Technical Difficulties

I promised to post my new piece Dark Dream today and I have been trying to do so. But when I try to upload it to YouTube it seems to just hang. I can't seem to find a reason for this in any manuals but I will keep looking. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know!

What Happened to YouTube?

I use YouTube clips quite a lot here at The Music Salon. And I used to browse around on it a lot more than I do now. A few weeks ago it seemed they made a big change in the algorithm. They used to divide suggestions up into different categories or streams and there was an option to delete streams and categories. I started deleting a lot of the ones I wasn't interested in like athletics, pop music, pet videos and so on. Then, recently, all that changed. Now there are four rows of suggestions at the top that correspond to what I tend to be interested in. Then below that are gazillions of videos most of which I have no interest in. Also, they took away the delete option. I have also noticed that there is more and more a predominance of videos that have nothing going for them except their click-baity titles. The actual content is less than moronic and most of them have the same extremely irritating narrator.  YouTube seems to be on its way to being unwatchable except for your own searches.

Some examples:

I swear, I have never searched for anything or viewed anything that would lead the algorithm to think I would be interested in any of those!

YouTube used to have lots of quirky and intriguing videos by people that often had something interesting to say. But now it is turning into a version of People Magazine and the most idiotic top ten lists you can imagine. Does this follow some kind of network mass distribution rule? Every mass media ultimately becomes horrible?

Mind you, they still have stuff like this, that just popped up today:

The Joy and Sorrow of YouTube

I just can't get interested in the streaming services for music--probably because they seem to be ill-adapted to classical music generally. But I am a heavy user of YouTube because there are so many riches to be discovered there and it is all free. Sure, there are a lot of poor or mediocre performances and many of the older clips have poor video or poor sound, but alongside those are a lot of great performances.

The problem with YouTube is mainly sorting through to find the good stuff. For example, I was looking for a good performance with good video and good sound of the Mozart Requiem to share with a friend and found the search function to just not work well. It turned up a lot of inadequate performances and then, as you scrolled down, was offering up other pieces of music entirely. Then, a few minutes later, I went to the main YouTube page and there was what I had been looking for: a 1988 film of Leonard Bernstein conducting the Requiem with the Bavarian Radio Orchestra and Choir. Here it is:

The YouTube algorithm is not your friend. I am constantly telling it not to offer up obscure pop music and dance on my personal page, but it keeps on keeping on.

YouTube contains thousands of absolute gems, but it hides them quite successfully. Looking for a good performance of the Symphony No. 7 by Shostakovich, the first on the list was Marin Alsop with the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra. These clips from Frankfurt are really excellent in terms of video and sound: crisp and clear and the camerawork does not go overboard. The problem with this one, I am afraid to say, is that Marin Alsop delivers possibly the most boring Shostakovich I have ever heard. God knows it was tidy, too tidy, but it had about as much fire and passion as a trip to Macey's. How could you make this piece in particular sound dull? Wow. The next clip was Bernstein conducting, it is unclear, but I think the New York Phillies. That had all the fire that Alsop was missing, but no video, just audio. Next Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theater Orchestra. Lots of fire again, but no video. Next, the utterly authentic Leningrad Symphony conducted by Yevgeny Mravinsky, but no video and the sound was poor. Next is Semyon Bychkov conducting the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln in a concert in Japan with video. A brisk, no-nonsense performance.

The thing with this piece, I think, is that if you have ever heard it live, you will not be satisfied with any recorded performance because the dynamic range will be seriously compressed. No ordinary sound system as far as I know, can reproduce the 11 minute crescendo in the first movement from one snare drum played very quietly to the whole orchestra, with ranks of tympanists, trombones, trumpets, horns, etc. playing full blast.

Well, I have gotten a bit off-topic, but I think what I will do, from time to time, is post particularly good YouTube clips for your general edification and amusement.

The Future of Music Reviews

I just wanted to add my voice to Norman Lebrecht's recent post about music reviews. YouTube really changes everything. If you are talking about a particular piece of music, you can just put up a clip of it. If you want to compare different performances, as I did in this post, then you can insert them into your text. Here is the review that Norman links to, a superb example of how to review using examples from YouTube.

A friend of mine keeps asking when I am I going to write that book on music criticism. I guess my answer is, as soon as I figure out a way to duplicate how I work on this blog in a book.

For example, wouldn't it be great to be able to do in some kind of book format a section like this post on the Bach family that includes music by Bach pere and his three famous composer sons?

But let's not kid ourselves, even with YouTube for illustrative examples, if you really want to get down to brass tacks and talk about the musical details, you are going to have to use musical notation. We didn't spend a thousand years developing it for nothing! Have a look at this post to see what I mean.

Appropriately, let's end with a clip: