Competition.’
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Th New York Times has a feature on a conductor who resists the usual career pressures: A Conductor in Demand, and in Control.
“At the moment, I will be much more content to be a simple freelancer,” Gražinytė-Tyla, 35, said in a recent interview at the Bavarian State Opera here, where she was preparing a new production of Janacek’s “The Cunning Little Vixen.”
It’s an unusual statement coming from a young conductor in demand, especially one whose current appointment — as music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in Britain — concludes this spring. Even more unusual since Gražinytė-Tyla, along with the likes of Susanna Mälkki, is often mentioned as a leading contender to fill vacancies on the horizon at top American orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic.
Read the whole thing for an insight into a conductor that is determined to pursue her own artistic path.
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Now I understand why I am single: Music taste has become the latest weapon in our online dating war
...on dating apps, music taste has become one of the primary ways of signalling one’s suitability as a mate – and how, by reducing people to profiles of their likes and dislikes, this taste has been weaponised.
If we read too much into music taste, it’s probably because it is one of only a handful of data points we’re given to assess potential romantic compatibility. In the past, “Beatles or Stones?” and “Oasis v Blur” were icebreakers that you’d quickly move past if you fancied each other enough; on dating apps, they are the precursor to a conversation occurring at all.
OkCupid’s survey found that one in three singles believe musical preference to be a good indicator of intelligence.
Ok, new hope for lovers of Anton Webern?
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Taylor Swift v Damon Albarn: why the idea of the lone songwriter is outdated
Damon Albarn, the lead singer of Blur and Gorillaz, has recently been criticised for his “outdated” views of modern songwriting. In an interview with the LA Times, Albarn explained that US singer-songwriter Taylor Swift’s “co-writing” approach was at odds with his “traditionalist” view of writing songs. He went on to say that co-writing “doesn’t count” as songwriting.
Hmm, I seem to recall that the team of Lennon and McCartney were pretty good songwriters...
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Let's have a look at another review in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. This is from a review of Class, Control, and Classical Music, by Anna Bull by Juliet Hess.
In Class, Control, and Classical Music, Anna Bull poses a key question to classical music stakeholders: “how are musical institutions, practices, and aesthetics shaped by wider conditions of economic inequality, and in what ways might music enable and entrench such inequalities or work against them?” (p. 1) Through ethnography and careful historical analysis, she interrogates youth classical music programs and explores how they participate in class reproduction, the formation of middle-class selfhood, and classed boundary-drawing.
Well, of course the basic assumptions here are from Karl Marx and his analysis of society in terms of class and economics, but those assumptions go unquestioned. They might not be the best way to understand the role of music in society, but hey, what do I know? Another big influence is Pierre Bourdieu and I think I have talked about his views before. A quote from the book offers a look at the author's approach:
In order to address inequalities evident in classical music education and its cultural institutions, we need to disrupt the aesthetics of the music itself rather than continuing to produce perfect versions of the canonic repertoire. The boundary-drawing that I have described, which safeguards classical music’s cultural prestige, needs to be loosened, and the “treasures” guarded by it must be let out for us to play with. (p. 192)
This is a subtle approach, but it seems to me to simply valorize whatever progressive music educators choose to do, so it is part of the general wave of progressivism. This is a book about classical music education that has grave doubts about the very value of classical music education because it promotes inequality.
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Here is a lovely piece by Marc-Antoine Charpentier performed by Lea Desandre and Thomas Dunford:
Oddly, there are almost no clips of conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla on YouTube. Apart from a whole Mozart opera and a bunch of interview and trailer clips all I could find was this short Bach movement which hardly requires a conductor.
Here is the first movement of the Brahms Piano Trio No. 1 in B major played by the Merz Trio. I put this up because I just heard them play this piece in a concert last night along with trios by Haydn and Fauré. Yes, chamber music is back!
22 comments:
I know Juliet Hess personally and know Anna Bull through her writing, and it would be hard to find two people more passionate about classical music and its teaching. I can't speak to Dr Bull's motivations beyond what she publishes, but my sense of Juliet is that she just doesn't want the music she loves to go the way of the dinosaurs. You can certainly debate either of their diagnoses of classical music's institutional woes and their proposed solution, but these two have committed their lives to classical music education. They just believe that classical music education can be better than it is now, that it doesn't need to live in such a hermetically sealed castle of its own, that its exclusiveness is harmful both to itself and to the larger educational world.
Thanks, Ethan, I was pretty sure you would comment on this one. I'm not questioning either of the scholars' motivation or commitment. I'm coming at this more from the way the discussion is framed, the basic assumptions. Those are what I am questioning.
I guess what I take away from Dr Bull's work is not that classical music education is bad because it promotes inequality; her argument is that the current model of classical music education is bad because it promotes inequality and also isn't doing much good for classical music itself. This idea that my fellow progressive music educators are somehow trying to destroy the canon is simply wrong. All Dr Bull does all day is teach classical music and studies the teaching of classical music. Frankly, I think that the canon is in the safest hands with her.
Now, again, it is absolutely fine to disagree with her diagnosis of classical music's problems, and her proposed solutions to those problems. But to say that her book "has grave doubts about the very value of classical music education" is way off base. You could easily take that conclusion away from, like, my work, but Dr Bull?
What sets off my alarm bells, even if in a muted way, is reference to "we need to disrupt the aesthetics of the music itself." I'm very unsure of what that could possibly mean. There are a lot of other examples of abstract reference such as to how music might "participate in class reproduction" and "classed boundary-drawing." I don't know what this refers to and I can't find cognates in my own experience.
Presumably it would be easy to find out what it means by reading the book. Based on her background, presumably she means, let's not conflate the history of Western European music with the aesthetics and preferences of white guys in recent decades, they are not the same thing. To really do historical music justice, you have to look at all the history, including economic and social history. And to teach this music in a thorough and rigorous way in the present, you have to be conscious of its social roles, not just its "pure formal" content (as if it were possibly to engage that content out of social context in the first place.) Pretending that music is apolitical, as the academy and performing institutions have mainly done in my lifetime, is itself a political stance. Dr Bull would like us to pay a little more attention to the harm caused by that this passive deference to the status quo. The only good way to honor a tradition is to reevaluate it. People didn't study or perform this music the same way in 1922 as they did in 1822, why should we carry on with the methods and attitudes of 1922?
I tend to prefer a critical race theory angle on these things to Dr Bull's class-based analysis. My take is that classical music has been a marker of white identity politics across social class, and in the past at least, there were plenty of blue-collar white people who were classical music fans (my dad among them.) But there are two different things here: there's disagreeing with Dr Bull's interpretation and assessment of the issues, which is fine, but then there's imagining that she's somehow hostile to the very idea of classical education or the basic validity of the canon, which even a cursory skim of her writing would reveal to not be the case at all. I know Juliet Hess' arguments better here, and Juliet's feeling is that making classical music less racist and elitist would get more people listening and participating. Who could argue with that?
Concrete example: Florence Price is starting to be discussed more as a significant figure, right? Her music shows striking blues influence, more than any other classical composer I have ever heard. And it isn't a corny pastiche like Debussy's "ragtime" stuff, it's the genuine article, seamlessly fused with Price's mostly European vocabulary. Bringing her more to the center of programming and education isn't just a gesture of inclusiveness; it shows different aesthetic priorities, pointing to the blues as a bigger deal in "art" music than you would be led to believe from only studying the usual suspects. This is the kind of aesthetic re-evaluation that Dr Bull wants us to do.
Another concrete example from closer to my own area of expertise: opera companies still (still!) routinely have performers in blackface. We can have a conversation about whether you should only cast Black people to play Black roles, or only cast Asian people to play Asian roles, there are valid points to be had on both sides. But opera partisans are defending *blackface*! Really hard to get a young person interested in opera, especially if that young person isn't a complete dick, once they find out about the blackface. IMHO letting go of blackface would be a benefit to the appreciation of the beauty of opera, the exact opposite of a threat to it.
I'm with you Bryan as regards the much vaunted "disruption". Does anyone know what is being proposed, here? The review is short on specifics and verrrry long on mind-numbing jargon.
Just sounds like a lowering of standards ("perfect" versions, boooo!) and a catering to the tastes of students. As to the latter, their taste is not necessarily to be consulted. It is being formed.
There are a whole host of issues raised here, Ethan, and I may take them up in a new post, something I have done with other issues that bring out a lot of discussion. I doubt I will get to reading the original book, but I can certainly take up some of the things you raise. Thanks Jives, for your comment.
I will say that I have a very big problem with identity politics and collectivist ideologies in general.
I'm trying really hard to stick to my vacation from blogging ... but now that I've got the Scruton book back in front of me ...
Bryan, page 456 in Roger Scruton's The Aesthetics of Music
I have a simple suggestion. Leave classical music to the Europeans. As I have noted repeatedly here in the Americas the itch to revel in pop music is just too strong even for supposedly staid musicologists. The grants agencies can easily be persuaded to fund the aesthetic merits of Taylor Swift re- recording her early hit albums and many other vitally important musical issues. And given recordings and websites we can all access the Euro events.
I do feel sad for US classically trained artists but no one here seems interested in them.
Maury, sarcasm attempt? :)
We might be forced by the pandemic into some kind of neo-Biedermeier ethos and praxis which I'd honestly be okay with if "that" happened because guitarists would benefit from a new wave of hausmusik. The orchestral and operatic traditions have not been as self-sustaining in the US as in Europe but that isn't really germane to the scope of classical music as a whole. My guitar society in the area seems to be doing okay, even fairly well considering how virtual everything has had to become since the pandemic constraints were enacted.
the Hatchet
I was referring more to music writing. The hausmusic is an honorable way for music lovers to perform and enjoy live music but it's not a career path. Guitar and piano are rather all purpose instruments and can function in different circumstances more easily than most others. Young people spent a fair amount of money going to the conservatory for other instruments although some do study guitar and piano. So they need a living.
In Europe the authorities view classical music as one element of their society and make decisions with that in mind. No one here in similar positions thinks that so the various rules tend to favor socially popular activities like sports. The other problem somewhat related is that older people are preferential consumers of classical music. It seems pretty clear that such older listeners have different risk tolerance in attending concerts between Europe and the Americas. Chamber groups I am familiar with are being whipsawed the past year doing concerts and then having to stop for several months due to anxiety and varying edicts. Rinse and repeat, while sports events go their merry way. Yes young classical musicians here may be forced to get other jobs and play hausmusic as a sideline.
yes, someone who spent years studying oboe is going to have a rough go of things. I've seen chamber ensembles over the years of guitar plus an orchestral instrument and often they split their performing repertoire between concert music traditional fare and wedding music. So there are not many oboe and guitar duos out there but there have been maybe a dozen I've come across over the years and I noticed that pattern of split repertoire. When you can't line up a chamber music concert you can have the wedding gig material handy, which is where pop song arrangements become handy.
And besides hausmusik there's also church music, for those of us who go to church (although here in the Puget Sound that's often been virtual because of pandemic constraints). I have probably played more music (even my own compositions) in church services than I ever played in recitals or band gigs. It's not a musical "living" but it's definitely a way to stay musically active.
If everybody wants to know what Anna Bull's book is arguing, I'd recommend reading it, rather than trying to parse its content from a review of it.
That is an excellent suggestion, of course. But the Kindle version of the book is $63.35 which is a bit pricey!
The hard cover book is even more expensive.
I actually have been reading off and on about 19th century European music but not necessarily the evolution of WASP music education . I'm looking into the Biedermeier Viennese musical culture for a couple of reasons 1) it as a critical period and region for the development of classical guitar repertoire and I am interested in learning about that and 2) it seems to have been the Biedermeier era composers, their styles and their patronage system that came in for contempt from the wagnerian and schumann type polemics about petit bourgeois art bankrolled by conservative bureaucrats.
I'm less directly focused on class and race in classical music debates because I considered going to seminary for biblical studies and theology as well as grad school for music. I didn't have the money for either but I've been reading Jeremy Begbie, Daniel K L Chua and other authors who have no hesitation exploring how the religion in art-religion evolved in Germany in the early 19th century onward. Why and how did it evolve in the Prussian scene, for instance, and not Geneva? At some point we can't ignore the differences in religious thought about the arts between Luther in what became Germany (and Schleiermacher) on the one hand and the Genevan legacy of Zwingli, Bullinger and, yeah, Calvin on the other hand. Art-religion developed in a particular geographic range and yet it DIDN'T develop across the board. I don't pick up a lot of art-religious ideology from Sor or from Italian guitarist composers and advocates of art-religion seemed particularly scornful of the Biedermeier era musical culture. Why? What was the deal with Germans slamming the Italians when Haydn trained in the partimento tradition? I have found that studying galant and partimento practices has helped me further explore a synthesis of 18th century musical processes and forms (sonata and fugue) with more American vernacular material (shape note hymns, ragtime, blues riffs) by way of Charles Ives style cumulative setting.
The highbrow Scruton style art-religion in the post-Wagnerian cast tends to assume such a process is impossible (Borstlap) or if possible not achieved (and this is where I think Roger Scruton blinked in the face of the insularity of classical music in a way that progressives and conservatives have overlooked by deciding Scruton had to be strict one or the other over against some moments of vacilation in his aesthetic stances that I want to explore when I finally get back to blogging).
So Bull's book looks like something to get to but I'm pretty busy with Jeremy Begbie, Daniel Chua, Thomas Torrance, Emil Brunner, some Charles Garside Jr on the Genevan Reformers on the arts and stuff like that.
I think the class and race elements of debate are important but, as I've shared in the past, I'm half Native American and half white. My Native A American dad gave me my first guitar and loved Andres Segovia but, of course, the legacy of how the Spanish treated American Indians is even more ghastly then how the English and the French treated them. The English and Russians come off best, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, but they still had their vices.
At the risk of rambling, I've wondered whether the fact that Bryan, Ethan and I are guitarists may be partly why we can think outside the boxes that pianists often seem to fall back on in musicology and music history debates. I might be wrong but I've been thinking lately about how different paradigms of musical education can seem to be among guitarists compared to pianists lately.
Mr Hain,
I am only interested in music books that discuss specific compositional techniques. While I have no interest in other types of music books I wasn't dissing anyone. I'm just pointing out that in the Americas there is a strong democratic and populist tradition and it is at variance to traditions from more aristocratic / oligopolistic societies (however defined).
So writing books about say the Populist Elements of Mansion Design is rather oxymoronic. It would be better or at least more direct and useful to discuss other types of residences that are designed for broad groups of people. That's just my general view of things.
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