Looking far younger than his years, Russian pianist Evgeny Kissin gave a warmly received concert Wednesday evening in the Haus für Mozart. Here is the program, which the elves at the Festival have updated to reflect the three encores he played:
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| Evgeny Kissin acknowledging applause |
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| Open air market |
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| Lots of sausages |
Any music AI generator is only as good as the data it’s trained on. These systems require a vast amount of data, and a model trained on a biased data set will reproduce those biases in its output. Whose voices are included in that huge crate of music, and whose are left out? Today’s AI models are liable to exclude vast swaths of music, especially from musical traditions that predate recording technology and come from non-Western origins. As currently designed, they are more likely to produce stereotypical sounds within a genre or style than they are to produce anything peculiar, let alone innovative or interesting. Generative AI systems have a bias toward mediocrity, but transcendent music is found on the margins.
That is a pretty fair take on it--and it illustrates why music AI generation is likely of very little interest.
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Snappy headline (and revealing subhead). The Composer Has No Clothes: Classical music ennobles bullshit
Such deceptions surface occasionally in classical music, enabled by the field’s fetish for name dropping, prestige, and aura. In 1964, an English lunch-lady-turned-musician named Rosemary Brown began claiming that the ghosts of composers past took control of her hands while she was playing the piano. She “dictated” new works by Bach, Brahms, and Rachmaninov, and conversed with Beethoven, to widespread credulity. (Ludwig had “obviously taken the trouble to learn English since he passed over,” she clarified.) In 2007, the pianist Joyce Hatto was exposed for having plagiarized some one hundred critically acclaimed recordings from other performers; in one instance, a reviewer panned the exact same recording when it was marketed under a different name. In 2014, Mamoru Samuragochi, a deaf composer known as “Japan’s Beethoven,” was revealed to be neither deaf nor the composer of the music that he released. (That Samuragochi was not Beethoven’s musical heir was apparent earlier.)
Well, sure Classical music ennobles bullshit, but so does, oh, I dunno, the world of finance and investment, crypto currency, literature and, wait, every other field of human endeavor. The difference is, when someone is bullshitting in the world of crypto, people lose billions of dollars, but in the world of classical music, mostly people just feel silly. Well, sure, it seems unlikely that the ghost of Beethoven would dictate new works to Rosemary, but she seemed like such a nice person.
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Opinions differ on Der Idiot: IDIOT IS SALZBURG’S BIGGEST HIT
Jan Brachmann writes in the FAZ: ‘When Bogdan Volkov, as Prince Myshkin, sits alone on the huge stage of the Felsenreitschule, staring into the darkness around him and singing in a half-voice, childishly bright: “What a breathless, strange day. Everything rushes and flickers before my eyes,” then you can feel what Weinberg’s music has captured about this character from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel: it gains clarity about the world by becoming quiet in the midst of the noise.’
Shirley Apthorp writes in the FT: ‘There are times when you leave the opera house unable to speak. When the combination of text, music, motion and imagery reaches a level of such complex perfection that you can’t find words for the way you feel.’
My opinion was rather different.
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Now let's have an envoi. Kissin playing Brahms. Here are the Balladen op. 10 from earlier this year:
