Friday Miscellanea

 Let's start with an unusual article on the sense of hearing: The Sounds Of Invisible Worlds.

As McLuhan noted, the printing press changed human behaviors and cultural habits, and also our perceptual patterns. Oral traditions receded; visual culture became ascendant. As the written word permeated our lifeworld, the importance of the spoken word — and the use of hearing as a method for exploring and understanding the world — dwindled. 

Senses that are not cultivated tend to atrophy. Ethnographers have long commented on the seeming deafness of Western peoples — raised in a culture obsessed with vision and the written word, whose sense of hearing is less developed than peoples of other cultures. 

The painstaking work of bio-acousticians has revealed that many more species than we previously realized actually make noise. Moreover, we are realizing that many species that are vocally active are capable of conveying complex information through acoustic communication.

A good example is elephant infrasound. Elephants emit powerful, very low sound waves (well below human hearing range) that travel long distances through both forest and savannah and help herds and families coordinate behavior across vast expanses of terrain. Even more surprising are the specific signals and sounds that elephants convey for certain situations, which scientists have compiled into a dictionary with thousands of sounds. African elephants, for example, have a specific signal for honeybees. They are keen listeners too, able to distinguish between humans from tribes that hunt them and those that don’t merely by listening to their voices and discerning their dialects.

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The Guardian has an excellent piece on an unusual music festival: ‘Festivals have to be slightly different and magical’: Orkney’s St Magnus festival

The St Magnus festival was co-founded by Maxwell Davies, Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown, arts campaigner Marjorie Linklater and Norman Mitchell, music teacher and cathedral organist. Ticket sales have always been split equally between visitors and residents, but the local community was and remains at its heart, and the islands’ rich past is a tangible part of the midsummer festival, which takes in classical, contemporary and traditional music, literature and dance as well as drama. 

The festival has always positioned emerging artists, says Nicolson, who also cites Dutch pianist Nikola Meeuwsen as among the names to watch. “Sometimes I feel like it’s a bit like being a football scout. Come to my world before I can’t afford you!” he laughs. Previous performers who came at the beginning of their now stellar careers have included Sean Shibe, Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy, and a teenage Nicola Benedetti.

Contemporary music is less of a presence than it was in Maxwell Davies’s day; this year’s festival features only a single premiere, from the Scottish composer Pàdruig Morrison. “Max’s music comes and goes from the programming when it’s appropriate,” says Nicolson. “I want to do things that aren’t just a token throw in; things that aren’t done very often, such as the Medium that was performed last year, a 50-minute unaccompanied monodrama for soprano. It’s an extraordinary and fascinating piece but very rarely done.”

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Two good pieces in The Guardian this week: ‘Extraordinary historical jewels’: the cantatas of Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre

Born in Paris in 1665, Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre was a musical prodigy, a talented singer and harpsichordist. She was presented to Louis XIV at Versailles as a teenager, and taken under the wing of his mistress Madame de Montespan. Lauded by the elite, her opera Céphale et Procris (1694) was the first ever by a woman to be performed at the Paris Opera. But most remarkably of all, even though it wasn’t a success, she continued to compose and sustained a professional career into middle age and widowhood. In the new century, she experimented with new forms such as the sonata and the cantata, becoming riskier and more distinctive in her style. She remained among the most respected of French composers until her death in 1729 and was included in guides to the best music for the remainder of the 18th century, before disappearing from view.

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From the CBC: Is Taylor Swift saving the economy? I remember how shocked I was a decade or so ago, to read that a musician that I, at the time, had never heard of was a billionaire. This was Jay-Z and it was in the Wall Street Journal. Previously I had only been aware of Paul McCartney in the billionaire club and certainly he deserved it. But Jay-Z? I had never even heard the name, let alone the music. But it is more and more amazing what a large place music seems to occupy in the economy.

The online research group QuestionPro crunched the numbers and found the Eras Tour will generate billions of dollars in economic activity in the United States. 

"If the current spending pace continues through the end of the tour, the Eras Tour will have generated an estimated $5 billion [US] in economic impact, more than the gross domestic product of 50 countries," QuestionPro wrote in a news release.

Plus, over at the New York Times, Paul Krugman weighs in: Is Taylor Swift Underpaid?

Still, there are many talented artists. Why do a few earn so much? There’s a standard economic theory about that, laid out in a famous paper by the economist Sherwin Rosen, “The Economics of Superstars.” Rosen argued that modern technology meant that the potential reach of performers was much larger than it had been when live performance was the only way to entertain an audience, so that a musician (or, his example, a comedian) who was, or was perceived to be, even a bit better than his or her rivals could earn large sums by performing on mass media, selling records, and so on.

But on the surface, that’s not what’s happening with Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. They’re making huge sums not mainly from record or streaming royalties but from concerts — which is, by the way, normal. One of the lessons I learned from Alan Krueger is that musicians have always made their money mainly by touring; this was true even during the CD era, when record companies were making money hand over fist but passing very little on to the artists. It’s even more true now, in this age of streaming.

But there are live performances, and then there are live performances; ticket sales for each of Swift’s concerts are expected to be $11 million to $12 million.

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Kronos Quartet spreads the word for contemporary music to a new generation of performers

The idea, according to founding first violinist and Artistic Director David Harrington, was to commission 50 quartets from a variety of composers, and make those easily accessible, free of charge, to anyone who wanted to tackle them.

The project, announced in 2015, has now been completed, creating a broad and eclectic repertoire by composers with wildly different stylistic approaches. The quartet’s annual three-day festival, scheduled for Thursday through Saturday, June 22-24, at SFJazz, will be devoted to the fruits of the project.

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More on the business of music: 30 years ago, Prince changed the way artists negotiate with the music industry

“While he was still being paid very generously by Warner Brothers, the conditions of that contract, especially as it pertained to how and when and why he could release his music, that those conditions had become kind of onerous,” Piepenbring said. “He felt that he no longer had control over his songs.” 

“He kind of very famously said that ‘if you don’t own your masters, then your masters own you,’ ” said writer and tech entrepreneur Anil Dash, who’s written about Prince. “At the time when he changed his name, he took to shortly thereafter writing the word slave on his face, which is a pretty profound statement for a Black artist to make.”

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Our first envoi should be something by longtime Orkney resident Peter Maxwell Davies.

Here is a cantata by Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre:

Finally, a little music from the Kronos Quartet: