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| Audience comment at the San Francisco Symphony |
In line with our comments last week on the corruption of consciousness in art, I offer this headline: Alicia Keys Will Now Read You Daily Affirmations In Your Home.
Yes, you read that right. The renowned singer's holistic beauty and skin care brand, Keys Soulcare, has recently partnered with Amazon Alexa to make your manifesting goals even easier. The new custom Keys Soulcare Alexa theme is an exclusive offer for new and existing Echo customers that infuses a soulful twist to your everyday Alexa interactions.
“With our new Alexa experience, we’re bringing the philosophy of Keys Soulcare and infusing it into people’s daily lives, helping them to create empowering beauty rituals that nurture their whole selves,” says Alicia Keys. “There is so much power in a voice — I am filled with gratitude to connect with Alexa users in this special way.”
With Alicia Keys at the helm, this new endeavor invites the brand’s community to engage with Keys Soulcare’s core philosophy of nurturing the complete self — internally and externally, from skin and soul — by welcoming Keys (or, her voice at least) into their homes and daily lives.
Is this as bad as those numerous cryptocurrency scams? Or other commercial lies? Not in dollar terms, certainly. And no-one offering aesthetic scams has been put in jail (though there have been some hefty fines). But it is most certainly bad.
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The project to make really sure that we aren't neglecting women composers continues: What Happened When an Orchestra Said Goodbye to All-Male Concerts.
I went to nine performances during the season, between November and May, and heard 11 pieces by female composers. All the works were new to me, imbuing each concert with a sense of discovery unusual for an orchestra’s subscription series.
Many of those compositions — especially the ones written before the 20th century — are unlikely to find their way into the standard repertoire, which Brüggen acknowledges. But that isn’t her goal. “What we’re doing is a journey of discovery,” she said. “The selection process that happened with men throughout the centuries didn’t happen with women. It’s our social responsibility to make that happen now.”
And in so doing one places social responsibility above aesthetic responsibility, without actually saying so. But at the same time, the series seems to have turned up a number of interesting, neglected works by women composers so praise for that. Let's let a commentator on the article have the final word:
I am not very interested in long dead supposedly missed out women composers. If there is a gem or two out there (just as with dead men), then by all means bring them on. But most non-performed western classical music is in the dustbin of history for a reason.
However, much as I love the standard classical canon, I am also very interested in new composers of whatever gender or color or whatever. I don't want to see a bias against modern women composers, but not much interested in seeing a bias for them either.
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While a cynical approach is not always correct, that's the way to bet: Culture, Digested: The PhD in Creativity
Unlike a traditional PhD program, where a small number of candidates are selected to contribute to a field’s base of knowledge with original research and scholarship, this doctorate was sponsored by a whiskey distillery and sought to teach students “to think more creatively” through “intensive immersion in creative thinking,” according to the university’s official website. (It also deviates from many other PhD programs by charging tuition – more than $50,000 a year for at least three years – and fees, rather than being one of the fully funded programs that is the university norm.)
The sins of the American arts institutions – saddling students with tens, sometimes hundreds, of thousands of dollars in debt as they train them for jobs that don’t exist, the absence of real artistic instruction, their contribution to the vast divide that exists between the credentialed and the uncredentialed in income inequality and quality of life – have been well documented.
Two things to keep in mind. 1) no-one can teach you how to be creative and if they pretend they can, run in the opposite direction and 2) actually being creative is almost a guarantee that your life earnings will be paltry because real creativity is very hard to monetize. If you want to be rich, take someone else's idea and monetize it.
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We seem to be on the cusp of a shift in political alignments in Europe and North America. But we don't talk about politics here so I will just dig out a tiny musical story from San Francisco: SAN FRAN SYMPHONY THREATENS CONCERTGOER
An audience member who held up a rude sign in Finnish during an Esa-Pekka Salonen concert ten days ago has been threatened with disciplinary acction by the orchestra management.
Laura Leibowitz brandished the sign below. Loosely translated from the Finnish it means ‘F*ck the board’.
Impractical and unpleasant as this may be, Ms Leibowitz was contacted by senior director of operations Andrew Dubowski and warned about her ‘disruptive and offensive’ action.
‘Displaying of any signage inside Davies Symphony Hall is not permitted,’ the senior flak informed her, adding: ‘Should this conduct occur again, you will be subject to further disciplinary action, up to and including removal from Davies Symphony Hall and/or suspension of privileges to enter and attend activities of the San Francisco Symphony.’
This amounts to a new orchestra management strategy: don’t like the feedback? change the audience.
Doncha just love the and/or?
There's a PS:
UPDATE: The composer John Adams tweets: The SF Symphony is one of THE great orchestras. Alas, their board’s grim austerity plan & willingness to lose Esa-Pekka Salonen risks ruining both morale of the players and overall artistic quality. This in one of the wealthiest demographics in the world. What gives?
Yes, there is a point at which the average person is just going to say "screw you people!"
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What would you play for a classical set at Glastonbury? I’ll take your brain to another dimension … my classical DJ set at Glastonbury
Every great DJ set needs to go out on a high, and as I’m not great, nor even actually a DJ, I was relying on a small bespectacled Russian to do that for me: Igor Stravinsky. My last track was the finale from his ballet The Firebird. It’s a masterclass in musical extremes, starting with a hopeful lone horn piercing the sonic landscape, orchestral layers gradually build like the best trance records do, and then the ultimate beat drop. Stravinsky puts a pause in which pulses with expectancy, and then the final bars come racing out, the luminous bird aloft. Stravinsky delivered, and there was a big response from the audience.
Read the whole thing.
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More from San Francisco: Big changes afoot at 3 great San Francisco classical music institutions
The symphony is indeed in a state of turmoil that feels existential. Four years ago, Salonen became music director with the mandate to foster innovation, following what he had accomplished in his 17 years at the helm of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Unfortunately, the city and its orchestra were hard hit by the pandemic. Rather than give Salonen the support to realize his bold vision, the San Francisco Symphony, which sits on a $345-million endowment (the second largest of any American orchestra), slashed, slashed and slashed some more. Management insists the institution will otherwise run out of cash. Dire financial projections have become self-fulfilling prophecy.
Salonen has refused to renew his contract (which runs for one more season) after the board scaled back a European tour, new commissions, innovative programming and staged productions with Peter Sellars, its much-heralded digital media, its “Concerts for Kids” series and the far-reaching creative partners from various walks of music and technology Salonen appointed. A black-box series, SoundBox, a hit with young audiences, has been downgraded as well. Frank Gehry’s proposals for inexpensive experimental new halls made by refashioning warehouses on Treasure Island should be a no-brainer, but for this board they are a nonstarter. A musicians strike looks likely in the fall.
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I've been watching more of Rick Beato's clips recently because he has something to say. This is one from yesterday:
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Let's start with some John Adams played by the San Francisco Symphony during happier days:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MDdECxPsro
And the Finale to The Firebird by Stravinsky:
Finally Sinfonia concertante for organ and orchestra by Esa-Pekka Salonen with the NDR Elbphilharmonie:
6 comments:
Did Greenberg mention or forget the Pythogorean/Platonic Quadrivium i.e. Astronomy, Mathematics (number), Geometry and wait for it, Music?
What was distinctive about one more deification of Music in the 1880-1910 period was the personalization of the phenomenon with composers as saints and prophets. A straight line to Alicia Keys I might add.
Despite the above post I don't want to dump on Alicia Keys. Artists even in the pop world are facing shrinking physical media sales, soaring expenses on tours and little return from streaming. So artists with small or declining sales have to sell the merch. Also she set up some nonprofits which probably rely somewhat on her funding. If you look up her discography it can be seen that her last big album in terms of sales was in 2012. Her later albums have barely sold at all comparatively and and in the last 5 years or so are mostly live show recordings on her own label as RCA cut her loose.
Actually, the really prominent name as far as the high repute of music in the late 19th century goes, is Schopenhauer who had a lot of influence.
I don't have anything against Alicia Keys either, musically at least. But I feel that the merchantilization strategies of musicians (which have made Rihanna at least, a billionaire) are really to the detriment of music as an art form. People often talk about the blurring of boundaries between the musical genres as being a good thing, right up there with diversity and multiculturalism, but the more commercial pop music gets the further I want to be from it.
I understand your feelings but for artists less rich than Ms Keys the selling of merch may make the difference between continuing as an artist or working for the car rental companies etc. We live in the world we have, not the world we want.
For me the real issue is not the selling of merch but the fact that only pop musicians are able to sell the merch; this is not an option for classical musicians or even jazz artists. The root of the problem is the collapse of the patronage system and an upper class that had some sophistication about high art. Neither the educational system nor the media devote resources to it either. So it is hardly surprising in this environment that people are forced to get funds any which way they can. But classical and jazz artists are the ones without any other means to support themselves and as the SFO drama shows the institutional support is a joke.
Clement Greenberg did a perfect analysis of the situation in 1939 and I will put it up as soon as I get back home where the book is.
Ted Gioia, I think it was, pointed out that Jay Z and Beyonce have as much or more revenue from merchandising than from the music itself.
But I've read enough Taruskin over the course of my life he dropped this term called sinecure. Matanya Ophee was a guitarist and music publisher who pointed out most guitarist composers were enlisted military personnel which meant their day job was working as soldiers in literally soldiering capacities or pushing paperwork (more Sor's field if memory serves). Since I've been on a slow Matiegka blogging project his day jobs included working as a legal clerk and a school teacher at a Catholic school.
The idea that artists were remunerated first and foremost for the Art rather than other goods and services may be one of the more misleading canards of arts education I've encountered over the course of my life.
We could lament that many musicians have to have jobs to get by but one of the most valuable bits of advice I got from one of my music professors was when he told me "You probably won't have an actual career in music but if you can find a job that pays your bills and gives you enough time to spend with family and friends and THEN have time left over to make the music you want that's pretty good. You can be happy with that."
I suspect Schopenhauer had the constraint of thinking in terms of strictly European conceptions of pitch organizations so the notion that music could be some direct presentation of the Will rather than Image would be too easy to take for granted. Introduce multiple simultaneous tuning systems and ways of organizing pitch outside the proverbial long 19th century and the question of whether Schopenhauer's surmise about music being more directly expressive Will than Image might be, well, a surmise.
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