Friday Miscellanea

Late-breaking news: Peter Schickele, Composer and Gleeful Sire of P.D.Q. Bach, Dies at 88. The New York Times delivers a hefty obit to this unique composer.

For more than a half century, through live performances seemingly born of the marriage of Mozart, the Marx Brothers and Rube Goldberg; prizewinning recordings; and even a book-length biography, P.D.Q. Bach (“the only dead composer from whom one can commission,” Mr. Schickele liked to say) remained enduringly, fiendishly alive.

Leaping from Mr. Schickele’s pen in P.D.Q.’s name were compositions like the “No-No Nonette,” the cantata “Iphigenia in Brooklyn,” the “Unbegun” Symphony and “Pervertimento for Bagpipes, Bicycle and Balloons.”

Read the whole thing! Now on with our regularly-scheduled program.

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"A gramophone record, the musical thought, the musical notation,

the sound waves, all stand to one another in that internal relation of depicting

that holds between language and world."

--Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.014

With war come some heroic music stories: ‘Our music cannot be destroyed’: the duo reviving a macabre Ukrainian masterpiece.

In the National Philharmonic Hall in Warsaw, violinist Joshua Bell and conductor Dalia Stasevska are on an intensely focused mission to get the opening bars of a concerto just right. The work begins with a series of exposed chords from the woodwind, from which rises a declamatory flourish on the violin that fades into a lyrical phrase so intimate and hushed that it steals the breath. The musicians are recording the piece, so the passage is repeated over and over, then critiqued, with the finest of adjustments made. 

The violin concerto is by the virtually forgotten Ukrainian-born composer Thomas de Hartmann. The musicians of the International Symphony Orchestra Lviv (INSO-Lviv) are giving it its first commercial recording since the work’s premiere in 1943. They will then perform it in a concert of Ukrainian and Polish music in Warsaw. The timing of this wartime resurrection has its own irony, since De Hartmann’s klezmer-inflected score was deeply influenced by his distress at the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, and especially by the fate of its Jewish citizens.

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The headline is deceptive: CONTEMPORARY MUSIC IS OVER, DONE, DEAD. WHAT NOW? In reality these are some interesting thoughts from French composer Jean-Louis Agobet.

Let’s look at how haute cuisine emerged from the hushed and totally utopian space of the 1970s and 1980s. Elitist, terribly hermetic in its codes and vocabulary, the cuisine of the happy few has become incredibly open and popular without renouncing quality, creative demand and invention, but by abandoning the purity of the space in which it was deployed, by completely rethinking the discourse and the codes which accompanied it and by embracing, this is the essential, a real economic, social and referential diversity…

Creative quality is something that can be nurtured in hermetic spaces and then used to infuse more popular offerings, is the message here.

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I tried to watch the Bernstein movie Maestro on Netflix, but found it uncongenial (as I do with most movies about classical music) and turned it off after five minutes. I did enjoy this review, though: Leonard Bernstein Deserved Better Than ‘Maestro’

Was it any good? The fact that the first extended scene about music didn’t come till about 90 minutes into the two-hour film should be enough to supply you with your answer. By confining the plot to a small part of Bernstein’s personal life, Cooper somehow managed to turn the most talented, flamboyant, beloved, successful, and complex American musician in history into a two-dimensional domestic villain.

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Universal Music Group to Lay Off ‘Hundreds’ in First Quarter. I have to say that articles like this do not make me more comfortable with the corporate approach to music:

A Universal rep said in a statement: “We continue to position UMG to accelerate its leadership in music’s most promising growth areas and drive its transformation to capitalize on them. Over the past several years, we have been investing in future growth—building our ecommerce and D2C operations, expanding geographically, and leveraging new technologies. While we maintain our industry-leading investments in A&R and artist development, we are creating efficiencies in other areas of the business so we can remain nimble and responsive to the dynamic market, while realizing the benefits of our scale.”

Doesn't sound like there is any room there for creative freedom.

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Is "algorithmic anxiety" something real? How to Take Back Your Life From Algorithms

Songs are getting shorter, because it only takes 30 seconds to rack up a listen on Spotify. Poetry has enjoyed an unexpected revival on Instagram, but mostly when it is universal, aphoristic, and neatly formatted to work as image as well as text. There’s the phenomenon of the “fake movie” on streaming services like Netflix; these cultural artifacts have actors, plots, settings—all the makings of a real film, but still seem slickly artificial, crowd-sourced and focus-grouped down to nothing.

In other words, what you like is being erased by what suits an algorithm. 

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Their Songs Were Stolen by Phantom Artists. They Couldn’t Get Them Back.

Despite their backgrounds, both men were stymied by the vast and arcane world of music streaming fraud, a realm where anonymous pirates are constantly devising new ways to steal from the $17 billion a year pool of royalty money intended for artists.

That’s a giant, tempting pot of gold for scammers around the world. Beatdapp, a Vancouver company that detects fraud for industry clients, estimates that a little more than 10 percent of that pot, about $2 billion, is swiped annually.

“Bad actors are getting creative,” said Andreea Gleeson of the Music Fights Fraud Alliance, a collection of labels, distributors and streaming platforms. “It’s a constantly moving target.”

Spotify and its rivals were supposed to end the era of music piracy. In the late 1990s and early aughts, millions of fans routinely downloaded songs from online peer-to-peer file services without paying a penny, a fiasco that cost the industry a fortune. When monthly subscription services (like Spotify) and pay-per-song offerings (the early version of Apple Music) came along, musicians and labels finally had a lucrative way to harness the convenience of online music.

But the streaming ecosystem, say critics, is easily gamed. For $20, artists can buy an annual subscription to a music distributor, a company that can instantly post songs to dozens of streaming platforms. Unfortunately, bad actors have the same opportunity.

Read the whole thing. 

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New Research Looks At How Music Builds Social Connections

It will be no secret to anyone who’s attended a live concert that the experience can bring people together, and that it can happen on what feels like a visceral level. The implications point to questions and theories.

• Has music evolved as a way to create and build social bonds? Was that its main driving force in early humans?
• Traditional and modern societies tend to mark most public occasions with music, which helps to establish trust within groups.
• Spontaneous synchronization to the rhythm of music has an effect on specific areas of the brain, as well as on feelings of positive connectedness.
• Several studies show that the feeling of affiliation with the group persists after the musical experience, and resulted in increased cooperation and cohesion within working groups.
• That effect has been observed in children as young as 14-months of age.

Read the whole thing for a few caveats.

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Here is some good news from Bachtrack:

 One notable finding over the past ten years has been the steady rise in programming of music by living composers. Worldwide, since 2013, contemporary music has risen from around 6% to 14% in our listings. This is a trend reflected in many individual locations: in the UK rising from 6% to 15%, and in the US rising from 7.5% to 20%. In some locations, such as Japan, Austria and France, there are comparatively fewer performances of contemporary music, but even in each of these locations, there is an observed rise.

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 Here is the Thomas de Hartmann Violin Concerto in a live performance:

Here is Nucleus (2003) for orchestra by Jean-Louis Agobet:

Let's have a little Leonard Bernstein. This is his Serenade for violin and orchestra after Plato's Symposium.

And for something less modern, here is the Takeuchi String Quartet with the String Quartet in G major Hob.III:81 Op.77-1 by Joseph Haydn: