Friday Miscellanea

This is the best long think-piece about our cultural malaise I have read in a long time: America’s pop-culture armageddon. Read the whole thing, but this is a good bit:

While the implosion of each of America’s culture industries may look different up close, it is not hard to see the common factors at work. These range from the consolidation of once-thriving industries and the monopolisation of distribution channels to the stamping-out of competition, the ongoing detachment of monopolistic conglomerates from their audiences and the pursuit of lowest-common-denominator blockbusters to pay for the resulting losses. As America’s culture industries have decayed into anti-competitive, risk-averse monopolists, they have imposed layers upon layers of mind-numbing and increasingly politicised bureaucracy on their productions that make real creativity all but impossible. Looming above all these developments is the threat of push-button culture-production driven by AI, whereby studio executives can fulfil their dystopian dreams of licensing the likenesses of dead actors and actresses and feeding them into software owned by tech conglomerates. This would dispense with the need to negotiate for the services of pesky writers, directors and actors, along with Hollywood’s century-old hodge-podge of unionised guilds.

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 Hearing New Sounds from Very Old Instruments:

“Period instruments.” We often associate the term with the era in which they were either invented or were in their heyday. The time warp of historical performance thus entails some cartography to recover (or discover) a period instrument’s home turf. We often must take a step back from the instruments, viewing them as foreign objects, philosophically fusing time and space to make good L.P. Bartley’s famous quote, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

But the fields of composition and contemporary performance have offered alternative paths to learning about the expressive potential of period instruments, and, intriguingly, even some historical aspects of how they were used.

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This wing-shaped instrument is a redesigned baby grand piano:

“The magic of the instrument is mostly hidden,” Harden says. “I wanted to liberate the piano by more fully expressing its form, function, and usability.” For now, the Ravenchord is just a concept, but the technical drawings are done, and Harden is waiting for an investor—maybe Elton John, he says in jest—to swoop in and turn those drawings into a built prototype.

Harden is far from the first person to attempt to reinvent the instrument. The Schimmel Pegasus, for example, boasts a voluptuous body worthy of Zaha Hadid’s office. The Bogányi piano sports a cantilevered shape reminiscent of a giant Panton chair. Most of these iterations retain the DNA of a grand piano, tweaking it only at the margin. But the Ravenchord is unrecognizable—perhaps because Harden, who doesn’t play the piano, isn’t as attached to the traditional shape of the instrument as I have been since I started playing at age 7. “I don’t think that pianos are very beautiful. I think they’re awkward forms with ugly legs,” he tells me. Touché.

Follow the link for some photos of a really weird and wonderful instrument.

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Truncated? Skimpy? You're darn right it is! This is possibly the most deficient Friday Miscellanea I have ever put up except for that one that didn't even get posted on Friday. The reason is that I have been so busy this week that I didn't have any spare time to dig around for interesting items. So let's just move right on to some envois.

Here is a piece for amplified viol quartet from the second item above:

And now some Llobet played by one of our favorite commentators, Steven Watson.

Finally, the Mozart Clarinet Concerto: