Friday Miscellanea

Here is a meaty piece from The New York Times: Composer, Uninterrupted: Christian Wolff at 90

Wolff, who turns 90 on Friday, is associated with a different pantheon. He is the last living representative of what’s known as the New York School of composition, a group that included John Cage, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and David Tudor. Their tight-knit circle shifted midcentury American music away from classic European models. And it radiated out, intersecting with other arts and artists who were making New York a leading center of modernism: the choreographer Merce Cunningham, the poet John Ashbery, the painters Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and many others.

After an early period involving intense reduction of musical materials, like the proto-minimalist “Duo for Violins” (1950), Wolff sought to create structures that cultivated chance, and also required performers to pay close attention to one another, listening for aural cues to proceed. Or, conversely, to play similar material independently, in tandem. Increasingly, his goal was to allow players of differing abilities to work together.

Over the years, Wolff explored a variety of strategies: graphic scores, text pieces, geometric configurations in which clusters of standard notation hung suspended in expanses of white space. The results could be agitated, evanescent or surprisingly direct and tuneful.

Over the years a perennial interest of mine has been notation and recently I have been combining that with an interest in Wittgenstein's "picture theory" in which thoughts and propositions are seen as pictures of reality. And, of course, graphic notation is a picture of a piece of music. I'm going to see if I can develop this idea.

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I'm not surprised: Are TikTok and Instagram dulling your taste?

“Algorithmic recommendations are addictive because they are always subtly confirming your own cultural, political, and social biases, warping your surroundings into a mirror image of yourself while doing the same for everyone else,” Chayka writes. “This had made me anxious, the possibility that my view of my own life — lived through the Internet — was a fiction formed by the feeds.” So he went on an algorithm cleanse and quit social media...

That's been my solution.

If taste — aesthetic judgment — is a human skill cultivated by a lifetime of gazing, reading, listening and selecting, recommendation algorithms are like the new robots powering up to take over the assembly line of our intentionality. These mathematical helpers reduce selection time and boost the efficiency of seeing pictures, watching TV shows and hearing songs: more and faster.

Just no. 

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A history of new music in Los Angeles: Old-World Culture Meets Hollywood: Monday Evening Concerts and the Development of L.A.’s New-Music Scene

Yet if the LA Phil is the jewel in the crown, there is also a long-established, vibrant, but much less publicized contemporary music scene in Los Angeles led by the venerable Monday Evening Concerts series, which began in the late 1930s. Those roots have branched into a number of current organizations that grew from the same network of players. 

At the height of the Great Depression, when America was reeling in despair, Hollywood thrived, attracting a remarkable community of artists, composers, musicians, writers, and dancer/choreographers from famous artistic scenes, from Vienna to Paris, London, and New York. There was work in the movies, and suddenly Los Angeles was a hub of artists with international recognition.

“It was a completely transplanted community, with the Hollywood film and recording industry as its nexus,” observes Ara Guzelimian, artistic and executive director of the Ojai Music Festival. “Together they kick-started the idea of cultural Los Angeles and at the same time fostered a new audience. It was a cultural jolt.”

In the 1930s Los Angeles was home to the two most important composers of the first half of the century: Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky. 

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 Looking at this:  “Welcome to the Sound Wellness Revolution”: Endel’s AI-Generated Soundscapes and the Commodification of Passive Listening I wonder why there are not any positive trends?

Functional music is nothing new. From work songs to workout playlists, music is often used to influence listeners’ moods and behaviours. This is exemplified by the ubiquity of background music, which can be traced to the United States in the 1930s when the company Muzak first began piping easy-listening music into stores, workplaces, public transit, and other spaces. In the century since, recorded background music has spread throughout much of the world from Britain to Japan, designed to calm listeners, encourage customer spending, and increase worker efficiency. These effects reflect Anahid Kassabian’s concept of “ubiquitous listening,” which describes how even passive engagement with music can shape affect and subjectivity.

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 Our first envoi is by Christian Wolff, Edges from 1968.

I recently re-watched one of my favorite movies, The Year of Living Dangerously by Peter Weir with Linda Hunt, Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver. In one scene we see Gibson's character simply listening to this song. I think Peter Weir uses music more skillfully than any other director I can think of.

The movie's title, by the way, comes from a speech by Indonesian President Sukarno. I'm thinking of naming this year The Year of Petulant Restraint.

Finally the Tombeau fait à Paris sur la mort de Monsieur Blancheroche by Johann Jakob Froberger