I've had an iPad for years and I find it enormously useful. But I don't know what horrifies me more: the new Apple ad for the iPad, or that there are people who are not horrified by it.
It is so smug, disdainful and contemptuous of not only the materials that creative people typically work with, but creative people themselves. Trying sketching on an iPad was one of the things that drove me away from digital technology. iPads may be useful for the usual internet diversions and for promoting, recording and videoing creative activities. But that's it. If you want to actually create something, you need to get your hands dirty with some of those things crushed in the commercial.
I often enjoy poking fun at Ted Gioia, but I'm also quick to recognize when he makes some good points. In his latest, AI Is Defeated in Hollywood—But What About Music?, he sets the scene with this quote from Bill Cantos:
And he analyzes this as follows:
AI tracks are showing up everywhere, but not because they’re good. There are no devoted fans of this genre. It’s only happening because AI music is cheap, and somebody can make a buck by getting rid of the musicians—provided listeners aren’t paying attention.
If you think this over, you immediately grasp that:
AI music is more profitable for streaming platforms, because they can buy it as cheap work-for-hire (or even make their own tracks at almost no cost).
But these AI tracks are markedly inferior. Listeners won’t prefer them or seek them out.
So they need to make users as passive and indifferent as possible in order to reap the cost savings.
Putting it in historical context, we can see a trend towards the simplification of some genres of music since the 1950s with rock n roll, or since the 1980s with punk and hip-hop. Or if you are more hard-core, from the 1830s with romanticism. Or if you are really hard-core, from 1733, the death of François Couperin and the development of classical style through the use of textures and rhythms from opera buffa. But the development of AI tracks seems to have reached a new level of aesthetic triviality. This might be an example of the genre:
I might be just a weird sort of person, but the feeling of this music reminds me of a time I was in the hospital for a few days when I was a teenager and they gave me tranquilizers. I started to feel anxious and I realized it was because I had been staring at the wall for half an hour with no thoughts. That this was even possible troubled me deeply! But yeah, I realize that this is not the usual effect of tranquilizers. Just as, for me, the usual effect of listening to music is not to be put into a kind of aesthetic refrigerator where nothing is happening and you are going nowhere. This makes me uneasy and unhappy because I need to get out and experience something real. This is not real. Ok, it serves a purpose, but is becoming passive and indifferent a good way to respond to the pressures and stresses of everyday life? I guess we all react differently.
I don't usually don't do reviews of anything, but I have had an excellent experience with my new laptop, so here are some comments. I wanted a lighter laptop with a larger screen than my older Macbook Pro so I bought a Chromebook. They take some getting used to, but I have used them before and they are quite manageable for most purposes. I bought the newest Acer 15.6 inch model:
As I said in the previous post, I just got the laptop and charged it up the day before getting on the plane to Toronto. As I forgot the charger, it had to last the whole six days I was there, which it did, but after checking my email the last morning, it only had five minutes left! Pretty impressive, especially compared to my older MacBook Pro that only has a couple of hours of charge. I love Chromebooks because they boot up in just a few seconds and shut down instantly. Mac and Windows machines, especially the latter, seem to take geological time to boot up.
So what is the hitch? Chromebooks run the Chrome operating system from Google which will not run any ordinary applications. So I can't compose on the road as it won't run Finale. It also won't run Word or Powerpoint or any other ordinary program. What it will run is Google docs so for normal purposes just open your Word file with Google docs and edit therein, saving it as a Word file to send to others. Mind you, I haven't done this much, but I think it would work. For web browsing there are no issues. I am writing this review on my Chromebook.
Why did I get a Chromebook instead of a MacBook Air like everyone else? A new MacBook Air with a 13' screen costs north of a thousand dollars. My 15.6' Chromebook cost $212 (plus $58 shipping and import fees to Mexico).
How does the screen definition and speakers compare to my older MacBook Pro? Quite well. Viewing this YouTube clip on the Chromebook compares well with the Mac:
The picture seems very comparable (mind you, my old MacBook does not have a retina display) and the sound also seems just as good--a bit better in fact as it delivers more volume at max. The MacBook is a bit quiet even when you crank it up. The Chromebook has some fair-sized speakers on either side of the keyboard. The keyboard is nothing special, not as nice as on a Mac, but perfectly useable.
So there you have it. Why are Macs so much more expensive? They are gorgeous examples of industrial design, and Apple has found that their customers are loyal enough to accept higher prices. Windows machines are more expensive largely because of the hefty fee Microsoft charges for the operating system. So, you might consider buying a Chromebook at a fraction of the cost.
UPDATE: How hard was it to connect my Chromebook to my HP printer? It took 30 seconds.
A couple of interesting items this morning. First of all, according to Slipped Disc, the Orchestre National d’Ile-de-France is giving all its musicians iPads to replace the traditional printed parts in performances. This is a very cool idea, of course. Music notation works best as a constantly scrolling stream, an option common with music software. Page turns are just awkward. I have seen string quartets using iPads or laptops instead of printed parts a few times. Mind you, on one occasion there was an interesting problem. You typically have a little foot switch you use to turn the page. On this occasion, due to some Bluetooth error, the cellist was discovering that every time the violist turned his page, the cellist's page turned as well! In the comments to the Slipped Disc post one musician mentions that it ain't gonna be easy to change fingerings or bowings in rehearsal! There is something to be said for paper easily edited with a pencil and an eraser.
Kanye West always manages to make the news and a little controversy came out of his interview on Jimmy Kimmel this past Thursday. Here is the interview:
I found a few things interesting. West has a kind of childlike demeanor with occasional bursts of wisdom. For example, I liked his comment that "in this world we live in there are two main motivating forces--that's love or fear." That's not a bad thing to keep in mind. It reminds me of one of Patton's sayings, "never take counsel of your fears" which apparently he stole from Stonewall Jackson. In any case, it is good to remind ourselves from time to time, not to be ruled by our fears. Of course, there are other motivating forces and Kanye mentions pride. Another couple are greed and curiosity. I think curiosity is a really important one, often left off lists of virtues.
Kanye is a musician and designer so the way he thinks is probably not primarily in terms of verbal logic, but rather visual or musical logic. He mentions that he is not about politics or policy, but about not being afraid to say something outside what is supposedly permitted for an African-American (his term). This was the character of his response when Jimmy Kimmel brought up Trump. At one point Kanye says "we could have a dialogue about the President and not a diatribe." He then goes on to say that love can cure hate and so on. Then Jimmy Kimmel interrupts with the usual litany of leftist criticism (or perhaps, more accurately, smears) of Trump: tearing families apart, how he cares about nobody, etc. Kimmel really wasn't listening, was he? This was the jarring, inappropriate element. We didn't use to insert our political ideology into every corner of life--there was a time when we would have thought that demanding that a rapper defend the political policies of a current administration was absurd. I suspect that time was not that long ago, either.
What I really liked about Kanye's reply was that there wasn't one. Soon after they went to a commercial break and he never answered the "question." These kinds of things are really not actual questions are they, but rather ideological traps? The National Post had a piece on it where they reported on Kanye's tweeting that he wasn't stumped by the question but was thinking how best to answer and then was cut off. That is a very polite way, perhaps, of saying, that the nastiness of the question was simply embarrassing. There is a word we rarely use these days, but it keeps coming to mind: this kind of verbal interaction is really impertinent, rude, disrespectful, not only to the person being criticized, but also to the interview guest. In my experience, there are really only two ways to handle this kind of argument: either stop them in their tracks before they have a chance to hurl much, or simply refuse to engage. Kanye chose the more politic way.
Now let's have something to clear the palate with. Here is a really lovely piece for guitar by perhaps the greatest guitar composer of the 20th century, Joaquin Rodrigo. It is too long to be a short piece and too short to be a long piece, so it was not included in my recent top ten lists. Which is why I want to mention it now. This is the Invocation and Dance by Rodrigo played by Pepe Romero:
I've been an enthusiastic user of the Kindle since I got one a couple of years ago. I'm not an enthusiastic early-adopter of technology--it took me years and years to finally succumb to the attractions of the iPhone--but as soon as I realized that the Kindle was not just an ebook reader, but a doorway to the Amazon bookstore, I was sold. You can purchase and download any Kindle book to your reader in just a few seconds. To a book lover whose tastes ran to the esoteric, this is a dream come true.
Now for the downside: for light fiction, which consists just of pages of text, the Kindle Paperwhite (the reader I own) seems just about perfect. You need to buy a cover for it, but with that you can carry it anywhere. It is large enough to enable you to read simple text easily, but light enough to carry around and hold easily in the hand. Reading in bed and in dim light is much better with a Kindle than a paper book as the screen is illuminated. But for serious non-fiction books, there are some serious limitations. For example, I just read a history of Spain on the Kindle and while the photos were ok, if a bit small, all the maps were completely illegible because too tiny to read. This is also true of any book with musical examples: they will be hard to read at best and often impossible. So this is a serious problem!
But I have found the solution: download the free Kindle reader from Amazon and you can read these kinds of books on your desktop computer (or tablet, but I haven't tried that) in a nice, big roomy window--in color! Added super plus is that not only is the reader free, but you can go back and read all those Kindle books you have already purchased in your new reader at no additional cost. You already own them. And now you can actually see them!
I was driven to this discovery by my need to read Boris Berman's Prokofiev's Piano Sonatas: A Guide for the Listener and Performer which is $82 in hardcover but only $18 for Kindle. But if you can't actually see the musical examples, the Kindle version is hardly worth it. Hence the need for the Kindle reader software so you can read on your desktop.
Here is a screenshot showing how easily readable musical examples are with the reader:
Plus, I now know how it is that some bloggers can easily quote sections from Kindle books they are reading without having to retype the whole passage as I have been doing. They are just copying and pasting from the desktop reader.
Portability has always been the big plus with the Kindle. I can walk around with hundreds of books at my fingertips. Now, even when I travel, I can have access to the detailed graphics of non-fiction books by downloading the reader software to my laptop. It's all good!
Am I the last person to discover this? If so, I apologize!
Let's have some music to welcome in the New Year. I will be doing a lot of Prokofiev soon, so let's have something else. This seems the occasion for some Bach. One of his cheeriest large vocal/orchestral works is the Magnificat, which you really can't hear too often. This is the Arnold Schoenberg Choir and Concentus Musicus Wien conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt. The soloists are Christine Schafer, Anna Korondi, Bernarda Fink, Ian Bostridge and Christopher Maltman:
Gaius Petronius, supposedly the author of the Satyricon, one of the first novels, was titled elegantiae arbiter, "judge of elegance" in Nero's court. According to Tacitus he was regarded as the absolute authority on matters of taste. We apparently have the modern equivalent, lurking in obscure offices in Silicon Valley, the people who decide what we will listen to--at least if we subscribe to a music streaming service. Buzzfeed has the story: Inside the Playlist Factory.
When he’s choosing your music for you, Carl Chery, 37, is in Culver City, California, sitting at his desk in an office with no signage, trying to decide whether Drake and Future’s “Jumpman” (jumpman, jumpman, jumpman) has jumped the shark. Or sometimes he’s at home in his one-bedroom apartment on the border of West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, walking around in his living room with new Gucci Mane blasting from a Beats Pill. Or at the gym going for a morning run on the treadmill, thinking about your gym and your treadmill, listening through headphones for changes in tempo and tone: Will this song push you through the pain? Is that one too long on the buildup?
So how does this work?
Try any of the major music streaming services today and you’ll find variations on a common theme: thousands of ready-made playlists (“Rich Girl Pop,” “Inspired by Jeff Buckley,” “Songs to Sing in the Shower”) for every conceivable genre, activity, or mood. In the two years since the Beats acquisition, three of the largest services, including Apple Music, Spotify, and Google Play Music (and smaller ones like Tidal and Rhapsody, too), have increasingly relied on these playlists to accomplish two important goals at once: 1) helping users inundated by a catalog of more than 30 million songs more easily find the ones they actually want, and 2) creating difference in a market where everyone has more or less the same goods.
Ok, well, none of those precisely fit what I want to listen to... What I need is something like "Music to accompany a furtive meditation on humility" or "Something with a lot of hemiola" or "Dyspeptic music while reading the news about the latest jihadist attack in Europe" or "Something with just a touch of transcendence plus some rhythmic verve." Surely in 30 million songs this should be easy? No? Is it because most of those 30 million songs display a dreary backbeaten sameness? Oh, right.
The thing is, I know fairly well how to find good music, and avoiding streaming services is probably a good place to start. Hey, I think I qualify as a "veteran music nerd" (how these professionals are described), but I am probably the last person to be hired to help choose playlists. This is what I might come up with for my last category: "Something with just a touch of transcendence plus some rhythmic verve:"
Mozart, Symphony No. 41, last movement
Bach, Dona nobis pacem from the Mass in B minor
Steve Reich, Music for 18 Musicians
Prokofiev, Symphony No. 5
Giovanni Gabrieli - Canzon XVI for 12 Parts
Hey, let's have a listen to that last one for our envoi:
Attributes of Music, painting by Anne Vallayer-Coster
Technology and music always seem to have a tricky relationship. On the one hand, technology is crucial to all music. Some examples: the wound metal and nylon strings on the guitar, the clever and complex mechanism of the piano, the intricate mechanisms that enable wind instruments to be conveniently played in tune, and more recently, the development of high-quality recordings of musical performances.
But at the same time, technology, in its burgeoning energy, always seems just on the verge of running rough-shod over the music itself. I've just run across an interesting example in a TED talk. I'm rather a newcomer to the whole Ted-talk phenomenon. TED, which stands for "Technology, Entertainment, Design" is a conference project owned by a non-profit foundation. The main conference is held each year in Vancouver, BC, Canada. A whole host of talented and famous (not always the same thing) people have given talks, which are limited to 18 minutes. I wonder how much the organizers work with the presenters to create the most impactful talk. In any case, the talks, at least the very few I have seen, are pithy, entertaining and present cool things in a humorous way. So, very attractive. While you have to pay the large sum of $7500 to attend the talks in person, they are available on YouTube for free. Here is one where a vocalist demonstrates how computerized sound recording technology can be used to augment his already impressive gifts:
Quite entertaining. Amazingly accurate imitations of all sorts of sounds, natural and musical, with just the voice and amplification. And he can, with the aid of the technology (sampling and looping) quickly create tracks that mimic familiar musical genres. And that's about it. What's wrong with this, from my quirky point of view, is that it is about everything but creativity!! Mimicking the sound of a cat or dog or housefly or Pink Floyd, is all still just mimicking. To me this, while seeming to be very cool and slick and techno, is aesthetically no different than a Frank Gorshin impression:
Or, perhaps, rather less creative than a good impressionist. If Frank Gorshin is before your time, Jim Carrey has shown how to do a good impression:
Which shows the creative aspect of impressions: they are satirical caricatures of the originals and, hence, creative.
So the problem with the technology of Beardyman's polyphony, is that it is rather too accurate. He manages to make his voice sound just like sounds in the real world and, with the aid of the digital sampler, to put together textures that sound just like jazz or Pink Floyd. Which is clever and talented, of course. But what it is certainly not is interesting or creative.
I wonder how many TED talks are just like this? I suspect that this is high-class entertainment for the privileged class that makes them feel really good about themselves because they appreciate all this cleverness. Which is actually dreary and dull as soon as you dig into it.
Oh yes, and technology always seems to present a danger to creativity because it distracts from actually doing something. Creativity always, with no exceptions I can think of, comes from somewhere in the human mind, not from a gadget.
Or is it just me?
And as a little bonus, here are some photos of composers out having fun.
Schoenberg playing tennis:
Schoenberg swimming:
And Stravinsky sun-bathing:
UPDATE: I just ran across a brilliant critique of the whole TED idea, ironically in the form of a TED talk!
Courtesy of Norman Lebrecht, I just watched a video that is getting a lot of play. Written by/Starring Charlene deGuzman and Directed by Miles Crawford:
If you spend all your time recording, photographing and videoing life, then when will you have time to look at all these archives? Even more important, you will have missed actually living!
A few days ago I saw a YouTube video of a popular music performance in which nearly everyone in the audience was holding up their smartphone.
Here is the link to an essay about smartphone recordings by James Ehnes, violin soloist.
As I have mentioned before, recording technology is very much a mixed blessing. On the one hand, you can easily have access to all the great music in good performances. On the other hand, your life is cursed because every time you go out in public you are harassed by horrible, tinny recordings of bad music blasted at you from every corner.
Recording tends to result in a certain amount of alienation. From the point of view of the musician, recording objectifies his performance. Rather than it being a simple matter of playing the music in an expressive way, it is complicated by the fact that after playing you listen to the performance and are separated from it. You are "on the other side" or hearing from the outside what you just played from the inside. I think that since minor errors seem to be amplified by the recording process, the tendency is to make the playing more mechanically perfect and certainly less spontaneous. You can learn to work within these constraints, of course, but the tendency is there.
Similarly, the listener is alienated from the musical performance by the fact that it is intermediated by technology. It will always sound different from the original performance. A musical performance always has a context: it is in a particular location, in a particular hall or room at a particular hour and date and with just these musicians dressed in just that way and feeling just as they felt. All this is enervated by the recording process whereby the exact sound and feel of the location of the performance is washed away. Even with video, the feel of being in the place is gone.
As we can see in that YouTube video about the smartphone, it alienates people from one another. Would young people watch this video and not see the tragedy of it? Just see it as normal life?
Time for a confession: the first Bach recording I ever purchased was Walter/Wendy Carlos' Switched-On Bach a synthesizer version of some popular Bach pieces released in 1968. I think I bought it in 1970. I was at the time an electric bass and six-string guitarist, recent member of several different bands and new admirer of classical music. Here is an example of the kind of arrangement found on that album:
I am reminded of this by an article in The Nation about a new book by Paul Elie. Reviewer Michael O'Donnell describes it as follows:
Classical music has experienced years of diminishing ticket sales and the indifference of young listeners and so must exploit technology, Elie believes, in order to endure. To prove as much, he lived for “a thousand and one nights” with Bach’s music on compact disc, MP3 and radio, and he emerged on the other side of the experience eager to proselytize both the music and the recording technology that captured it. Against the instinct of purists to denounce the ubiquitous cheapening of classical music in ringtones, overheated movie trailers and hip-hop songs, Elie contends: “The more various our encounters with Bach, the more objective his genius is.”
At the end O'Donnell comments that Elie should spend less time with recordings and more time listening to Bach live. Well, sure, but I think it would be even better to take a few lessons and learn how to play a little Bach. You don't need to be a virtuoso to experience playing Bach and it will connect you with the music in a way that no amount of listening to recordings or going to concerts will do.
But what I really want to talk about is how these kinds of disputes between people who argue for popularizing Bach by playing him on synthesizers or jazzing him up or playing him in subway stations as they recently did in New York and people who argue for more historically-informed performances of Bach are actually a kind of category mistake.
The notion of a category error comes from a 1949 philosophical inquiry by Gilbert Ryle in a book titled The Concept of Mind and it is a useful notion. To give a musical example, you might be giving an introduction to classical music to a friend by taking him to an orchestral concert. You point out the different instruments to him: those are the violins and over there are the flutes. He says, "ok, I see the violins and the flutes and the other instruments you pointed out, but I don't see the orchestra. Where is the orchestra?" He has made the category mistake of not understanding that all the instruments together constitute the orchestra.
I think that nearly all the typical disputes about Bach, or classical music generally, are plagued with category mistakes. When we talk about performing Bach on synthesizers or on harpsichord, in a concert hall or a subway platform, on a recording with digital editing or in your music room at home we are talking about the accidentals of music, not the essence of music.
I notice that much discussion of aesthetics avoids the words 'good' and 'bad' as if they were infectious. The paragraph I quote above twists around, but ends up saying that Bach's genius is "objective", which I take it means 'good'. When you play Bach you can handle a phrase well or badly. Your texture can be clear or muddy. There are a thousand things you can do that work or don't work--and by 'work' I mean are musically effective. It is this sort of thing that matters. If I want to demonstrate how a phrase should (or could) be shaped effectively, I could do so on a guitar, a piano, a synthesizer or a copy of an historical harpsichord and which I chose would be nearly irrelevant. I say 'nearly' because some qualities, like speed of decay or type of attack, could influence how I shaped the phrase.
You can deliver an effective performance of Bach in many different ways on many different instruments which is why transcriptions of Bach are so frequent and so successful. You can also deliver many different kinds of ineffective, maudlin, muddy and wobbly performances of Bach on many different instruments. This is the kind of distinction that matters: between good and bad, not between this model synthesizer and that kind of violin bow, between a performance on piano or one on harpsichord.
We admire the performances of Glenn Gould not because he had an eccentric personality or sat on a funny chair or hummed when he played or isolated himself in the studio or chose a certain editing procedure, but because he played Bach well. Really well. That's the only thing that matters.
Bach endures not because of the use or non-use of any particular technology or even musical instrument, but because his music is aesthetically powerful. This is what drives everyone from Carlos to Gould to me to play Bach and a host of others to listen to Bach.
There are a couple of different approaches to this question. One is a celebration of all the wonderful gifts technology has brought to music. For example, with a laptop and an inexpensive recording equipment package you can set up your own home studio for less than $1000. This replaces what would have cost probably $100,000 twenty or thirty years ago and offers an order of magnitude of higher quality than the recording equipment the Beatles did all their recording on. With the iPod everyone can carry thousands of songs around with them to listen to anywhere. I compose using an inexpensive music software that enables me to instantly hear notes I input played on any instrument at any tempo. It even does dynamics and fermatas. True, it's still a computer so the performance is, uh, stiff and clunky, but it produces a perfect score, ready for publication.
The other approach is to criticize the intrusion of technology into music by noticing that with the hundred year old development of recording technology, no-one has to learn how to play an instrument or even go to a concert in order to enjoy music. Another consequence is that recorded music is ubiquitous in most public spaces. The effect of this is that music is taken for granted and becomes just another mass-produced industrial product. The one place actual music performance is still demanded is at pivotal life events such as weddings and funerals. The general level of musical knowledge has probably plummeted as a smaller percentage of the population takes music lessons and hence learns to read music.
Both of these approaches contain truths, of course.
As I just pointed out in a comment on the Atlantic article The Loudness Wars, this isn't about loudness at all. It's about clipping. The absolute loudness of a track is under your control, not the engineers. All the engineer can do is compress the dynamic. Here is an excellent short explanation:
The advantage to compression is that it makes a track using it stand out against tracks that don't. It also makes tracks more audible in an environment where there is a lot of background noise. So, big pluses in a lot of situations in the modern world. But, honestly? It makes music sound like shit. Sorry to be blunt. I read about this a while back, but the Atlantic article lays out the context. I've been wondering why so much pop music sounds so crappy and this is part of the reason. Another part is pointless hyperactivity, but I've already posted, briefly, on that. Meaningless arm-waving is a vice all music is prone to, but this punching up of everything, or chopping of the peaks, is a vice unique to pop music.
Here is some truthiness for you:
You can't actually listen to music when there is a lot of background noise--all you can listen to is punched up sludge
Music uses a number of different techniques to express things: a range of pitches, a range of harmonies, a range of rhythmic values and a range of dynamic values--it makes no more sense to flatten out the louds and softs than it would to use just one note in the melody
Musical expression is not a function of digital or other compression, or of costuming, or of dance routines, or of whatever else you can find to stuff into the video
I'm all in favor of sexiness, but sexiness and musicality are not actually the same thing.
Speaking of dynamic range, the right use of it can be one of the most powerful resources in music. The most amazing example I can think of is the first movement of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7. I cannot embed a clip that will demonstrate this. You will actually have to physically go to an orchestral performance of it. The reason is that, after a six minute introduction, a long passage starts--usually known as the "Invasion Theme"--that lasts for about eleven minutes. The entire passage, a long passacaglia on a single theme, is a crescendo. It starts with a simple rhythm on a single snare drum and by the end there is the whole orchestra including three snare drums, five tympani, bass drum, cymbals, tam-tam, triangle, tambourine, xylophone, eight French horns, six trumpets, six trombones, tuba, full woodwind section including contrabassoon, and at least sixty strings. These instruments are slowly added, bit by bit, until all of them are playing at full volume. This incredibly wide dynamic range, from a single snare drum playing quietly to the huge orchestra playing loudly is UNRECORDABLE! No recording technology we possess can capture that enormous a range. So go find a performance, buy a ticket and get back to me.... OK? I have had the experience of hearing this in a live performance and it is not one you soon forget.
As I said, it cannot be experienced in a recording, but just to give you a slight taste of it, here is a YouTube clip of the first part. The first movement of the symphony is 25 to 30 minutes long, depending on the performance, so it has to be chopped up. The crescendo I am talking about starts around 6:52 in this clip:
