Friday Miscellanea

Here is a piece on Pop Music’s Blandest Prophet:

In the history of pop, the producer’s place is clearer. A producer serves as a shorthand for the dominant sound of a whole era: George Martin and Eddie Kramer for the “studio as a musical instrument” experiments of the late ’60s; Quincy Jones for the clinically precise grooves of ’70s and ’80s R&B; Glen Ballard for the drum-machine-and-acoustic-guitar mallscapes of ’90s adult alternative; Babyface for the smooth textures of that decade’s R&B; Max Martin for the Eurodance sheen of 2000s teen pop. Each of these sounds is curiously detachable from the music itself, and certainly from the artists who make it. 

It could be said that we are living through soundless — which is to say zeitgeistless — times. Our pop stars have a curiously anonymous quality, as if they are singing from behind the disturbing animal masks on The Masked Singer, already alienated from their own music. Streaming platforms have melted down the old genre system, where each style of music could lay claim to a discrete audience segment, into a tepid, A.I.-aggregated soup.

Or, as I think of it, "industrialized music product."

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Here's an interesting question: What Happened to the Avant-Garde?

It’s commonplace to note that sociopolitical upheaval and artistic experimentation often flourish side by side. But today — despite an alleged “polycrisis” — new modes of cultural production don’t seem to be emerging. Three years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent George Floyd rebellion, the arts seem stagnant and stubbornly centralized: franchise fare dominates at the box office; literary output is hampered by monopolized publishers; even the obsession with so-called nepo babies suggests a cultural bloodline without disruption. The internet, meanwhile, tends to both homogenize art and silo audiences by algorithm. We’ve begun to wonder if we’re overlooking experimental movements, or if they’re going extinct.

There are several linked articles. I have some ideas, but what do you think?

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 A surprisingly interesting item from Slipped Disc: REMEMBER WHEN FESTIVALS USED TO BE FUN?

It’s our second year at the Oregon Old-Time Fiddlers’ Summer Camp, in Pleasant Hills, Oregon. About 200 of us are camped in a flat, hot field abutting a grove of Douglas Firs belonging to the rather down-at-the-heals Emerald Christian Academy. We are fearlessly lead by a motley group of instructors with a median age of somewhere between 75 and 105, judging from the stories of childhoods with no running water, lists of recent health issues combined with forgetting where the double bass is parked.

Students range from 2 years old to 80, coming from a 500 mile radius, in campers, old pickup trucks and SUV’s, carrying banjos, fiddles, basses, ukuleles and guitars. From many walks of life, I have met farmers, retired professionals, and university professors, some wearing home-made clothing, cowboy hats and boots, or cutoffs and Nirvana t-shirts. Green-haired adolescents and mothers with long braids join in ad-hoc circle jams well before and after the sun has gone down. In the evenings, after country dancing in the gym, the kids play outside while parents play their instruments around the campsites, all eventually coming back to sleep when they feel like their day is done.

This is the kind of thing my mother would have been involved with when she was alive. Read the whole thing.

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Here is yet another example of why you should not allow your guitar in checked baggage: ‘RYANAIR CHUCKED MY GUITAR’.

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One of the ongoing sadnesses of the decline of classical music can be found in headlines like this: Donate, dump or destroy? Finding a home for used pianos can be a challenge.

When I moved from Montreal I had a lot of possessions to trim down and one category was musical instruments. My mother had recently passed away so I had her collection as well as my own. I also had several computers to unload. So I put a couple of ads in the paper. The computers (and the car) disappeared in a few days. But the musical instruments, which included an electric piano, several violins, some student guitars, an antique banjo and others, just sat there. No calls. Nobody needed or wanted musical instruments. I still have that antique banjo.

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WHY ARE THE SCORES OF UNDERREPRESENTED COMPOSERS RIDDLED WITH MISTAKES?

If we need a score of Beethoven piano sonatas or Brahms string quartets, we might spend a while deliberating over which of the various editions to buy – many musicians will choose an ‘Urtext’ edition, which aims to present as faithfully as possible the composer’s markings; others might choose a version with more editorial suggestions, helpful fingerings and other annotations. Fortunately, these days we can generally be fairly confident that, whichever edition we end up with, the notes which Beethoven or Brahms wrote will be accurately represented.

This is not surprising as these works have been studied and performed and re-published many times which has provided numerous occasions to correct the many mistakes that certainly plagued the scores when they were first published.

In the weeks leading up to Kaleidoscope’s recordings of Florence Price’s Piano Quintet and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Nonet (both for Chandos), Tom spent many days trying to correct a vast catalogue of errors in the published editions – some were very obvious (the very first bar of the Coleridge-Taylor Nonet, a resonant F minor chord, contained notes which clearly didn’t belong to the harmony), while others needed more detailed detective work, and only became apparent as we got to know the music more intimately. 

Upon realising just how many errors there seemed to be in the Price Quintet score, we contacted the library of University of Arkansas Special Collections Department, where Price’s original manuscript is held. This enabled us to spot and correct a huge number of mistakes – our errata list runs to 150 significant misprints (which we’re always happy to share with other musicians), and we’re quite sure we didn’t catch everything. The editor admitted that the score had been produced in a hurry and apologised for the errors; since then, a ‘revised and corrected’ edition has been produced by the same publisher...

This is also not surprising for the same reasons cited above. After a couple of generations of performances, all these errors (or most of them!) will be hunted down and corrected. Probably. Alas, I know of quite a few guitar editions that have had the same errors reproduced in printing after printing--and they were far from "underrepresented" composers.

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Ted Gioia: The Number of Songs in the World Doubled Yesterday

An artificial intelligence company in Delaware boasted, in a press release, that it had created 100 million new songs. That’s roughly equivalent to the entire catalog of music available on Spotify.

It took thousands of years of human creativity to make the first 100 million songs. But an AI bot matched that effort in a flash.

Define "song." Hah, hah, hah!

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 Controlling behaviour, emotional abuse – is classical music teaching broken?

While classical music has long been mired in high profile cases of sexual abuse, the psychological and emotional abuse experienced by many young musicians is harder to pin down and often goes under the radar – especially when it happens to impressionable music students at universities and conservatoires who feel unable to speak out against their teachers.

Along with Hollywood, film, theater, dance and other areas. I really hate to read statements like these that seem to portray classical music education as uniquely evil. It's not. Most classical music teachers are caring, hard-working (if sometimes bored) musicians who are simply trying to do the best they can for their students. And for not much pay!

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Ok, no more dreary news items. Time for some joyous envoi! Let's start with some old-time fiddle music:

Next, Segovia playing Bach:

And finally, the Piano Quintet in A minor (with the score!) by Florence Price: