Category: Music

My excellent Conversation with David Robertson

by  Tyler Cowen in

David is one of my very favorite conductors of classical music, especially in contemporary works but not only.  He also is super-articulate and has the right stage presence to make for a great podcast guest.  Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary:

Tyler and David explore Pierre Boulez’s centenary and the emotional depths beneath his reputation for severity, whether Boulez is better understood as a surrealist or a serialist composer, the influence of non-Western music like gamelan on Boulez’s compositions, the challenge of memorizing contemporary scores, whether Boulez’s music still sounds contemporary after decades, where skeptics should start with Boulez, how conductors connect with players during a performance, the management lessons of conducting, which orchestra sections posed Robertson the greatest challenges, how he and other conductors achieve clarity of sound, what conductors should read beyond music books, what Robertson enjoys in popular music, how national audiences differ from others, how Robertson first discovered classical music, why he insists on conducting the 1911 version of Stravinsky’s Petrushka rather than the 1947 revision, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: I have some general questions about conducting. How is it you make your players feel better?

ROBERTSON: Oh, I think the music actually does that.

COWEN: But you smile at them, you occasionally wink or just encourage them, or what is it you do?

…ROBERTSON: There’s an unwritten rule in an orchestra that you don’t turn around and look at somebody, even if they’ve played something great. I think that part of our job is to show the rest of the players, gee, how great that was. Part of the flexibility comes from if, let’s say, the oboe player has the reed from God tonight, that if they want to stay on the high note a little bit longer, or the soprano at the Metropolitan Opera, that you just say, “Yes, let’s do this. This is one of these magical moments of humanity, and we are lucky to be a part of it.”

COWEN: When do the players look at you?

ROBERTSON: Oh, that’s a fabulous question. I’ll now have to go public with this. The funny thing is, every single individual in an orchestra looks up at a different time. It’s totally personal. There are some people who look up a whole bar before, and then they put their eyes down, and they don’t want any more eye contact. There are other people who look as though they’re not looking up, but you can see that they’re paying attention to you before they go back into their own world. And there are people who look up right before they’re going to play.

One of the challenges for a conductor is, as quickly as possible with a group you don’t know, to try and actually memorize when everybody looks up because I always say, this is like the paper boy or the paper girl. If you’re on your route, and you have your papers in your bicycle satchel, and you throw it at the window, and the window is closed, you’ll probably have to pay for the pane of glass.

Whereas if the window goes up, which is the equivalency of someone looking up to get information, that’s the moment where you can send the information through with your hands or your face or your gestures, that you’re saying, “Maybe try it this way.” They pick that information up and then use it.

But the thing that no one will tell you, and that the players themselves don’t often realize, is that instinctively, and I think subconsciously, almost every player looks up after they’ve finished playing something. I think it’s tojust check in to see, “Am I in the right place?”

Recommended.

What should I ask Seamus Murphy?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him.  An associate of his emails me this excellent description of his work:

Spent over two decades photographing in Afghanistan (12 trips between 1994–2007). Has been back since the fall of the U.S. side.

  • Collaborated with P.J. Harvey on her album Let England Shake— they travelled together through Kosovo, Afghanistan, and the U.S. while she wrote songs and he filmed/photographed. This lead to P.J.’s album, and Seamus’s documentary ‘A Dog Called Money’
  • Made a film on recently deceased Irish poet Pat Ingoldsby. Pat was a well known Dublin character, a former TV presenter who sold his poetry on the streets of Dublin outside Trinity college for decades.
  • Published several books, including:
    • A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan
    • I Am the Beggar of the World (with Afghan women’s Landay poetry)
    • The Hollow of the Hand (with P.J. Harvey)
    • The Republic (on Ireland pre-2016 centenary)
  • Won 7 work press photo awards, and has photos held in the Getty Museum and Imperial War Museum
  • More recently Seamus has published Strange Love which is a photography book on visual parallels between the U.S. and Russia.
  • Seamus also semi lives in India now and has photo collections on modernising/not-modernising India (https://www.seamusmurphy.com/Epic-City/2)

TC again: So what should I ask him?

p.s. Here is Murphy’s home page.

Are cultural products getting longer?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Ted Gioia argues that cultural products are getting longer:

Some video creators have already figured this out. That’s why the number of videos longer than 20 minutes uploaded on YouTube grew from 1.3 million to 8.5 million in just two years…

Songs are also getting longer. The top ten hits on Billboard actually increased twenty seconds in duration last year. Five top ten hits ran for more than five minutes…

I’ve charted the duration of [Taylor] Swift’s studio albums over the last two decades, and it tells the same story. She has gradually learned that her audience prefers longer musical experiences…

I  calculated the average length of the current fiction bestsellers, and they are longer than in any of the previous measurement periods.

Movies are getting longer too.  Of course this is the exact opposite of what the “smart phones are ruining our brains” theorists have been telling us.  I think I would sooner say that the variance of our attention spans is going up?  In any case, here is part of Ted’s theory:

  1. The dopamine boosts from endlessly scrolling short videos eventually produce anhedonia—the complete absence of enjoyment in an experience supposedly pursued for pleasure. (I write about that here.) So even addicts grow dissatisfied with their addiction.
  2. More and more people are now rebelling against these manipulative digital interfaces. A sizable portion of the population simply refuses to become addicts. This has always been true with booze and drugs, and it’s now true with digital entertainment.
  3. Short form clickbait gets digested easily, and spreads quickly. But this doesn’t generate longterm loyalty. Short form is like a meme—spreading easily and then disappearing. Whereas long immersive experiences reach deeper into the hearts and souls of the audience. This creates a much stronger bond than any 15-second video or melody will ever match.

An important piece and useful corrective.

Noah on cultural stagnation

by  Tyler Cowen in

Fast-forward to the 2020s, and the artistic community has been largely disintermediated. If you want to be a successful commercial creator, the way to get started now is not first to struggle to prove yourself in the closed and cosseted artistic community — it’s to simply throw your work up online and see if it goes viral. If it does, you’re in.

This means that any creator whose goal is to sell out can do so without spending years making art that impresses artists. Of course, some creators still just intrinsically want to impress other artists. But if the money-motivated creators have left the community, there are just fewer people in that community left to impress. It becomes more and more niche and hipster. And there are fewer crossovers from the art world to mass culture, because the people left in the art world are the ones who don’t really care if they get famous and rich.

…But that’s the basic principle — if you want more novelty, I think you’ve got to make the artists work for each other more. How you do that, in a world where technology has made artists irrelevant as gatekeepers, is not something I have a concrete answer for. We may simply be in for a long period of artistic stagnation in America.

To sum up, I sort of believe that cultural stagnation is real, but I also think the root of the problem is probably technological — and therefore very hard to expunge.

Here is the full essay.  One question is how much stagnation we have, and I will not address that at this moment.  Another is what is the source of that degree of stagnation.  I am perhaps more inclined to blame the current quality of audience taste today.  In the past, audience taste often did very well, for instance in supporting the Beatles or Motown, or many earlier Hollywood movies, even when critical or artistic taste was mixed.  Mozart too was popular with his audiences.  Still Noah’s hypothesis is an interesting one.

Addendum: Alex and I wrote a paper on closely related issues, An Economic Theory of Avant-Garde and Popular Art.

*Hope I Get Old Before I Die*

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the new and fun book by David Hepworth.  It focuses on the careers of rock stars who simply keep on going and do not retire.

Can we admit that Paul McCartney and also the Rolling Stones have made the best of this?

Here is one bit:

Of the ten most-visited graves in the USA, just one is the resting place of a president.  The rest are all the graves of entertainers.

I liked this line:

‘Sometimes I feel like I work for Liz Phair,’ she [Liz Phair] says.  ‘And I have years off but then, like, I work for her.’

You can order the book here.

Music compensation fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

The Kanye West and Jay-Z song “No Church in the Wild,” for instance, sampled a single instrumental line from a failed solo album recorded in the late 1970s by the Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera; the licensing proceeds provided Mr. Manzanera with “the biggest payday he had in the course of his entire career.” Or there is Mr. Hepworth’s revelation that some crazed fan supposedly paid more than $160,000 for a seat at Led Zeppelin’s 2007 reunion.

Here is more from the WSJ review of David Hepworth’s Hope I Get Old Before I Die, reviewed by D.J. Taylor.

My Conversation with the excellent Ian Leslie

by  Tyler Cowen in

I loved his new book on John and Paul, of the Beatles, and I am delighted to see it doing so well on the UK bestseller lists, and now also on the US lists.  Here is my audio, video, and transcript with him.  Here is the episode summary:

In this deep dive into one of music’s most legendary partnerships, Ian Leslie and Tyler unpack the complex relationship between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Leslie, whose book John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs examines this creative pairing, reveals how their contrasting personalities—John’s intuitive, sometimes chaotic approach and Paul’s methodical perfectionism—created a unique creative alchemy that neither could fully replicate after the Beatles split.

They explore John’s immediate songwriting brilliance versus Paul’s gradual development, debate when the Beatles truly became the Beatles, dissect their best and worst covers, examine the nuances of their collaborative composition process, consider their many musical influences, challenge the sentiment in “Yesterday,” evaluate unreleased tracks and post-Beatles reunions, contemplate what went wrong between John and Paul in 1969, assess their solo careers and collaborations with others, compare underrated McCartney and Lennon albums, and ultimately extract broader lessons about creative partnerships.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: Do you think Paul’s song, “Yesterday,” is excessively sentimental?

LESLIE: No, I don’t. First of all, it’s not really sentimental in any way. I think it acquired this reputation because it does seem to come from a different tradition, perhaps a more easy-listening tradition in the first instance, although, I can hear echoes of music going far back from that in history.

But as a song about this person, this woman has left me and I have no idea why, it doesn’t then go on to describe how wonderful this girl is. Just says she’s gone and I don’t know why. It’s bleak. [laughs] The way he sings it is clipped, it’s brusque, it’s northern. It’s almost this northern folk sound to the way he sings it.

The string arrangement — he made sure that it wasn’t sentimental. He said to George Martin explicitly, “We’ve got to find a way of not making this sound saccharine.” So, George Martin asked the players not to play with vibrato or to play with very little vibrato. I think it’s very unsentimental, and in a way, it’s not that far off from “For No One,” which is an anti-sentimental song, where there’s very little hope.

COWEN: Or “Another Girl” even, right? The girls were leaving all the time in that song. It’s quite brutally about something very particular.

LESLIE: It’s interesting because I think in that year, 1965, with “Another Girl” and “I’m Looking Through You,” he is really soaking up, I think, from John. Or “The Night Before.” He’s leading into his Johness in the sense of he’s finding some anger and some hostility.

COWEN: “You Won’t See Me,” most of all.

The only topic was the Beatles, plus a bit on artistic collaboration more generally.  In any case this was one of the most fun episodes for me.  Definitely recommended, and again I am a big fan of Ian’s book John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs.

1969

by  Tyler Cowen in

1969 was a big year for me.  Most of all, we left Fall River and moved back to New Jersey, but this time to Bergen rather than Hudson County — Billy Joel comments.  I’ll cover Bergen County another time, here were three other developments of import in my seven-year-old life in 1969:

1. The United States landed a man on the moon.

My parents let me stay up late to watch this, thank goodness.  Of course I was very excited, and we heard all about it in school.  This event drove my later interest in science fiction, space exploration, and also travel by jet.  None of those were directions my career or writings went in, but they were early intellectual influences.  At this point in the game, how could you not watch Star Trek reruns?

Back then, we all knew something special was happening, even I knew at age seven.  I also began to understand that the United States was the country that did this, and what that meant.  So I became more patriotic.  The command center at NASA seemed to me a great achievement, in a way more impressive than the spaceship.

2. The New York Mets won the World Series.

Alas, I was no longer a Red Sox fan.  The important thing here is that the New York Mets season, along with the moon landing of that same summer, was the first thing I truly followed with all of my attention.  I learned how to keep on top of something, at least to the greatest degree possible given my constraints (which were extreme, starting with no internet but hardly ending there).  In 1968 I watched baseball games, but in 1969 I followed The New York Mets and absorbed all of the available information about them, including reading newspapers, listening to radio talk shows, and digesting statistics on a regular basis.

That is a tendency that has stuck with me, and I first practiced it then and there.

3. I received my first transistor radio.

I don’t hear people talk about this much any more, but for me it was like the arrival of the internet.  All of a sudden I was in regular touch with a big chunk of the world.  I could hear the new music that was out.  Could listen to the news.  Find out sports scores.  Hear talk shows.  Or whatever.  The menu was very America-centric, and the sound was terrible, but none of that mattered.  The information superhighway had been opened for me.

I heard the Jackson Five song “I Want You Back,” and the Beatles’ “Hey Jude.”  Those tunes bored me quickly, and I returned to them and their excellence only later.  But I knew they were out there, and I knew they were important.  At least early on, I preferred The Archies “Sugar, Sugar,” Tommy Roe’s “Dizzy,” and oddities such as Zaeger and Evans “In the Year 2525.”  How about “They’re Coming to Take Me Away”?

In fact they did not take me away, rather they ensconced me securely in New Jersey, in the momentous year of 1969.

What should I ask David Robertson?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes, David Robertson the conductor.  He studied with Boulez and Messiaen, and arguably is the second best Boulez conductor ever.  He also is famous for his recordings of John Adams.  I find him consistently excellent, for instance his Unsuk Chin, Milhaud, or Porgy and Bess.  Here is his Wikipedia page.  Here is his TEDx talk on conducting.  Here is his home page.  He is very smart.

So what should I ask him?