Friday Miscellanea

It's Holy Week down here in Mexico, so I have a little more time to put together a Friday Miscellanea.

In every department of human endeavour, inspired talent is an intolerable insult to mediocrity.

--Simon Leys

Musicology Now asks Is Country Music Quintessentially American? Or White?

The sense of country music as one’s own culture is shared by members of every group discussed here. Thus, to speak of country as white music today is not just a continuation of long-standing erasures; it erases anew. Country music is quintessentially American music, bearing audible traces of exchange among diverse groups in U.S. society. In our divided moment it’s music that speaks to a stereotype-shatteringly broad audience through themes of love of family, friends, community, and country; freedom and fun; and what Steve Goodson called “hillbilly humanism,” an ethos insisting that each person is worthy and none of us can judge another. At this pivotal point in our history, the music industry must recognize the rich diversity of country music’s past and present and embrace its potential for a more equitable and inclusive future.

Oddly, the paragraph just prior to this one talks about the influence of Mexico which rather suggests that country music is not quintessentially American:

Mexican influences and engagements in country music are the focus of my current research—which includes variously gendered vaqueros. In my fieldwork, Mexican American country fans spoke of the music’s crucial connections to the Mexican figure of the cowboy, working-class rancho culture, the former Mexican territories that constitute the American Southwest, and—in country’s patriotic songs—their love for both their American and Mexican cultures and identities.

While the roughly equivalent genre in Mexico might be called by a different name, "ranchero" for example, a similar populist form of music certainly exists. Canada is also mentioned, mainly for its indigenous contributions, but the existence of several kinds of equivalent musics in Canada isn't really acknowledged. These include, yes, "country music" but also "old-time" music and various regional forms. So I guess the obvious answers to the title questions are "no" and "no."

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This is a question we have pondered here: ‘Anything is possible’: why Iceland has become a classical music powerhouse.

Student musicians in Iceland often find themselves crossing genre boundaries by necessity. There’s only one institution in the capital where you can study music to degree level, thrusting students of varied outlooks together. This eroding of musical silos has produced countless indefinable artists, including Hildur Guðnadóttir who became the first female composer to win an Oscar, Bafta and Golden Globe in the same season. It was for her score to the film Joker – a cello concerto in disguise. A cellist, singer, producer and composer, Guðnadóttir works across metal, electronica, classical and film music.

What really boggles me is that Iceland has a population about the same as the capital city of British Columbia, Victoria, where I lived and taught for over a decade. No energetic aesthetic ferment there, I can tell you! And then there is Finland...

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Does this worry anyone: It’s Their Content, You’re Just Licensing it

Amid recent debates over several publishers’ removal of potentially offensive material from the work of popular 20th-century authors — including Roald Dahl, R.L. Stine and Agatha Christie — is a less discussed but no less thorny question about the method of the revisions. For some e-book owners, the changes appeared as if made by a book thief in the night: quietly and with no clear evidence of a disturbance.

For those who use a music streaming service, isn't this much like a different arrangement of a song being substituted? Say, a version of Across the Universe without all the Phil Specter strings? Or a performance of Bach on modern instead of original instruments. Or even an arrangement of a piano piece by Prokofiev with some of the dissonances removed? Sound ridiculous? Well, a few years ago the idea of Agatha Christie being surreptitiously censored would also have seemed ridiculous.

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On an Overgrown Path talks about Bach: Bach to basics.

One of the many downsides of our clickbait obsessed culture is the neglect of not very clickbait-able J S Bach. To compensate for that in a very small way this post highlights some old and new, straight and not so straight, recordings of Bach's music that have given me particular pleasure recently.

Check it out.

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Here is a beautiful example of how to mess up by asking the wrong question: In the architecture of the mind, where lies human imagination?

Though there are many theories about the place of imagination in cognitive architecture, two are worth mentioning here, not least because all others can be traced to them. On the one hand, in their book Mindreading (2003), Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich argue that some components of our cognitive architecture are dedicated to imagination. For them, imagination is a distinct mental ability like belief and desire, and since those each have cognitive equipment dedicated to them in cognitive architecture, so too does imagination. With such dedicated equipment, we can explain how imagination is used for different ends. For instance, we can explain how imagination can be a source of knowledge, even though it is typically taken to be fantastical in nature. We can say that the imagination-equipment is connected to the belief-equipment such that, by leveraging that connection, imagination can be constrained, thereby leading us to knowledge. After all, being constrained is what distinguishes knowledge from fantasy. While you can fantasise about wildly improbable things, you can’t know wildly improbable things. Put simply, we can explain the epistemic uses of imagination.

Or being too quick to make an assumption. I've recently been watching this video:

Which deals with the interesting question, is everything that exists physical? And the answer is, most likely not. On the list of things that are not physical are consciousness, belief, imagination and so on. So, nope, you're not going to find the "structure" of imagination in the brain. I await your cards and letters!

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Steve Reich Looks Back on the Musical Revolution He Helped Ignite

Steve Reich isn’t crazy about the term “minimalism.” But he’s made his peace with it.

“In the early days, there was the possibility it would be called ‘trance music,’” he said. “So the name could have been worse.”

Whatever you want to call it, Reich, along with his friends and fellow composers Philip Glass and Terry Riley, created a new style of classical music in the 1960s and ’70s, one that emphasized repetition and shifting rhythmic patterns. It was a radical break from the thorny art music of the time, and it took decades for critics and scholars to accept its best works, including Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, into the canon.

 Follow the link to read the whole thing.

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Once more with Gustavo where Norman Lebrecht explains how New York has such difficulty picking a conductor:

It has been 65 years since the New York Philharmonic last appointed the right conductor, so long ago that hardly anyone alive remembers it except as legend. The ensuing vacancy of imagination has meant that every well-intentioned baton since then has been held up against Leonard Bernstein’s and found wanting in every department — music, human and media. 

Bernstein was music director for a record 11 years. His successors were doomed by comparison. Pierre Boulez was too ascetic, Zubin Mehta superficial, Kurt Masur heavy weather, Lorin Maazel boring, Alan Gilbert half-baked and Jaap Van Zweden an accounting error. 

All that can be asserted right now is that New York has, for once in a lifetime, not picked the wrong baton.

Wow, talk about praising with faint damns!

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How Cold War Politics Destroyed One of the Most Popular Bands in America

 Last year, Rolling Stone compiled a list of “The 50 Worst Decisions in Music History.” Near the top, alongside very high-profile errors in judgment like Decca Records’ rejection of the Beatles, there was a much less familiar episode: the time Blood, Sweat & Tears embarked on an Eastern European concert tour, underwritten by the State Department while the Vietnam War was raging. The reputation of the U.S. government was in tatters for young people, meaning the band looked, as the magazine put it, like “propaganda pawns — which is, more or less, what they were.”

An interesting read.

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Here's a different envoi to start: Muddy Waters back before there were any billionaire musicians.

And of course, the Bach Easter Oratorio with the Netherlands Bach Society:

And since we haven't put up any Steve Reich for a while here is Music for 18 Musicians, still one of his most influential pieces. Performance by a French ensemble: