Friday Miscellanea

I think I have mentioned before that most pop songs are written by a mysterious committee of Swedes. Well, that is not quite true. But Max Martin has written between ten and twenty percent of the top ten pop songs over the last decade!

If you rank songwriters by the number of Billboard no 1 hits they have penned, Paul McCarthy and John Lennon have been leagues ahead of the competition for more than fifty years. This is not true anymore. If Max Martin keeps up the streak he has had for the last 25 years, he will overtake Lennon this year and McCarthy in a handful more.

And as incredible as this achievement is, Max Martin is just a part of a larger phenomenon: the so called Swedish music miracle. 

No country comes close to exporting as much music in relation to the size of its economy.

The main drivers of revenue are the big pop acts, ABBA and Roxette, and a stable of songwriters who write for The Weeknd, Taylor Swift, Coldplay, Nicky Minaj, Ed Sheeran, and a large share of other acts that have been on the top of the charts over the last three decades.

The reason is that Sweden has been successful in creating a creative music scene in the same sense as Elizabethan England had a creative theater scene and Florence in the renaissance was a creative scene for writers, painters and other artists. These places had a significant number of creative people who were basically inspired by and creating works directed at one another.

Almost invariably, when you notice someone doing bold original work, there is a scene behind them. Renaissance Florence was a scene for scholars and painters, flowering in Leonardo DaVinci. The coffeehouses of Elizabethan London were a scene for playwrights, flowering in Shakespeare.

For an idea of why this came about in Sweden, follow the link. And then there was Athens in the 4th century BC and Vienna in the 18th century.

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Something new for streaming music: Apple Wants to Solve One of Music’s Biggest Problems.

“We always had a problem,” said Jonathan Gruber, the head of Apple Music’s classical programming. “A big, big problem.” 

The problem was the way that classical music is categorized. The structure of classical music is completely different from pop music’s, which makes it extremely difficult for it to function in the streaming era.

As regular readers know, it's not a problem for me as I don't use a streaming service for music relying instead on my CD collection and frequent reference to YouTube.

Even the most sophisticated algorithms from the most technologically advanced companies are too clumsy to handle composers like Mozart and Brahms. That’s because they were made for individual artists like Bad Bunny and Madonna. If you want to hear a Bad Bunny song, it will be in your ears within seconds. If you want to hear a Brahms piano concerto, good luck. Try sifting through hundreds of recordings without a standardized format to track down one movement from a particular soloist who has performed it several times. You could listen to an entire Madonna album in the time it takes to find the right Mozart.

So it's really a discographic problem not solvable by tech guys but only by some musicians.

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The New Yorker devotes one of its trademark long pieces to David Sulzer, professor of psychiatry, neurology, and pharmacology at Columbia University who has a double identity as musician and composer Dave Soldier: The Wild World of Music. It's a fun piece of journalism, but my favorite bit is this very egregious quote from Allan Kozinn:

“Like the more famous Kronos Quartet, the Soldier navigates waters outside the chamber music mainstream,” the Times critic Allan Kozinn wrote in 1989. “But the Kronos’s unpolished performances leave one suspecting that it adopted its repertory to avoid comparison with better quartets. The Soldier seems to be the real thing—a virtuosic band given to iconoclastic experimentation.”

I suspect he might disavow that aesthetic judgement these days.

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Alex Ross alerts us to a new work by Cassandra Miller: I cannot love without trembling. The piece starts at around the 1:01 mark. While currently based in London, she hails from my neck of the woods, the  southern end of Vancouver Island.

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And speaking of Canada: Regina Symphony Orchestra cancels shows as ticket sales drop

The orchestra returned with a full season of shows last September, something the program hasn’t offered since before the pandemic.

But the ensemble has seen an almost 50 per cent decline in attendance in both season subscriptions and single ticket purchases.

For Gerrard, the big question is: why?

“I think from what I can tell is people largely just got out of the habit of going out. There was a large time that we couldn’t go out and we had to stay home,” Gerrard said

A long time ago I said something like we would not know the full impact of the pandemic lockdowns on the music world for a long time and some might be permanent.

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The Cello Suites by Bach have a perennial appeal: A Cellist Breaks Music Into ‘Fragments,’ Then Connects Them

AT FIRST GLANCE, “Fragments” might appear to be another of Weilerstein’s explorations of Bach, a successor to her all-in-one-night performances of the six suites, her emotive recording of them on the Pentatone label and her pandemic streaming series. But Weilerstein thinks of it not as “a new approach to Bach,” she said, rather “a celebration of the really disparate voices in contemporary classical music,” with Bach as a common reference point.

Read the whole thing for the context.

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BBC suspends proposed closure of the BBC Singers

The BBC has paused its decision to close the BBC Singers, after "a number of organisations" came forward to offer alternative funding.

The group, which is the UK's only full-time professional chamber choir, was targeted by budget cuts shortly before celebrating its 100th anniversary.

The proposal sparked a backlash, with 140,000 people signing a petition urging the BBC to reverse its decision.

A temporary reprieve has been granted, as new funding models are explored.

"I am confident that this does secure their future," said Simon Webb, the BBC's head of orchestras and choirs.

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However: Los Angeles’s Metro Is Using Classical Music as a Weapon

The relentless rain and near-freezing temperatures over the last two months have driven people to seek shelter in the system’s underground stations, and the classical music was an effort to drive them back out. Cheung described the move as making the “system more enjoyable and comfortable for the people who use it as a transit system.” The music — described to me as “earplugs-at-a-concert loud” by one frequent commuter — is the audio version of hostile architecture, where bumpy benches and spiky surfaces are employed to keep those who have nowhere else to go out of sight.

I was thinking Xenakis maybe, or Stockhausen, but the video at the clip sounds more like a drunken performance of Vivaldi.

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And finally, the most entertaining writer on music, Ted Gioia: Where Did Musicology Come From?

Musicology originated as the study of magical incantations. You probably haven’t heard that before. And for a good reason: They don’t teach this stuff in music schools.

It’s too embarrassing. Too shameful. Too unsettling.

Well, the real reason is actually that this bears no resemblance whatsoever to the history of musicology, the study of music from a historical and theoretical standpoint omitting the practices of composition and performance, that was largely the invention of German scholars in the 19th century. Only in the fevered mind of Ted Gioia is it the study of magical incantations. Great opening sentence, though. I think Taruskin had an even better one in the first essay of his new collection: "I thought I'd begin by telling you how I know that God exists and watches over me." Of course the difference is that while Ted proceeds to dance around the mulberry bush for a while, Prof. Taruskin goes on to point out a number of difficult intersections between ethics and aesthetics.

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I know you wanted to hear this, so here is David Soldier's orchestra of Thai elephants with a tune called "Rain"

As you can see each elephant has a human assistant, so they are not on their own. Next is the Arditti Quartet playing Tetras by Iannis Xenakis (couldn't find a performance by Kronos):

And here is Canadian folksinger Jeffrey Straker accompanied by the Regina Symphony:

Finally, the BBC Singers with a Stabat Mater by Sulpitia Lodovica Cesis: