Friday Miscellanea

Let's start with a quote:

Compared to Bach, we all suck!

 --Pat Metheny reported by Rick Beato.

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And here is something from the prolific Ted Gioia: How I Got an AI Theme Song for My Substack, Or why AI music in 2023 isn’t about innovation or creativity—it’s just a crude cost-cutting tool.

“The real leverage point for AI is cost savings. That’s because the music itself isn’t very good. Sure, there’s a certain novelty factor here—but that will wear off very soon. The real hook is that AI works for cheap, it’s almost like slave labor in the band.”

AI doesn’t ask to share publishing rights or composer credits. You don’t even need to buy it a drink or take it out for lunch. Even more important, AI doesn’t even know what the words union scale mean.

I have been taken to task in the past for calling a lot of pop music nothing more than an industrial product.

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Staying with Ted for a moment, he reports on the top ten most performed classical composers.

This is from Bachtrack and there really aren't any surprises, right? I have a long-standing complaint about Bachtrack: their list of the top ten pianists does not include Gyorgy Sokolov who every year plays a large number of concerts on the European continent in all the leading concert venues--many more concerts than other artists on the list. But he is never mentioned. When I was in Salzburg in 2020 he played the Grossefestspielhaus which was full and gave six encores. Evgeny Kissin played the same hall and gave three encores and Igor Levit played the much smaller Haus für Mozart and played one encore.

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More about that movie: Marin Alsop offended by depiction of cruel woman conductor in ‘TÁR’

Marin Alsop, the world’s foremost woman conductor, is no fan of “TÁR,” the acclaimed film about an unscrupulous woman conductor.

“I was offended as a woman, I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian,” Alsop said of the movie, which stars Cate Blanchett as Berlin Philharmonic leader Lydia Tár.

“There are so many men — actual, documented men — this film could have been based on but, instead, it puts a woman in the role but gives her all the attributes of those men. That feels anti-woman. To assume that women will either behave identically to men or become hysterical, crazy, insane is to perpetuate something we’ve already seen on film so many times before.”

So according to Marin Alsop, it is offensive for a woman conductor to be a villain in a fictional narrative? Or maybe it is just impossible? To tell the truth, I find this attitude, that only male conductors can behave badly, offensive.

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From the New Yorker: The Warm Glow of the Blog-Rock Era 

Counterfactual history is tricky, but it feels safe to say that Voxtrot found a bigger audience––or found its audience faster––than it would have otherwise thanks to the Internet phenomenon referred to as “blog rock.” By the mid-aughts, starting a blog was easier than ever. Streaming hadn’t yet taken over our listening habits, but Web connections were speedy enough that, if a blog posted an MP3, a reader could be hearing the song a few minutes later. It was exciting, hopping from blog to blog as though you were reading a large, collectively authored, and constantly updated zine, with samples of the gushed-over music just a click away. And it was free! Optimistic thinking about the disruptive, democratizing potential of the Internet was everywhere, and it seemed like blogs had become––at least for fans of certain faddish strains of indie rock––the new A. & R. departments, the new radio, the new Seattle, a tool for wriggling free of the bias and influence of stodgy old gatekeepers.

Well, it didn't take long for Big Tech to step in and fix all that!

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It has been a long time since we have had an envoi from Ravel, so here is Ivo Pogorelich with a fine performance of Gaspard de la nuit:

 

Marin Alsop conducting the Symphony No. 7 by Shostakovich:

And here are Ten Cello Preludes by Sofia Gubaidulina: