Friday Miscellanea

Ted Gioia's latest has one of the funniest charts I have ever seen:

Click to enlarge

As he says, this seems to be saying that "The more metal bands per capita, the happier the country." Sounds like a bad case of mistaking correlation for causation...

* * *

I have a passing interest in economics so I occasionally read the blog of Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok. Recently Tyler wrote about How I listen to music. Lots of items on the list, but here are the interesting ones:

4. I don’t listen to much jazz at home any more, though I am no less keen to see a good jazz concert live.  Having already spent a lot of time with the great classics, at current margins I am disillusioned with most “jazz as recorded music.” 

6. Bach gets the most listening time.

Well, ok, not that many interesting ones. But go have a look for yourself.

 * * *

This piece from the New York Times on literary criticism applies, somewhat, to music: Who’s Afraid of Reissued Books?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that literary critics are the most annoying people in the world. They’re elitist, or undignified. They’re divisive. They’re snobs. Their profession is, in fact, dead, and has been for decades. And upon realizing that they are irrelevant, they take themselves way too seriously.

The urgent need to slot historical works of literature into some sort of forced contemporary relevance, whether by insisting on their prophetic nature or wiping them from the collective memory in order to rescue them, seems to miss the idea that reissues may have inherent value because they have aged, or even simply because they are enjoyable. Perhaps Ms. Taubes has something different or more to offer without being reduced to an early example of autofiction. Perhaps a Marguerite Duras novel of rural French poverty and exhaustion does not need to be introduced and contextualized within a story of being a tired mother in a white-collar home in the United States.

And perhaps we can just enjoy historic opera for the simple joys it provides as well as allowing new productions the freedom to discover new joys (or sorrows and outrage, I suppose).

* * *

And what a truly horrific acronym: ANUS SACKS TWO MUSIC PROFESSORS. Couldn't they have named their school the National University School of Music of Australia instead? NUSMA?

The Australian National University School of Music in Canberra, no stranger to controversy, has outdone itself by dismissing two long-serving teachers, the violinist and violist Tor Fromyhr and the cellist David Pereira.

ANUS says they were appointed incorrectly. They are being offered re-employment as casual labour.

And this sounds like just another way to convert good paying jobs with benefits to lower paying jobs with no benefits.

* * *

Hoping to find an article about, you know, music, I went to the Musicology Now site only to discover that there is no longer a Musicology Now site. This was a project of the American Musicological Society. Actual professors don't have the time, I guess and the students tend to produce politically correct drivel, am I right?

* * *

 Cash-strapped councils target arts, parks and leisure cuts

Councils in England are in a state of financial crisis with many facing effective bankruptcy in the next few years unless the funding system is reformed, according to a new report.

More than half the councils that responded to a survey said they were likely to be unable to balance their books in the next five years.

Two-thirds said they were cutting services.

Parks, leisure facilities, arts and culture are at the top of the list.

Let me try and shed some factual light on this. But first we need to translate "funding system reform" into the reality. What they mean is "higher taxes." The truth is that all governments everywhere are chronically short of funds and the reason is simple. Their primary motivations for spending are:

• buying votes so they can be re-elected
• social benefits (also buying votes so they can be re-elected)
• ample salaries and benefits for government workers, i.e. themselves
• the basic functions of government: security (i.e. the police), the administration of justice and defence
• other services such as infrastructure (roads, etc.) and cultural subsidies

Notice the order of priorities. Last on the list is things like cultural subsidies. As a matter of self-interest, for all governments everywhere the first three items will always command priority. However, in some societies cultural subsidies may be given a higher priority due to the choices of the voters. Germany, for example, finds the money to support eighty opera houses while in all of North America there are fewer than fifteen. That includes one in Mexico, two or three in Canada and ten or so in the US.

* * *

Pianist Tiffany Poon on Being a 21st-Century Classical Musician. I ran into Tiffany Poon on YouTube years ago and I enjoyed her personal clips such as the one on her first visit to Salzburg.

Poon, too, has spent an inordinate amount of time documenting her artistic process — yes, even the less glamorous parts of being a musician, like drilling the same tricky passage in Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto over and over and over. Today, day-in-the-life-of-a-musician-at-so-and-so-conservatory videos are aplenty online, but in 2017, when Poon, then a senior in the Columbia-Juilliard Program, began making them, she was ahead of the curve. 

“Learned to Play Harpsichord 2 Hours Before Performing,” one is titled, with 900,000 views. “Upgrade! Picking a New Steinway Model B Grand Piano,” reads another, with over 500,000 views. In the thumbnail of her vlog “Practicing Chopin - 10 Days Till Concert,” she’s staring at her music stand with an elbow propped on the keyboard, seeming quite exasperated. That one’s also been viewed more than 500,000 times. (If you’re curious, here’s a playlist of more than 150 vlogs Poon recorded between 2017 and 2021.) The videos have clearly struck a chord with viewers and have helped her build a YouTube subscriber base comparable in size to that of star violinist Ray Chen.

I'm leaving that in the original format so you can follow the links. I quit watching her videos quite a while ago because while it is certainly a normal part of life for a musician to drill over and over particular passages, it is hardly normal to spend much time listening to someone else do so! Though I do recall a time when I was a student in Salzburg. One evening I went out to the practice rooms to go over the Concierto de Aranjuez first movement at quarter-speed prior to playing it the next morning in Pepe Romero's master class. The practice rooms were in a small building behind the residence and as I went in I heard a violinist playing the same four bars from the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto over and over again. I vaguely recall it was a passage in thirds. Anyway, I spent a couple of hours on the Rodrigo and when I left I heard the same violinist still working on the same little section. I felt like such a slacker!

I know that Hilary Hahn has put up videos of herself practicing, but it would feel like masochism for me to do the same. And Schadenfreude to watch someone else practicing. Don't watch other people living their lives, for Pete's sake! Live your own life! Sheesh...

* * *

Now let's find some good music to listen to. How about Tiffany Poon? I can't seem to find a performance newer than six years ago. Here is some Beethoven:

Just about the first chamber music I ever tried to play was this, the Partita No. 1 by Bach arranged for French horn and guitar:

In honour of the ANUS sacking, here is the Sinfonia Concertante by Mozart for violin and viola:

I first discovered this piece while reading Paul Johnson's biography of Mozart where he mentions this as an example of how Mozart in later life wrote a piece of transcendental beauty oh, every few weeks.