Category: Music

Why is choral music harder to appreciate?

by  Tyler Cowen in

It has struck me that most recommenders and lovers of choral music and themselves singers (or conductors) of choral music.  It helps a great deal to be right there.  So it occurred to me there are a few reasons why choral music is harder to appreciate than say either symphonies or chamber music:

1. Mixtures of voices do not translate onto recordings as well as do most symphony orchestra instrumental blends.  For one thing, the different voices are harder to sort out.  They are best understood when you are singing in the midst of the action.

2. A good deal of choral music is sung in a different language, and so most listeners do not understand the words.

3. A good deal of quality choral music has a background religious context.  Most listeners have only a modest knowledge of this background context.  For instance, how many people know that Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius is about purgatory, and that this was highly controversial in Elgar’s time, as it was viewed as a very Catholic concept?

3b. 6. Choral works may depend on church acoustics, or the surrounding church aura, but we go to church less often these days.

4. A lot of choral music sounds pious, and indeed may be pious.  At the very least they tend to be serious.  (How many comic choral pieces can you think of from the classical repertoire?  Or even comic moments?)  That seriousness of mood may appeal less to contemporary listeners.

5. Star vocalists drive a reasonable percentage of classical music sales.  But most choral works have a strong collective element, and they may not be set up to showcase soloists.  So the celebrity-driven appeal of choral forms can be relatively weak.

6. Many of the best-known choral works are quite long.  That may place them at a relative disadvantage.

7. Opera arguably has grown in relative popularity, and that may be serious competition for choral works because it can serve as a substitute.

What else?

What to Watch (or Not): Ballard, Perfect Days, Billy Joel

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Ballard (Amazon Prime) — I liked Bosch, so I had high hopes for this spinoff. The core premise—a team of misfits solving cold cases—is solid enough but the writing is unimaginative and lazy. In one scene, Ballard is told she needs to get a confession. We expect clever interrogation tactics. Instead, she walks in and bluntly asks, “Did you shoot Yulia Kravetz?”

Maggie Q is charismatic but the writers don’t write for her. She’s exceptionally slim, for example, yet the show repeatedly asks us to believe she can physically overpower men twice her size. I have no problem with that in a superhero movie but it’s off putting in a show that pretends to be grounded and gritty. If you’re casting someone with that physique, write her as sharper, more cunning, more insightful—not as a female stand-in for macho Bosch.

Worst of all is the ending: a killer reveal that comes out of nowhere, with no foreshadowing or internal logic. The writers don’t understand the difference between a twist and a cheat. Disappointing.

Perfect Days (Hulu, Amazon) — a 2023 Wim Wenders film that won the award at Cannes for “works of artistic quality which witnesses to the power of film to reveal the mysterious depths of human beings through what concerns them, their hurts and failings as well as their hopes.” The film follows the life of Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho, who won at Cannes for best actor) as he cleans public toilets in Tokyo’s Shibuya district. You will not be surprised to learn that the movie proceeds slowly. The toilets and the cleaning are the most interesting part of the first hour! I say this not as critique–I liked Perfect Days and the toilets really are interesting–only to illustrate the kind of movie that it is.

It helps to know the following from a useful Sean Burns review:

Komorebi is a Japanese word for the dancing shadow patterns created by sunlight shining through the rustling leaves of trees. There’s no equivalent term in English, and it’s tough to imagine any American caring enough to come up with one. But every afternoon on his lunch break, Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) takes a picture of the komorebi from his favorite park bench using an old Olympus film camera. Back at his apartment, he’s got boxes and boxes of black-and-white photos of the same spot, every one of them unique. Subtle shifts of the light and swaying branches in the breeze make similar snapshots strikingly different every time. Indeed, the whole concept behind komorebi is that it can exist only in a moment, never to be repeated. “Next time is next time,” Hirayama’s fond of saying, “Now is now.”

https://www.archilovers.com/stories/30456/why-architects-should-watch-perfect-days-by-wim-wenders.html

Although I would disagree with Burns slightly because there is an English term for something related to komorebi and that is crown shyness, the phenomena where trees grow in such a way that their branches keep from touching one another creating a canopy of closeness yet also distance. Indeed, I would argue that crown shyness expresses more of what the movie is about than komorebi.

A key question that divides reviewers is whether Hirayama is happy or content. The standard interpretation is that he has found, as Davis puts it, “beauty in the routine,” stopping to smell the roses. Yes, that is one aspect, but the routine is also a narcotic for the lost. Hirayama is estranged from his family. Barkeeps like him but all his relationships are superficial. He plays a game with a “friend” he never meets—distance and disconnection are everywhere.. In two scenes he finds meaning and joy in looking after a child but in both these scenes the child’s mother quickly rips the child away. Hirayama’s work partner disappears in the second half of the film. He almost makes connections with three women but in each case, crown shyness intervenes. He takes pride in his work but is operating well below his ability. He is isolated, alone, and without someone else to share a life, he is incomplete.

There are great scenes and music in Perfect Days, including a beautiful scene in which a Japanese hostess (Sayuri Ishikawa) sings House of the Rising Sun.

Billy Joel: And So It Goes (HBO) — 52nd Street was one of my favorite albums as a youth and it was fun to revisit his career. Billy Joel’s first wife, Elizabeth Weber, was the muse for many of his early songs including Big Shot and Stiletto:

She cuts you hard, she cuts you deepShe’s got so much skillShe’s so fascinatingThat you’re still there waitingWhen she comes back for the killYou’ve been slashed in the faceYou’ve been left there to bleedYou want to run awayBut you know you’re gonna stay‘Cause she gives you what you need

She is indeed, fascinating! Wow. Even today, she comes across as formidable.

I thought a lot about genetics while watching And So It Goes. Joel’s father was a classical musician, though his only notable comment on Billy’s playing was to knock him unconscious for taking too much liberty with a piece. The father left when Billy was eight. Not much nurture. Years later, they reunite in Vienna—where Joel discovers he has a half-brother, Alexander Joel, a successful pianist and conductor.

Joel grew up poor, but his paternal grandfather had been a wealthy Jewish businessman in Germany until the Nazis forced him out. His mother, Rosalind, was also musical, but her primary inheritance may have been bipolar disorder. Joel’s mental health struggles are never explicitly named in the documentary, but the signs are everywhere: an early suicide attempt, alcoholism, repeated motorcycle and car crashes of a self-destructive nature. The emotional cycles also help explain the pattern of intense, short-lived marriages to beautiful and accomplished women—Weber, Christie Brinkley, Katie Lee, and Alexis Roderick. In his highs, he was irresistible. In his lows, unbearable. He goes to extremes.

Critics didn’t always love Joel’s music, but his catalog has become part of the American songbook. Proof of something Tyler and I often discuss, the power of simply keeping going.

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.