Friday Miscellanea

Because the Friday Miscellanea used to be a lot more light-hearted and then things got very dire.

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Now back to our usual message of woe: Spotify officially demonetises all tracks with under 1,000 streams. See, this is why I don't stream (apart from YouTube). It is my conviction that much of the best art and music is found on the less-travelled paths, the less well-known artists. So the way the big corporations have stepped into our lives--oh and big governments too--has not been a blessing.

According to a Spotify blog post, 99.5% of all streams on the platform are of tracks that have above that many plays, with the platform claiming that these tracks will now earn more as a result. 

This week, United Musicians and Allied Workers shared a post on X which suggested those numbers could be wildly overstated, arguing that 86% of all content on Spotify will now fail to meet the criteria for royalties based on play count.

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The New Neo runs a really interesting blog and one of her specialties is dance: You may never have heard of Vladimir Vasiliev, one of the greatest male ballet dancers who ever lived.

But even on videos you can see the tremendous height of Vasiliev’s jumps. In this video the camera angles are sometimes odd, and I have no idea what sort of surface he’s on. It looks as though it could even be concrete, which would be awful. But no matter; Vasiliev soars to a height surprising. Keep in mind that the year was 1969 and ballet technique back then was nothing like as advanced as today. And yet most of today’s dancers can’t hold a candle to him

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This is a follow-up to an item posted a few weeks ago about the dire situation of the Victoria Conservatory of Music. This story is about the music program at another institution in the region, Vancouver Island University: VIU's music program should not be closed

We are shocked and dismayed upon learning that action is being taken to dismantle the music program at Vancouver Island University.

We believe this is short-sighted, as music is one of the most lucrative degrees to attain for so many reasons. We can attest to the success of this program, as we are both graduates from VIU’s former Malaspina College two-year jazz diploma.

We have made international careers in the music industry as multi Juno-award winning conductors, performers and producers, in part due to our formative years at this institution.

Read on for the details of the very successful careers of the writers. They close by saying:

We believe that there is a strong market in the institution to have a robust body of students who want to be trained to enter the ever-growing and changing Canadian music industry, whether in education or professional arts careers in music.

VIU is the perfect place for this to happen. Nanaimo has always had the potential to be a culture magnet and has had growth in this area because of VIU’s music program.

Closing this program will definitely shutter culture in the Nanaimo region, period.

I'm posting this because, as with the Victoria Conservatory of Music, I have a personal connection. For a couple of years, when the school was just a two-year college, myself and a flute professor drove from Victoria to Nanaimo once a week to spend the day teaching private students at the school.

I'm not sure that these kinds of appeal can be successful, though. The argument the writers make does not quite jibe with reality. The truth is that these two individuals are the exception, not the rule. The truth is that most graduates of this music program and ones at the Victoria Conservatory of Music and the University of Victoria will not have successful international careers--and that is what you have to achieve to make a decent living. Typically, graduates move into related fields like the public school system, arts administration or even out of the arts entirely. A tiny percentage, like myself, continue as performing musicians and make a living. Mind you, it likely won't be a "decent" living!

Why is this? Vancouver Island, British Columbia and Canada generally provide thin and poor cultural soil for any music apart from folk, popular and country. This is not surprising as they were only recently colonized. The very first Canadian composer who was not an immigrant from Great Britain, Murray Adaskin, only came into his career after the Second World War. Incidentally, Adaskin's parents were Jewish immigrants from Latvia. Classical music in Canada (with, as always, the exception of Quebec) has been supported by a tiny percentage of native-born Canadians and a significant number of immigrants from Europe, especially from Germany and Austria. As the proportion of these in the population diminishes and that of immigrants from Asia, Latin America and Africa increases, the support for classical music will continue to diminish.

The only real and reliable support for the rather expensive art form of classical music exists in societies where a very large proportion of the population love the music and attend performances. That in turn will open the possibility of lucrative careers for students of music in those societies. That's how the causality works. You can't create the markets by setting up schools to train musicians who graduate with nowhere to go. It is instructive to note that both the authors of the above article live and work in the US.

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Loony item of the week: How Our Music Affects the Earth.

While it's well known that factors like transportation, agriculture, and fashion use up resources and contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, less time is devoted to considering how the music industry as a whole plays a role in impacting the environment. It can be easy to forget that something we cherish so much can also be a part of the problem.

The rise of streaming services has led to lower consumption of records and CDs, and therefore less plastic packaging. Such tangible methods of music consumption may be more obvious in their effects on the environment, but streaming is harmful in its own way. A collaborative study between the University of Glasgow and the University of Oslo found that in 2000, when CD sales were at their highest, music consumption in the U.S. generated 157 million kilograms of greenhouse gases. It requires huge banks of servers which store the files that must be accessed every time a person plays a song. Each retrieval uses energy, which in turn generates carbon emissions.

Obviously civilization itself is a danger to the environment...

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A Russian expatriate based in Germany: A Conductor Who Believes That No Artist Can Be Apolitical

Now in his third season as the opera house’s music director, Jurowski, 52, is attracting the kind of adoration from the Munich public that was routine under Kirill Petrenko, who left in 2021 to lead the Berlin Philharmonic. But Jurowski is not merely winning over audiences; he has maintained the Bavarian State Opera’s reputation as one of the finest — if not the finest — companies in Europe while pushing its repertoire in new directions and rooting his artistry in political awareness.

“We classical musicians tend to keep ourselves way from politics,” Jurowski said over lunch in March. “We always say that the music should be apolitical. Music can be, and art can be, but people who are making art should not be apolitical. At a certain point it becomes not about politics, but about ethics.”

Read the whole thing to see how he negotiates the conflicting needs of aesthetics and politics.

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And here is composer David Bruce talking about Dilla Beats:

 There is actually a mainstream classical example of a micro rhythm. The traditional performance of a Viennese waltz is to play the first beat short, the second beat long and the third beat medium. Or you could think of it as playing the second beat early. And of course there is the whole panoply of effects of the French inégale.

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Now for some envois. Here is Vladimir Jurowski conducting Mahler:

And for an authentic performance of a Viennese waltz you likely can't do better than the Vienna Philharmonic:

Don't see any other good envoi possibilities in this week's items so I guess I get a free throw. We haven't mentioned the Swedish symphonic composer Allan Pettersson for quite a while. Here is his Symphony No. 6:

(That's for people who find Bruckner just too jaunty and superficial!)