Friday Miscellanea

I hate to harsh your mellow, but this has to be the musical atrocity of the week: MusicGen: Simple and Controllable Music Generation. I suspect we need a new definition of "music" specifically so we can warn one another about things like this.

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Here is some more technology: What Happens When A.I. Enters the Concert Hall

Isaac Io Schankler, a composer and music professor at Cal Poly Pomona, conceived the performance and joined Wang onstage to monitor and manipulate Realtime Audio Variational autoEncoder, or R.A.V.E., the neural audio synthesis algorithm that modeled Wang’s voice.

R.A.V.E. is an example of machine learning, a specific category of artificial intelligence technology that musicians have experimented with since the 1990s — but that now is defined by rapid development, the arrival of publicly available, A.I.-powered music tools and the dominating influence of high-profile initiatives by large tech companies.

This reminded me of some of the experiments decades ago at the Pompidou Center in Paris that Pierre Boulez was involved with and indeed, that seems to be in the DNA:

Antoine Caillon developed R.A.V.E. in 2021, during his graduate studies at IRCAM, the institute founded by the composer Pierre Boulez in Paris. “R.A.V.E.’s goal is to reconstruct its input,” he said. “The model compresses the audio signal it receives and tries to extract the sound’s salient features in order to resynthesize it properly.”

I just don't see what it has to do with musical expression.

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These stories are everywhere: Twelve Brutal Truths about AI Music

(2) Dead musicians will come back to life.

I don’t think the music business has fully grasped the zombie angle. The potential profitability is huge. Just imagine a dead musician or dead band working for you—they never complain or go on drunken sprees. They just churn out songs on demand for every occasion.

A few goofy YouTube videos have played around with the concept—making an AI John Lennon sing a David Bowie song, for example. These smell like gimmicks right now. But sometimes gimmicks get turned into major trends.

Sadly, probably not the ones we would like to come back to life.

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About now we desperately need a FUN clip:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kAfB0YCemxo

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Even the Beatles are jumping on the AI bandwagon: The Beatles Come Together for ‘Last Record’ Using AI, Paul McCartney Says

McCartney said Hollywood director Peter Jackson, who directed the 2021 documentary epic “The Beatles: Get Back,” used AI technology to isolate the voice of John Lennon from an old demo tape.

“He was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropy little bit of cassette where it had John’s voice and a piano,” McCartney said. “We were able to take John’s voice and make it pure through AI and you were able to mix the record as you would normally do.”

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Finally, a non-AI story: Revisiting a Kaija Saariaho Opera Days After Her Death

The composer Kaija Saariaho, who died earlier this month at 70, spent much of her career expecting not to write an opera. She saw it as a dusty art form, she once said, and couldn’t picture translating her sound world of slow, subtle harmonic changes into melodies and arias.

A pair of directors changed her mind. In the early 1990s she saw Patrice Chéreau’s staging of “Wozzeck” in Paris and Peter Sellars’s production of “Saint François d’Assise” at the Salzburg Festival — experiences that, she later said, “opened my mind to what can be done by telling a story with music.”

Saariaho’s first opera, “L’Amour de Loin,” an ethereal allegory of medieval love, premiered at Salzburg in 2000 and quickly became her most famous work. Even so, she didn’t plan to compose another.

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 And it seems like Saariaho's week as Alex Ross delivers another big piece at The New Yorker: The Sonic Signatures of Salvatore Sciarrino and Kaija Saariaho. First, Sciarrino:

The Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino, whose austerely sensuous opera “Venere e Adone” had its première on May 28th, at Staatsoper Hamburg, has long possessed his own inviolable sonic world. Born in Palermo, Sicily, in 1947, he is largely self-taught as a composer and at the age of fifteen was already winning notice at Italian new-music festivals. One of his earliest published scores, the Sonata for Two Pianos, from 1966, begins with softly sweeping gestures across the white keys, like the rapid strokes of a superfine brush. In keeping with the hectic spirit of the nineteen-sixties, Sciarrino dissolved conventional classical forms into atomized activity, but his exquisite touch, his lepidopterist’s regard for the slightest fluttering sound, set him apart from his thunderous avant-garde colleagues. Five decades on, he remains a musical loner, tending his own strange garden.

And Saariaho:

Saariaho shared with Sciarrino a feeling for music as a landscape seething with natural activity. But, in contrast to Sciarrino’s sparseness and dryness, Saariaho unleashed radically beautiful floods of tone. I remember my first encounter, in 1993, with her early orchestral masterpiece “Du Cristal,” which begins with a mountainous eight-note chord spread across many octaves, the notes C, D, and G-flat shining in the brass like a snowcap lit by the sun. At the close of the twentieth century, Saariaho revealed how much elemental drama remains in the realm of harmony: dissonance becomes a molten mass from which new tonalities are forged. That same organic majesty elevates her first opera, “L’Amour de Loin,” which arrived at the Met in 2016 and helped usher in a new age for contemporary fare at the house.

Nothing wrong with Alex Ross' prose!

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I am getting really tired of these folks. BREAKING: CLIMATE PROTESTERS DISRUPT GLYNDEBOURNE

‘Just Stop Oil just let off a glitter cannon in the front row of Glyndebourne Dialogues des Carmelites. Halted performance. (They were) rapidly removed by security. Torrent of boos and shouts of “get out” from audience.

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I offer this for two reasons: to avoid yet another story about AI and because Portland really needs some positive news. Mendelssohn’s bar is demystifying classical music with cocktails and Operaoke

Operatic voices reverberate throughout a quaint bar on North Mississippi Avenue — a typical Tuesday night for the musical regulars that frequent Mendelssohn’s, Portland’s one-of-a-kind classical music-themed bar.

Tucked in the bustling Boise neighborhood, Mendelssohn’s has become a gathering place for Portland’s musicians to sip on themed drinks, sing ballads from the high stage and meet other people interested in classical music.

Now for some groovy envois. First an instrumental piece by Kaija Saariaho:

Next that early piece by Salvatore Sciarrino, the Sonata for Two Pianos (1966)

And, inevitably, Hey Jude, performed by the world's greatest tearoom orchestra. Stick with it, the real song starts 51 seconds in: