It's a weird world we live in: Eric Clapton’s ‘Wonderful Tonight’ Guitar to Sell Amid Robust Music Memorabilia Market. You might get blocked by the paywall so the story is that an old Martin acoustic guitar that Clapton supposedly wrote a song on in 1977 is headed to auction and is estimated to sell for around $380,000 or the price of a house in many markets. This isn't one of his famous guitars like the Gibson he used to play on with Cream, or one of the Fender Stratocasters he played on in later years. Nope, this is just an old guitar with cigarette burns:
Clapton wrote “Wonderful Tonight” for his then-girlfriend Pattie Boyd, whom he would be married to from 1979 to 1989. The guitar has a number of other Clapton-specific features, such as cigarette burns in the finish, for which he was known to have across his guitars.
Memorabilia tied to specific, significant music pieces like Clapton’s guitar are attracting a certain group of well-resourced auction buyers as they look to reconnect with some of their favorite artists and own a literal piece of music history.
"A literal piece of music history"! This seems pathetic, decadent and superficially materialistic all at the same time so hey, I guess it is the perfect reflection of our times with its strange obsession with celebrity.
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I think this is one of those things I'm going to be skeptical about: Music Just Changed Forever.
Imagine if after Oppenheimer successfully detonated the first atomic bomb, the rest of the world had just shrugged its shoulders and carried on as normal.
Because that’s what seems to have just happened in the entire field of human culture known as “music.”
A few weeks ago, a company called Suno released a new version of its AI-generated music app to the public. It works much like ChatGPT: You type in a prompt describing the song you’d like… and it creates it.
The results are, in my view, absolutely astounding. So much so that I think it will be viewed by history as the end of one musical era and the start of the next one. Just as The Bomb reshaped all of warfare, we’ve reached the point where AI is going to reshape all of music.
That's the basic assumption. Notice that this is the kind of argument that has become typical in public discourse these days. Driven by the need for traffic, much of what we encounter on the internet, on YouTube and elsewhere is characterized by ludicrous and excessive claims and analogies. It started with entirely evidence and research-free claims about the "Ten Best" this and that. It moved on to claims that someone "destroyed" someone else with a quip. And now, every new generation of computer software changes humanity "forever." Take a moment to realize that every widespread event changes everything "forever." The Internet, the smart phone, the use of drones in warfare, in music, the invention of recording, the invention of streaming, sampling, the use of autotune and drum machines, hell, the invention of nylon strings for classical guitar to replace gut. All of these things had an incremental and continuing impact which means they changed things "forever."
Don't I wish that there were courses in school and university that taught things like proportionality and perspective in argument, that taught history, that just taught how to make an argument and avoid logical errors. Oh, wait, there was a time when they did, but all that had to be banned in order to leave room for more ideological indoctrination.
Ok end of rant. My answer to the above claim is simply that computer algorithms do not "create" anything, they just slap together some generic stuff lifted from people who did actually create something. Go ahead, listen to the examples. One thing we can deduce is that pop music has become itself so akin to a generic industrial product that even a computer can fake it plausibly. To be fair, the writer later on admits that:
I don’t think [AI] will make a huge difference at the “top” of the industry. Taylor Swift, Coldplay and, regrettably, U2, will continue to release albums and sell out stadiums. No one is going to stop you somehow enjoying Bono’s music.
But where I do think AI will make a difference are the billion other lower-grade circumstances where music is playing. If you need background music for your corporate health and safety training video, or you need a theme tune for your podcast, then it is a no-brainer to use AI instead of paying an expensive musician.
For better or worse then, AI will become the ubiquitous source of, essentially, “elevator music” for the entire world...
So it's not actually music. It's more anti-music.
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The Guardian: Yuja Wang review – from delicate finesse to fierce intensity
Yuja Wang’s latest recital at the Festival Hall was a dazzling, at times beguiling affair, carefully structured and executed with her customary flamboyance, glamour and elegance. Chopin’s four Ballades formed the second half of the programme, but before the interval came works from around 1950: Samuel Barber’s Piano Sonata in E Flat Minor, and a selection of Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues.
Let's give deserving praise, her programming is far more creative than most pianists these days. She even had a piece by Pierre Boulez as an encore.
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Norman Lebrecht wonders: WHERE DID UK MUSIC TEACHING GO WRONG?
There is only one British contestant at this year’s Leeds piano competition, an event founded by piano teacher Fanny Waterman (pictured) to advance awareness of the instrument and its talented young performers.
Just one.
I looked through the list of current players in the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester’s concert this week in Granada. One in five players were Spanish. I struggled to find a single Brit.
Getting into these elite events requires training at the highest level.
Have we just lost it?
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In case you were wondering: What is the state of opera in L.A.? Here is just a taste of the article:
Although no longer known for boldly progressive main stage productions — the likes of Achim Freyer’s Wagner “Ring” cycle (far and away the most imaginative of any American “Ring”) and a series of Robert Wilson stagings — L.A. Opera delivers a “Turandot” that does at least provide local color. Hockney designed his “Turandot” sets for San Francisco Opera and Chicago Lyric Opera, where they were first used in 1992. Still, he was at the time an Angeleno. His blues were the Pacific Ocean. His reds were Malibu sunsets.
The Hockney “Turandot” dazzles. He transformed objectionably quaint Chinoiserie of yore into a vibrant East-West artistic fusion. But of the seven operas Hockney designed (including a wondrous “Tristan und Isolde” for Music Center Opera in 1987), his “Turandot” is the most problematic and holds up least well.
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I guess we have to have a scandal of the week: In Free Fall: The classical music industry reacts to allegations of sexual harassment against conductor François-Xavier Roth
When the French conductor François-Xavier Roth woke up the week before last in his apartment in Paris, his career was in excellent shape. He had just given two concerts with the Berlin Philharmonic. He had a tour to look forward to with Les Siècles, the period instrument ensemble he founded. He was the Music Director of the Gürzenich Orchestra, the general music director of the city of Cologne, the Principal Guest Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, and Chief Conductor and Artist Director designate of the SWR Symphonieorchester in Stuttgart. His calendar was packed and the gigs kept getting better. Roth’s name stood for eclectic yet carefully curated programs, creative interpretations, and joyful experimentation beyond the well-trodden paths of the repertoire. He was equally capable of discovering unknown works and rediscovering well-known classics.
On May 22, suddenly nobody seemed to want anything to do with Roth. In the French satirical magazine Le Canard enchaîné, which is renowned for its investigative reporting, seven musicians accused Roth of harassment in the form of sexual text messages, including dick pics. (VAN was informed of Le Canard enchaîné’s upcoming article in advance, reporting exclusively on the story.) The evening the story was published, Roth was replaced by his assistant Adrien Perruchon for a concert with Les Siècles. The next day, Roth canceled all his upcoming engagements until further notice.
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The New York Times interviews Mitsuko Uchida: Mitsuko Uchida Says What She Thinks
When we met in the lobby of a hotel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Uchida was in the middle of a particularly busy stretch of concerts. Almost immediately, our conversation took an unexpected turn, as she made it clear she was irked by my questions about her life and music.
A scholarly artist, Uchida was intent on testing my musical knowledge, stopping the interview several times to quiz me on the German Renaissance, the invention of musical copyright, Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” and the deaths of Schubert and Webern. Unimpressed, she at one point suggested I leave my job for a year to study music full time.
I think the problem there was that the New York Times hasn't quite realized that few artists have much respect for the journalism profession any more. Here is a delightful exchange:
When you take time to dream, do you have revelations about life or music?
I never have revelations in my life. Or if I do, I won’t tell you.
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Let's have something from Yuja Wang. It is hard to find something by her on YouTube that is neither a concerto, an interview, clips featuring her costuming or a biography. But here is a Rachmaninov prelude:
So since we have one prelude, let's have all preludes today. Here is Marcin Dylla with the Prelude No. 1 by Villa-Lobos:
Here is the Prelude no. 1 in C major from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Bk I by Bach on clavichord:
And finally, the Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune by Debussy:
"Prelude" covers a lot of ground!
This week's link on AI inspired me to churn out about 5k words on the topic.
ReplyDeletehttps://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2024/06/on-why-ai-has-not-changed-everything.html
Guy L Beck's recent book makes a compelling point that scholars of religion and music respectively need to do more transdisciplinary work given the historic linkages between musical and religious practices. I hardly discuss his book proper at all but his overall point that debates in musicology about what music is expected to do to make humans better is old hat for Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist thinkers who were discussing and debating the benefits and uses of music before 18th century aesthetics emerged.
Gordon Graham pointed out (he's a Scottish Episcopalian cleric) that the trouble with art being autonomous is simply that it has no social use. Fans of classical music can't simultaneously want their music unencumbered from the social responsibilities of serving some civic cult AND be the focal point of public life. Social prestige entails social responsibilities or you should be content that classical music won its autonomy at the price of literally not mattering to anyone at large except its dogged devotees.
Whether highbrow or lowbrow, art mysticism residually relies upon cultic elements to invest music with "higher" power, something that AI doesn't do. As I quipped at the start of my blog post, the feeling of group spirit possession or personal gnosis is not something that's going to be successfully offloaded to bots.
Very interesting comment, Wenatchee. Thanks. The connection between music (art in general) and religion is huge. It is not just that the main supporter of written music from around 1,000 BCE through to the 19th century was the church, the connection goes back to ancient times. Greek theatre, not just tragedy but also comedy and the satyr play, was a quasi-religious civic ritual. Music (and art) is a component of human life and at times is takes on weighty social responsibilities (during the French Revolution, in the Soviet Union, now, in the social justice movement). During these times, there is considerable pressure on the artists to do nothing but realize their social responsibilities and there arises a controversy about whether it is more useful to use traditional forms that are more comprehensible to the proletariat or more abstract forms that illustrate how the new social construct is different from the bad old one. See the innumerable essays on this topic in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 30s.
ReplyDeleteAs a dogged devotee of classical music (and a lot of other things like literature, theater, philosophy, dance, etc) I refuse to define "mattering" as conforming to some social movement or another. They come and go and the more extreme ones usually end in disaster. Art, however, tends to endure.
Does art really endure, though, or is that an article of faith? Hummel was pretty popular in his day but a lot of people regard him as "trivial" compared to Beethoven. Who decided that?
ReplyDeleteGordon Graham's argument in his book about whether art successfully replaced religion in re-enchanting the world was to say that it didn't and it can't. Art made for the sake of art alone is too reflexive and self-aware to actually re-enchant anything. Brillo boxes, Fountains, works like 4'33" and James Joyce novels are all self-aware and knowing in ways that don't re-enchant the world. They're more meta-artistic cognitive games that let the people in the know recognize that they are able to recognize a wider variety of things as art than the rank and file philistines but this doesn't re-enchant the world it alienates the mundane by re-framing it as Art. Conservatives would say this is what makes those works fraudulent or the domain of charlatans but the art reflexive artworks, as Nicholas Wolterstorff put it, are those that don't put scare quotes around something to call it art but remove the "frame" of what is regarded as museum culture art to pose the question of why some things are valorized as "art" and others are not.
Charles Garside Jr. wrote a book called Zwingli and the Arts exploring the thought of the Swiss Reformer and he proposed that by banning music entirely from church services the Christian Reformer Zwingli (and Bullinger by extension) de facto created the realm of secular music in the private and public spheres in Switzerland. Zwingli said he played music in the privacy of his own home more than anyone he knew where it would not disturb the peace. Art historians may have had too much fun dismantling the very idea of Art but the point is worth considering, the whole concept of Art as autonomous is a recent invention and one that is in many respects superfluous to the creation of art. A lot of art and poetry and music created for the sake of art vanished into oblivion after its makers made it.
Someone (or someones) has to decide that something "endures" and that's the sharp end of the stick that progressives and people who want the arts to matter will never stop being able to hold.
Art that doesn't actually matter probably won't endure. Charles Rosen pointed out that the great standard works of the keyboard literature by Bach, for instance, were didactic works but we play them like they are "more" than just didactic works. Maybe art that endures can serve more than one function but for art to endure it has to serve at least one function. :)
Nothing like a good difference of opinion! Though this one tends to be on the edge of what can feasibly be discussed. Yes, art endures, good art at least. To answer your (presumably non-rhetorical) question, who decided that Hummel was trivial compared to Beethoven? --nearly every performer and listener to classical music in the last couple of hundred years. Also, you will notice that Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes and Homer are still quite often read but we have very little awareness of the social issues of the ancient Greeks, except, of course, in the writings of the dramatists whose work has endured.
ReplyDeleteLooking back one hundred years it is easy to see what is enduring and James Joyce and Stravinsky certainly are. More recent is uncertain. So, since it is quite clear that good art does endure, what function does it serve? Well, it does make life richer and more worth living. A life consisting only of those things that are strictly functional is actually a dystopia, isn't it? And it is depicted as such in many works of literature. One pictures those trudging lines of figures dressed all in grey going to their utilitarian cafeteria and then their utilitarian work and presumably listening to utilitarian music. Likely produced by AI, of course.
The separation of form and function would, I think, be a relatively modern invention and for that matter the distinction between art and artisanship, too. It's only in modern settings that a discrepancy between form and function seems to have actually emerged.
ReplyDeletePluriformity of function is still function. :)
I would propose that in the case of Hummel he was judged a second-rate composer because during the 19th century critics and audiences and performers came to regard improvisation with suspicion (Dana Gooley has an entire book on how Mendelssohn, Schumann and Liszt, all great improvisors, nevertheless took aim at improvisation as a concert practice). Gooley pointed out that in his time Hummel was the most popular concertizer and he was known to improvise fantasias based on themes given to him by his audience members and noted that since the 19th century the verdict of scholars and musicologists has tended to be that the first-rate improvisors in classical music from the 19th century on tended to be rated as the second or third tier level composers. The gift of epic improvisation is not the same as Beethovenian fixation on gestural cohesion at a multi-movement level, though James Webster has argued that Haydn was doing this before Beethoven made it infamous. As RIchard Taruskin contended, Haydn's intensity of thematic development was related to his wanting audiences to actually remember the melodies rather than to do some cosmic transcendental gestural cohesion thing a la Beethoven and later Romantics.
Since I'm working toward a new installment in the Matiegka project I could mention that Matiegka has a slow sonata form in Grand Sonata II where Theme 1 recapitulates in the subdominant key and is interrupted halfway through by Theme 2 emerging in the tonic key before the second half of Theme 1 finally returns in the tonic key. Matiegka is not even a marginal composer but the sheer variety of his sonata forms merits further attention. I have not seen a ton of sonata forms in which a first theme in a recapitulation is cut in half and interrupted by Theme 2, let alone a Theme 1 that recapitulates in a subdominant rather than a tonic key. Leonard Meyer was right to point out that Beethoven didn't really break that many rules and that that reputation was more reception history than musical reality. Composers who go too far off the beaten path (Anton Reicha's 36 fugues) become marginal. A certain amount of ostentatious adherence to convention, the cult of Beethoven panegyrics withstanding, is a precondition to "lasting". I think that's what I have been increasingly skeptical about in conventional music historiography, me and Richard Taruskin and Susan McClary before me.
First I have to correct a glaring error in my first comment. I meant to say "the main supporter of written music from around 1,000 CE through to the 19th century was the church" NOT 1,000 BCE! There was no Christian church before Christ.
ReplyDeleteRe: Hummel and improvisation, prior to the invention of sound recording, the gift of improvisation was hardly an enduring virtue. We have no real idea what the improvisations of Hummel, Beethoven, Mozart or Bach were actually like, though we may get an echo of them in notated fantasia-like compositions.
Actually, the main precondition to endurance in art (apart from whether the Medieval monks took time to copy your mss) is aesthetic quality, not ostentatious adherence to convention, which is pretty much a guarantee of mediocrity.
Endurance itself has not been established as a viable criterion for assigning value to art. In the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries there was skepticism about the longterm value of music because it was so evanescent and in-the-moment. It was so time-bound in performance and conception it was regarded as a lesser art, useful and emotionally powerful but not at the level of literature or painting. It wasn't until written systems allowed music to "endure" that aesthetic dogmas regarding the "enduring" nature of well-written music began to evolve. Since I've been reading Chiara Bertoglio's work on how philosophers and clergy interacted with the changing nature of music as writing systems evolved I am thinking about how recent even the idea that the arts (particularly music) were expected to "endure" has been as a philosophical invention or surmise.
ReplyDeletethe main precondition to endurance in art would be the capacity to reliably replicate a result.
No written systems, no preservation. Mediocrity, whatever that is, is the baseline for anything being "above" mediocrity.
So in this case I'd say claiming that convention is a path to mediocrity is a canard. George Rochberg pointed out that one of the reasons post-tonal music failed to land a lasting role in audience's ears is that you can only subvert so many conventions of listening at a time and that Schoenberg, for all his changes in pitch organization, did not abandon periodicity or the rhythmic conventions in phrasing of his time, which was why Rochberg regarded Schoenberg's works as more lasting than that of later integralist serialist composers. You can only fully subvert one convention at a time without violating the pattern-recognizing impulses of human cognition.
So, for instance, improvisation can be regarded as a lesser value in pop and classical than in jazz because in jazz improvisation is expected but also because improvisation involves a kind of audience engagement and listening that calls for knowing what is being improvised on and being able to understand how the improvisations relate to the ground theme but that requires a level of musical education, perception and engagement that can be even higher and more active than a play-the-notes-on-the-page approach.
Just because that doesn't "endure" doesn't mean it isn't an aesthetic value. The more complex values and norms of listening in music could die with every generation and have to be restored and it's the failure to retain "that" that is most likely to keep the proverbial ceiling in listening and music cognition so close to what fans of classical music would regard as the "floor" or "basement" of musical perception.
If we look back on pre-Renaissance art, the Medievalists had no scruples about melting down gorgeous pieces of jewel-laden metalwork for fast cash. There was also a predilection for "ephemeral" entertainments, in which examples from different media were discarded after their use in grand public or courtly events.
ReplyDeleteThis is only a tenuous thesis, but the notion of artistic endurance may be the invention of the Renaissance artist, who not only started signing their artistic pieces, but possibly had a vision of posterity linked to it. This idea of course flourished during the Romantic era, along with the cult of the artist and the emergence of the critic. The Hatchet is certainly correct in recognising that 'artistic endurance' is a philosophical invention.
Finally, don't we all prize the power of memory as a valuable "tool" in our experience of art? The imagination of the artist means nothing if the receiver of the work of art does not have imagination themselves. The viewer or listener constructs or reconstructs a work, giving force to the concept of ephemerality. Our personal experiences may be fleeting, but we can make them endure through our collective documentation.
To clarify my seemingly contradictory second paragraph, I think the primary reason for the emergence of signed work during the Renaissance was for practical reasons, with a realisation of potential future commissions. The nobility of remaining anonymous was usurped by the need for self promotion and an expanding market, whereas the aesthetic dogma of endurance is linked to written systems and replicated results, as the Hatchet said. This opens up the debate about whether we should be preserving the work or glorying the artist. As can be seen in our current celebrity-obsessed culture, we have gone too much into the latter category.
ReplyDeleteMarc, Bob Wegman and other scholars have pointed out the popularity cult of the composer most likely started with Josquin so the timing is about right. :)
ReplyDeleteWegman pointed out that composers and defenders of mensural polyphony invented ideas, so to speak, of gifted composers writing for God and for eternity and that the people critical of mensural polyphony were evil music-hating misanthropes. Wegman pointed out that all of these canards were canards. Even devout Catholic clergy had reservations about using the monies raised by the indulgences system on votive masses. It may have been killer fundraising, to put it crudely, but there were more Catholic clergy who were thinking the monies should have been going to social programs rather than lavish Latin music that not only was not understood by rank and file Catholics but which, as Joseph Herl and other more recent music historians have proposed, was probably only heard by the performers themselves and not even the clerics administering the sacrament.
But partisans of art for the sake of art have a long historian of acting as if the devoutly religious are against ART as such. It's easy to disprove if you actually read Calvin and Zwingli (not so much Bullinger or Beza on music).
But in response to criticism that the polyphonic masses were too arcane to help the ordinary faithful composers and partisans invented the idea that the music was for the ages and thus needed to keep being bankrolled. Bog Wegman's dry ironic observation was what saved Catholic mensural polyphony was the Lutheran revolt. Suddenly the Vatican had way bigger things to worry about than deciding whether or not to formally ban mensural polyphony in favor of chant-only liturgy. If that's what it took to keep Byrd's choral music around then, hey, thanks nascent Lutherans. :)