Friday Miscellanea

It's good news, bad news: Tennessee becomes first US state with law protecting musicians from AI

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed a bill into law on Thursday that aimed to protect artists including musicians from unauthorized use by artificial intelligence. 

The Tennessee legislation updates Tennessee's personal rights protection law to include "protections for songwriters, performers, and music industry professionals' voice from the misuse of artificial intelligence," the governor's office said in a statement.

The good news is that this might help artists defend themselves against the simple theft of their image, sound, style and so forth by AI programs. If you look at YouTube you can see many clips that create fake imagery of famous people like Emma Watson--who most certainly did not pose for all those bikini shots. But on the other hand, this is just another example of government taking over our individual powers of decision and discrimination which is most certainly a bad thing. In a better world, we would simply refuse to look at and listen to obviously fake representations. The necessity to distinguish between truth and falsity, illusion, is one of the most basic human needs.

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Finally Wagner gets HIP: How Did Wagner Want His ‘Ring’ Cycle to Sound?

With a team of researchers and dedicated musicians, the conductor Kent Nagano is taking a historically informed performance approach to Wagner’s epic.

This is Wagner without constant vibrato, and sometimes without traditionally operatic singing. But mostly, the difference in sound comes from the instruments themselves, both originals from the 19th century and reproductions. Historical, often temperamental winds and brasses have a milder timbre, similar to the gut strings used throughout the orchestra, which here is tuned to 435 hertz — Wagner’s preference, slightly lower than the frequency of 440 Hz used by most players today.

Looks like it is time to review Taruskin's remarks about historic "authenticity." If we are doing "historically informed" performances of Wagner now, can John Cage be far behind? Where is that piano he "prepared" and do we have the original screws?

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Naomi Wolf and the culture of New York: ‘Broken in What Way?’

The culture of New York is now completely fragmented, and this happened through language.

It used to be that while there were a million different languages and accents here, everyone was trying to communicate as best he or she could — all the time. New Yorkers were famous for this! Any given day was thrilling, because random strangers, from whatever part of the world, would say something silly or funny or wise to you in passing, and everyone would manage to get the gist of each other, whatever anyone’s level of English. We were all present in the joy of being Americans — New Yorkers!— together.

That commonality is simply gone. Culturally, this city could now be anywhere in the world — any globalist, polyglot city. The culture that was New York has been smashed right through.

And here is the crux of it:

There is a marked degradation in what can only be called aesthetics, and a great deal of erasure of what had been the presence of the treasures of Western culture.

If you are a child going to the Brooklyn Museum on a field trip, you will literally have no idea what the Western artistic heritage has been, but you will learn that it is bad.

Read the whole thing, if you can stand the depression, for the details. I think a few moments reflection will reveal by whom and through what means this was accomplished.

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And here they are: In the name of anti-elitism, Arts Council England has declared war on opera and excellence. Of course they have. Recall my post a while ago: of the five priorities of government, the first three are to serve themselves, the fourth is the basic functions of government such as the administration of justice and dead last is things like infrastructure and cultural subsidies. Government fundamentally has no interest in culture which is the product of individuals working in concert, its only interests are power and control. So more fool you if you let government have control over culture.

Despite zero evidence that audiences are averse to revivals or more responsive to newly commissioned work, the authors, Tamsin Cox and Oliver Mantell, emphasise their point with one of several threats featuring in a document intended to help shape its future opera funding. “As a result of its limited engagement with the creation of new work, opera and music theatre may find it harder to make an argument for its continued evolution as a cultural practice.”

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Proving that the University of North Texas hates early music as well as Schenkerian analysis: UNIVERSITY SHOOTS THE HARPSICHORDIST

One hundred and fifty people, including students, faculty and alumni, signed a petition, and faculty wrote letters urging the College of Music to reconsider its decision not to renew the contract of its only lecturer of harpsichord.

In summer 2023, College of Music Dean John Richmond made the decision to let Lecturer of Harpsichord Bradley Bennight’s contract expire at the end of the spring 2024 semester. The petition says the loss of the harpsichord lecturer position and the changes that would follow, in combination with previous cuts and any future cuts, could “severely cripple, if not destroy” the college’s early music program.

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After so much promise: SALONEN CLARIFIES HIS REASONS FOR LEAVING SAN FRANCISCO

The departing conductor has made some cryptic comments to Vesa Siren at the Helsingin Sanomat. Among other concerns, he is upset that budget cuts have eliminated next year’s Europe tour, requiring him to find a new orchestra to premiere his horn concerto at the Lucerne Festival.

He says: ‘The board has decided on big and dramatic cuts that affect the orchestra’s artistic profile so deeply that I don’t consider it possible to continue my contract.’

Additionally, ‘I’m not taking a new position as chief conductor, at least not soon. Possibly never again. After all, this has already been going on for a long time, 40 years.’

From an earlier Slipped Disc:

What really happened? Salonen, a sought-after conductor of progressive – meaning expensive – ideas ran into a headstrong board chair, Priscilla Geeslin, who demanded cuts. She called his departure ‘bittersweet’. That can be taken to mean that she is at least half pleased by the costly conductor’s departure. She got her way.

The third element is a weak CEO, Matthew Spivey, only 18 months in the job. When Geeslin pushed and Salonen shoved off, Spivey was squeezed until the pips squeaked. He piped up something about ‘significant financial pressures on the organization that have become impossible to ignore.’ What’s impossible to ignore is the ignominy of the situation.

There were three elements in the storm and one had to give way. It was, inevitably, the artist. 

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 From the "Agh, not again" Department: Music (Not Math) Is Our Universal Language — Two New Studies Show

Music is a universal language… it’s an often repeated axiom, but what does that mean? Two newly published scientific studies add proof to the common impression.

One dismantles one of the pillars of Western theory, while the results of the other show that no matter where we come from, we have an innate response to the emotions that music conveys.

Music isn't even a language, let alone a universal one. Also, music does not convey ordinary emotions. Finally, these are scientific studies, of course, so one ought to be on guard from the outset about scientific studies that make claims in non-scientific areas.

The study looked at the responses of test subjects to the music arising from different traditions, using what are called body sensations maps or BSMs. What they found was quite simple: the same kinds of emotional and physical responses were produced across diverse cultures.

The emotional qualities in music produce physical responses and sensations, in patterns that were similar across the diverse groups;

The acoustic and structural features of the music were linked to the emotions and bodily sensations produced;

There were universal patterns in the responses they observed;

They did not observe any significant differences across divergent cultures.

A joyful piece of music will always be interpreted as a joyful piece of music, in other words, no matter where it is heard.

My skepticism meter just hit the red. Without all the details of who the test subjects were, how many they were and where they came from and the exact details of what music was used and how responses were measured, not to mention how to precisely define "joy" in music, I haven't the slightest idea what they are actually claiming, let alone how true it is. AGH! (If you follow the link in the article, you can get some more details, but...)

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I think we need some music composed by Salonen. Here is his cello concerto:

A little harpsichord music by Jacques Duphly:

That's rather "dark academic" isn't it? Now let's have a piece of music that would be received utterly differently by different listeners depending on their cultural background:

But of course, this is true of pretty much all music, isn't it? Metallica fans might not get much out of a Mozart serenade and vice versa: