Friday Miscellanea

Finally something interesting: two new pieces by J. S. Bach. No, not newly written of course, but newly discovered. Here is the New York Times:

In 1992 Peter Wollny, then a Harvard graduate student in musicology, was researching his dissertation at the Royal Library of Belgium when he came across two unsigned music manuscripts so strikingly original that he had copies made and set them aside. 

“This is actually how I work,” Wollny said Tuesday. “Whenever I find something that poses a scholarly problem to me, I keep it. Even if it takes three decades, I don’t put it aside.”

Wollny began to develop a hunch about who wrote these two anonymous, undated works for organ: Johann Sebastian Bach. But finding evidence required years of musical detective work, and it was not until this week, 33 years after the random discovery he made while doing research on one of Bach’s sons, that he officially announced the discovery.

And here they are:

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As is often the case, the subhead is a nice summary: Cultural products are more than ever a class of financialized assets, whose owners are even further removed from artmaking

THE HISTORY OF THE MUSIC industry is a history of conglomeration. For decades, the business has been ruled by a dwindling number of corporations, each controlling an enormous market share that grows larger with every new merger or acquisition. Today just three record companies—Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group—control more than 80 percent of all recorded music released through a recognized label. And they do so with a collective iron fist, jealously guarding access to their vast catalogs, whether through album sales, streaming platforms, radio airplay, or commercial licensing. The Big Three’s disproportionate market-making power, according to scholar and musician Aram Sinnreich, has all the trappings of an oligopolistic cartel. And in turn, streaming itself, once a domain of renegades and upstarts, has consolidated around its own Big Three: Together Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music account for 90 percent of all streaming subscriptions.

I guess my problem is that I have no interest in music as an industry--only as an artform. But this is where we are.

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The answer is "no". Granderson: AI can perform a song, but can it make art?

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Here is a particularly fine exemplar of human-created music. Jean Rondeau playing the Tombeau for M. Blancrocher from the new Louis Couperin collection:

A lovely recent performance of the Debussy Sonata for Cello and Piano:

And finally, the Piano Sonata no, 8 by Sergei Prokofiev: