The Beauty of the Blogosphere

This is going to be one of those rare posts that does not deal directly with music, so skip if you are of a mind. I am travelling right now and one thing I come in contact with when I travel is the mass media. At home I read the blogosphere and various sites on the Internet that do include a couple of examples of the mass media: the Wall Street Journal, the Globe and Mail and occasionally the New York Times. But as I haven't watched television for over a decade apart from a few select series I watch either on DVD or the Internet (Game of Thrones, House MD, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) when I do encounter television I probably see it from a different angle than most people.

Usually when I am in a hotel I am not even tempted to turn on the television. I know what it's like. But last night, after I got home from the opera, I was curious about that monster battle between Real Madrid and Atlético so I turned it on. Either television has gotten worse, or, more likely, my perceptions are keener.

Now let me utter a couple of caveats first: there are some excellent shows on television. I have admired some of the very fine writing and direction ever since I lived in Montréal and watched Homicide: Life on the Street set in a very gritty Baltimore. Then there was Buffy (I even gave a couple of academic papers on the show in England a few years ago) and House MD and now the remarkable Game of Thrones. Sure, I suspect it of being morally bankrupt, but what a remarkable production with some outstanding acting. But these shows are the exception. Most television consists of the horribly dreary and enervating yet constantly kinetic routine of sports, talk, advertising, station announcements, more talk, melodrama, news, weather, more talk, more sports and, god knows, more advertising. This is the television experience.

It is a bit like a poker game. If you are sitting at the table and don't know who the mark is, then you are the mark! If you are sitting in front of the television, which is free and you are wondering who is paying for it, then you are paying for it. Just scanning through the channels last night for fifteen or twenty minutes I was horrified at what is going on. First of all, the constant sparkling graphics and jump cuts short circuit any possibility of rational thought. That, I suspect, is their purpose. Second, what you see and hear seems to be of three varieties: about a third of it is, I suppose, information of some kind. What is the temperature in Budapest? Who won the game? Financial reports and prognostications. Another third is supposed to be amusement: very fit and attractive people dressed like evil clowns posturing in rhythmic ways to a mechanical soundtrack with caterwauling. Yes, that was either a music video or an ad for something. There are also the melodramatic telenovelas as they are called in Latin America. But the last third is the most dangerous and insidious.

These are the shows that are supposedly the most serious, the ones that really inform us, the ones that are a "public service." Take for example one I saw either on CNN or the BBC International, it doesn't matter which. It was a panel discussion about the refugee crisis in Europe. It was a frank and cordial discussion, very civilised, which meant that every single person on the panel had exactly the same views. There is a terrible problem and it stems from the difficult and unsettled domestic conditions in places like Libya and the Sudan and so on. Africa is facing some real challenges and we have to find a way to help them. Another chimed in saying how absurd it was to think that a gunboat or two could be of any help. And so on. We could imagine other discussions about access to bathrooms for transgendered people, how Bernie Sanders might wrest the nomination away from Hillary Clinton and so on. All sorts of important issues. And in each case, through television (and newspapers, but less blatantly) we are told exactly how and what to think about each issue. There is never any discussion of what the real issues or problems are or what feasible solutions might include. Every crisis is prepackaged to fulfil a certain purpose and generate a certain kind of public opinion. This has been known for decades, of course, but it has gotten worse and worse.

Let's take a non-political example: every time you look at the financial news you see the same thing: projections and prognostications that are often wrong. The financial industry, a lot of which is devoted to offering advice on investments to small and large investors, is always, always telling us what the prospects are for this or that stock or mutual fund or where bond yields are going or what developing countries are likely to see real gains and so on. But Warren Buffett revealed the true state of affairs the other day when he said, quoting very loosely, don't bother with the hedge funds or the mutual funds or the stock advisors or even individual stocks. Just buy index funds or exchange-traded funds in a broad selection of sectors and forget about them. 80% (or so) of these rock n roll fund managers don't beat the market but they charge you big fees anyway. He is absolutely right, of course. But 90% of everything you read and hear about the market and investment is designed to convince you that this is not not true.

Most of what you see and hear on television, when it is not simply entertainment, is wrong, incorrect, a lie. These lies are meant to serve particular purposes, which is to indoctrinate the viewer as to the correct opinions about the world, politics, business and so on. But they are, of course, lies.

The idea that the news media offer anything that is remotely neutral has been untrue for several decades now. When it comes to politics they always have a chosen candidate that they are going to try and drag across the finish line now matter how repulsive he or she is. To pick a Canadian example, you cannot read a single issue of the Globe and Mail without reading how nasty, horrible and awful Stephen Harper (the ex-Prime Minister) was as a person and a politician. And how wonderful, sweet and honest is his replacement Justin Trudeau. Stephen Harper managed the affairs of Canada for over a decade and delivered a strong, healthy economy with no deficit to his successor. Who immediately ran a deficit. And you can be sure that however good or bad Trudeau's administration is, the Globe and Mail will praise him every day and twice on Saturday.

Which brings me to the blogosphere. What is different now is that there is another place you can go to read the news and hear opinions. The blogosphere, while it has sectors representative of all the dysfunction of the mass media, also has vast sectors that express every hue of political and other opinion. You can read specialized discussion of classical music here or libertarian political philosophy over at Samizdata or constitutional law over there or, really, whatever interests you. And you can seek out sites that take what is, from your point of view, a neutral approach or ones as biased as you like. There is no monoculture on the Internet.

Mind you, there are forces to whom this is a horrible situation and they are doing what they can to "fix" it, but so far, no luck. So let's hope this continues.

Whew, sorry for all that, but I just had to share. Now for some music. One of my favorite divertimenti by Mozart. This is the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields with the Divertimento in F major, K. 138 written when Mozart was sixteen:

Musicians and the Media

Pop musicians have become masters at exploiting the mass media in order to promote themselves. A lot of this comes down to exploiting their own sexuality, which, since their sexuality plays a similar role in their music, makes a kind of sense. Lady Gaga's or Rihanna's public persona in the media and the one portrayed in the music videos are essentially the same thing.

But when it comes to classical musicians, there is an uncomfortable gulf between the musician and the persona crafted for or by the mass media. As an example, have a look at this interview with the British violinist Nicola Benedetti in the Scottish Sun. Nicola does everything she can to preserve both her own dignity and that of classical music in the face of an unending stream of insinuating questions about sex, drugs and pop music. In between quotes from Nicola, the writer inserts gratuitous comments about her "washboard tummy" and long legs. But her message about hard work, discipline and dedication comes through despite all this. Her message is exactly 180 degrees away from the message of popular culture, but she still gets it across.

It is popular culture that is in a state of free fall these days and a look at the typical behaviour of young Britons--the binge culture--confirms it. Nicola is trying her best, even in an interview trying to drag her into the midst of this popular culture, to communicate the message that all things worthwhile take hard work and discipline--and to promote her own career. More power to her.

A while ago I put up a post looking sardonically at how some violinists promote themselves by using semi-nudity. This was meant to be a kind of critique, but from the statistics, that post keeps getting a lot of hits. I'm sure this is due to the title "Naked Violinists". So, since that sort of thing is NOT what this blog is about, quite the opposite, and so as not to disappoint those people who google "naked violinists", I am going to delete that post!

Now let's hear Nicola Benedetti play something. Here is some Vivaldi:

When Doctors Do Musicology

This story from the BBC strikes me as, well, silly. Discussing the influence of Beethoven's increasing deafness on his music, this is the claim:

Researchers from the University of Amsterdam, have found his early quartets (opus 18, 1798-1800) used a variety of high notes.

Beethoven, who suffered from a severe form of tinnitus, first mentioned his hearing problems in 1801 in a letter to Franz Wegeler and Karl Amenda.

He wrote: "In the theatre I have to get very close to the orchestra to understand the performers, and that from a distance I do not hear the high notes of the instruments and the singers' voices."

By 1810, when he composed the opus 74 and 95 quartets, the amount of high notes he used dropped significantly, tending towards lower frequency notes.

But the higher registers increased again in 1825, when he wrote the late string quartets opus 127 to 135 and it was thought he had become completely deaf.

The report's author Edoardo Saccenti said: "These results suggest that, as deafness progressed, Beethoven tended to use middle and low frequency notes, which he could hear better when music was performed, seemingly seeking for an auditory feedback loop.

"When he came to rely completely on his inner ear he was no longer compelled to produce music he could actually hear when performed and slowly returned to his inner musical world and earlier composing experiences."

 Well, yes, I think it is generally known that Beethoven did in fact use "high notes" in his early and late string quartets. Not to mention low and middle ones. So to test this odd claim, let's just have a look at those supposedly indicative middle-period quartets, op 74 and op 95, the 'Harp' and 'Serioso' quartets. On page 2 of the score of the 'Harp' quartet the first violin ascends to the fifth ledger line above the staff. On the next page, to the space above the fifth ledger line, on page four to the space above the fourth ledger line, on page five to the fifth ledger line again and so on. The Quartet op 95 shows the same kind of tessitura in the first violin. These are high notes. Very high notes. The same kind of high notes that we find in the early and late quartets. Neither I nor any other musicologist over the last 200 years have noticed any avoidance of high notes in the middle-period music of Beethoven and I sure don't see it in the scores.

Now, to be fair, I haven't seen the original article with its research data so perhaps I am missing something. But one thing is for sure: the BBC is shining everyone on with this ridiculous balderdash. Here's a tip: don't believe anything you read in the paper, hear on the radio or see on TV, especially when it makes some kind of scientific claim. The kind of 'science' we get in the mass media is absurdly over-simplified when it isn't utterly mistaken.

Here is the first movement of the Quartet op 74. Have a listen for the high notes, the first of which occur around 2:24 to 2:27: