Category: Music

Cross-ethnic casting

by  Tyler Cowen in

I complained about the casting of The Odyssey per se (the blind beggar was best), but in general I do not mind cross-ethnic casting.  I am glad Elizabeth Taylor played Cleopatra, Dev Patel played David Copperfield, Denzel Washington played Macbeth, black and Latino actors play white parts in Hamilton, and that Morgan Freeman can play God well (God himself would not be “white,” but God as black is nonetheless a conscious choice), and there was Jessye Norman (among others) singing and playing many traditionally white roles on the opera stage.

Recently in a private conversation I suggested that Nabeel Qureshi be cast as the next James Bond.  He has a British accent, was born in (northern!) England, is tall and is good-looking.  He does not remind anyone of Roger Moore.  He is old enough where you could believe he has some experience as a spy, and at the baccarat table, but young enough where he could do those stunts without it seeming ridiculous.

I recall the talk of a black Bond, a notion which likely would end up dull and cliched.  But a Bond of Pakistani ethnic origin?  Now that would occasion some debate.

I am not saying it always works.  I likely would object to a remake of Zulu with an all-Chinese cast.  Or there can be major cultural mistakes which are not cross-ethnic, such as casting a Liverpudlian in the role of a London elite.  Everyone in The Sopranos should at least be pretending to fit their roles, and indeed Tony himself grew up in New Jersey.  I would have done fine in a cameo role.

My excellent Conversation with Chase Koch

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary:

Chase and Tyler discuss if any of his father’s lessons never stuck, the guilt-trip letter his grandfather wrote three months after Charles was born, why Chase started throwing tennis matches, what Rafa’s grit taught him about stoicism, who he admired most from the 1992 Dream Team, whether the Spurs should jettison De’Aaron Fox, the David Gilmour solo that hooked him at eleven, what drew him to jam bands, how he built a boom-box business out of his parents’ garage, why his father interviewed Snoop on a Zoom call during Covid, why his band is named for the second law of thermodynamics, what it’s like working with MrBeast, how Koch Industries has evolved, what he learned from Marc Andreessen, the philosophy behind hiring the “farm team,” why he is teaching himself to code with Claude at his fourteen-year-old’s urging, where he’s traveling next, and much more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: N.W.A., are they good? I like them.

KOCH: I had my phases. My first business, Tyler, was when I was 15 years old and one of my best friends to this day, Askia Ahmad, he was wiring up car stereos and building custom boom boxes and all that. We basically built a business out of my parents’ garage because they had all the tools and materials and everything. Like, “Let’s build a business out of here. My parents hopefully will pay for the machinery, and then we can sell these boom boxes to our friends at high prices and capture a big margin.” Through that, I learned about the whole gangster rap. Your listeners may be surprised, but it started with me, Public Enemy, N.W.A., Eazy-E, of course—

COWEN: It’s so good.

KOCH: Dre.

COWEN: Snoop.

KOCH: Snoop.

COWEN: You know Snoop, right?

KOCH: It’s so good, so good. Yes.

COWEN: What’s Snoop like?

KOCH: Snoop? Okay. This goes back to what I was mentioning on the power of music to unify people. So I’ve been with Stand Together. For the listeners that don’t know, it’ll give context to your question. Stand Together is an organization that has really a community of like-minded leaders that all believe in one thing, in the power of human potential, and that every human has a gift.

We all know that there’s so many barriers in society that are holding people back, whether it’s barriers in education, barriers in regulation, so you can’t start a business, barriers in our criminal justice system, you name it. What Stand Together does is we have basically a comprehensive strategy that addresses everything from education to policy to bottom-up empowerment in communities to drive real social change. I’ve been a part of this for as long as I can remember.

My father’s been working on social change for 60 years. My passion for music, as you can see from your last line of questioning, with Stand Together and that whole community, we never tapped into culture. When I say culture and what the next generation pays attention to—sports, music, YouTube, entertainment, creators, media. During COVID, I had this idea that we’ve never tapped into music to drive social change.

And on one specific point:

Back to your question on energy, 4 percent of the overall capital consumed at Koch is in refining, which is basically where my grandfather started the company. I think that surprises a lot of people because I think a lot of people are still stuck in this, “Well, you’re this energy company.” No, we’re not. We touch the majority of the economy now, and we’re in everything from forest products, consumer products, software, as I described, glass manufacturing, to energy and fertilizers as well.

Interesting throughout.

Wiesbaden notes

by  Tyler Cowen in

Who goes to Wiesbaden these days?  The era of Russian nobles taking the cure here and gambling is long since gone.  And yet here we are.  The proximate cause of this trip is the desire to see Grigory Sokolov, one of the world’s great pianists and a cult figure of sorts.  He rarely tours North America, maybe these days never as he is 76.  The current program includes Beethoven’s fourth piano sonata, Beethoven’s Op.126 Bagetelles, and Schubert’s last piano sonata.  How can one say no?  Sokolov also was a favorite of Tom Schelling, I might add, especially his recording of The Art of the Fugue, in my view one of the best classical music recordings of all time.

Besides, I have long been a believer in semi-random excursions to mid-size, slightly neglected German cities.  There remains a strong cultural federalism in Germany, and so you might see and hear wonderful things in many different parts of the country.

I perceived two difficult Wiesbadens.  In one, if you walk through the cheaper part of the pedestrian zone in the evening, the city seems mostly Muslim.  But if you walk around during the morning, the city seems mostly German.  I might add that some of the younger Muslim women show signs of assimilating, at least based on how they dress and present themselves.  The older women tend to stick with the headscarves.

Over the last twenty years, inflation-adjusted real estate prices in Wiesbaden have gone up about forty percent, an OK performance.  At times the city “does not feel like Germany any more,” but I think it is holding on.  The proportion of new building is roughly equal to the population growth, so I do not think this price effect is a NIMBY effect.  Rather it reflects the fact that Wiesbaden is still a pretty nice place to live.  that said, in some significant ways Germany in the traditional sense is failing to reproduce itself.

It was stunning to me to discover how hard it is, in most of the downtown, to find plain, ordinary German food.  At any price level.  There is no current equivalent of Wienerwald or Nordsee to be seen, never mind a decent Wiener Schnitzel.

Much of Wiesbaden was destroyed and rebuilt, but the best fifteen or twenty buildings show the previous wealth and splendor to good effect.  You will see these gems walking around, though only periodically.  There is also an old Roman wall and a moving, more recent Holocaust memorial.

Most German ice cream just isn’t that good, so try L’Art Sucre for something French.

Museum Reinhard Ernst is the new institution in town, and it specializes in color field abstract art.  The building is impressive, but the collection is weak except for a few Stellas.  Why organize a museum around that basis unless the underlying collection is super strong in that area?  This one is not.  I can forgive the absence of the expensive American Ellsworth Kelly, but no Blinky Palermo or Günther Förg?

Nonetheless their restrooms might forestall this kind of Larry David conflict:

(At Museum Ludwig in Köln, by the way, you get the discount for being disabled only if you have “fifty degrees of disability,” however they might measure that.  Slight disabilities are not enough, you must be truly “schwerbehinderte,” as judged by the state, heaven forbid the museum rely on the honor system.)

Museum Wiesbaden in contrast was an unexpected delight.  Although it is mainly a natural history museum, they have one of the world’s best collections of Art Nouveau and the single best Jawlensky collection, and you can have these all to yourself.  Very few people seem to go there.

As for the economy, here are some Germany facts of the day.  Yet Germany continues, and visits remain a source of pleasure and interest.

Sokolov, by the way, played six encores.  Where should the Germany trip target next year?

Jackson Dahl podcasts with me and Nabeel on aesthetics

by  Tyler Cowen in

Filmed at home, this ran about two hours, and yes that is Nabeel Qureshi, with a cameo from Spinoza toward the very end.  From Jackson:

Links

From the episode summary:

Tyler and Nabeel are good friends, and given how prolific Tyler is, I decided to use Nabeel as an entry point and interview them together. We discuss sacred commitments, AI acceleration, mentorship, friendship, and more, but I focused the majority of the conversation on art and aesthetics. Tyler and Nabeel are unlikely aesthetes given their day jobs, but in fact take art deeply seriously. They have a shared love for and similar tastes in art, music, and film, in particular. We discuss strange and beautiful art, aesthetic stagnation, and a wide range of favorites: The Beatles, Mozart, Mondrian, Springsteen, Lana Del Rey, Kanye West, Cassavetes, The Sopranos, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=wC78q_BeD27XDnLN&v=qPHV-BezoIc&feature=youtu.be

Excerpt:

Tyler: (18:31) I think I’m very mundane in many ways. When Marc Andreessen had that famous tweet about not being too introspective, I know he got slammed for that, but I sympathize with that in many ways. I have my work. I focus on it. I want to go see places I haven’t seen before. That really drives me. I feel pretty well motivated. I do think all kinds of deep thoughts, but to me those deep thoughts feel more superficial than my so-called superficial urges to go around doing things. And I’m fine with that.

…Jackson: (23:25) Do you experience art primarily by thinking or by feeling?

Tyler: (23:29) I don’t even know what those words mean. I experience it by looking at it. I don’t think I have very deep emotional responses. I think it’s pleasure and I feel I learn a lot from it. When I go out and look at other works of art or just the world, I see a lot more than people who don’t live with art. I don’t think I feel that much. I’ve never cried in front of a painting. When I read these accounts of someone seeing a Madonna and weeping, it makes no sense to me. It’s like people who do sports gambling. Why do you do that? There are positive-sum gambles for you. Here are a few.

There is much more of interest, self-recommending!

Music markets remain deglobalized

by  Tyler Cowen in

It might seem surprising, in a world of global stars, that the 6m Danes, many of whom are fluent in English, listen mainly to homegrown music. And until fairly recently they did not. In 2019 only five songs in Denmark’s top 20 were in Danish. By last year the figure was 18.

A similar trend is under way in other countries—and in other forms of entertainment. From Asia to the Americas, music charts are increasingly dominated by local sounds. Hollywood television-streaming companies are commissioning more local productions in foreign markets, causing consumption of American shows to fall. Social networks are connecting the whole world, but so far people are mainly using them to consume local content. And as video gaming expands, it too is becoming increasingly tailored to local cultures…

In 2023 Will Page and Chris Dalla Riva noted in a London School of Economics paper that a number of European countries including France, Germany, Italy and Poland had seen rising domestic shares of their top tens in the preceding decade. Since then the phenomenon seems to have spread. Mr Page, formerly chief economist at Spotify, finds that 55% of streams of songs in Sweden’s top 20 last year were in Swedish, up from 29% in 2019. Norway’s figure rose from 13% to 38% in the same period.

That is from The Economist, and of course it echoes themes from my earlier Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures.  And Brazil most of all?

Latin America has gone the same way (see chart 1), Brazil astonishingly so: in the first week of June 96 of the top 100 artists on YouTube Music in the country were Brazilian (foreigners included Justin Bieber and Michael Jackson). Last year Thailand had a solidly local top ten, while Indonesia and the Philippines each had eight local tracks in their respective charts; Nigeria’s top ten were all local, as were nine of South Africa’s, according to the IFPI, which represents the recorded-music industry.

The same trends are happening for television as well, albeit less radically.

Why drugs are here to stay (from my email)

by  Tyler Cowen in

This is anonymized, I can vouch that the person is very smart and has excellent taste:

Some thoughts [referring to my recent Free Press piece on marijuana]. My feeling is that you read quickly enough that I can dump words on you and it will not be an imposition. So I have not really edited this. I am writing more now

1. Drugs are fun.

2. They open new ways of perceiving, sometimes by adversely impacting other ways of perceiving, particularly by adjusting attention response, and particularly for perceiving experiences that are sensory (what experiences aren’t sensory, ridiculous, I know, but here of course I mean art primarily.

3. Since the experiences I am inadequately categorizing above are profoundly influential on people’s meaning-making, drugs can be as well, of course.

4. Most people are not going to be as economically viable as they are now as producers of goods or services, and many, if not most, are going to be economically viable only to the extent that they generate demand, and here I think specifically demand for pleasure. Drugs are important in this social equation. People will use many more drugs of increasing variety and quality. This train has left the station, or, rather, these trains have left their stations. You will not call them back.

5. People prefer not to work. Most folks are lazy. As you know. People usually only work because they have to, and this is a perpetual source of human misery, the having to work part. Rich people like to say things like: “work gives you purpose” but that really is only for work in which you can create meaning for yourself. Most people do not have this work, cannot get this work, and will never experience meaning-making through work in a positive way.

6. The other ways people derive meaning are becoming more expensive, and prohibitively so for many, and here I mean specifically children. It always puzzles me why folks like Musk and Thiel advocate for more reproduction when it should be clear to all that (many) fewer humans will be required to generate (radically) more economic activity. Generating and raising new humans is already much more expensive than it was in previous generations, and fewer people are able to achieve the kind of economic security that predicts good parenting outcomes.

7. Tesla is a company that makes cars like Netflix is a company that mails you DVDs. You know this, it’s obvious, and has been since he put AI in his cars. Tesla makes robots, his cars are robots, and he will soon have many many other kinds of robots. SpaceX will solve the electricity and cooling issues around AI rapidly. The bottom line here is that all economic pressure points to people working less, not more. They will do more drugs.

8. This confluence of pressures (human desire for rest and relaxation, declining access to traditional means of meaning making — through work, through children — and the powerful economic pressures to replace human labor with AI and robotics) and the rapid evolution of much much better drugs (my boyfriend knows as much about pot as I do about wine, and here in the PNW pot is extremely high quality, and gets better literally all the time — there is a new nano-emulsified tech for drinkable live rosin marijuana products now available in Oregon, and let me tell you, that stuff is great) means that drug use will continue to rise, continue to improve in terms of its absolute value as a substitute for other meaning making activities, and continue to be blended in with other medical chemical use.

9. Mental health is health. Drugs do help with anxiety and pleasure, which is why people use them. Better drugs will help with these better.

10. I have an anxiety disorder (I never mind sharing this, I am also a type 2 diabetic and don’t mind sharing that) and am, at my heart, a bohemian libertine. As I get richer and richer, I use drugs to carve out space to disconnect from others. I create space for myself and my internal thinking with drugs. My internal thinking space is generally far more interesting than others’, though, and generally far more interesting than conversation with all but a few others.

11. I play an outstanding video game that replicates for me the experience of being a child playing with legos, except I never have to clean up my room. Marijuana enhances my video game experience by creating a sense of stasis while my mind wanders and i engage other bits of my mental engine on creation. Some of my best ideas, including many that have made clients millions of dollars, have occurred to me in this state, and I know no other state in which I am so open to new ideas. Many are lousy, but I successfully monetize enough of them to be getting richer than I need to be.

12. I spend more on classical music, theater, and other live performing arts than most people. I often use drugs to enhance the experience. Before a recent Bruckner 8, I bought pot two blocks from the hall in a store selling it openly but illegally — this was in one of those states with a world-class orchestra and outdated cannabis laws. Sitting in prime seats, high as a kite, I lost myself completely in Bruckner’s profound torrent of cosmic meaning. What I am saying is even my most cherished experiences can be improved by drugs. Many reasonable people feel the same, including Elon Musk.

13. I strongly recommend taking marijuana while hiking through the Olympic National Park in the rain. You will never experience olfactory sensations like that in any other setting or mindstate.

14. So, almost everyone is already using drugs almost all of the time, deriving great value from them in private, public, artificial, natural, and introspective spaces. You cannot replace that value with nothing, other competing forms of value are becoming much more expensive or require high levels of discipline (I get great value from my personal trainer who helps me get high on endorphins twice a week, now that’s a GREAT drug, so much clarity) and so I just don’t think there is any future in which you will put this genie back in the bottle.

*The Republic of Love*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is Martha C. Nussbaum, and the subtitle is Opera & Political Freedom.  Martha decided she did not wish to do a podcast after all, so since I put some real prep time in I thought I would offer some thoughts on the book directly, in part because it is not receiving substantive reviews elsewhere.  I suspect the number of people qualified to review the book, on the musical and philosophical and historical fronts, is pretty small.

Overall the book is very good, and if you think you might be interested you should buy and read it.  It shows a significant knowledge of opera, in part from Nussbaum’s own efforts as performer and singer.  Some of the operas considered at length include the major Mozart pieces, Verdi’s Don Carlo, Beethoven’s Fidelio, Benjamin Britten (Albert Herring, for one), and John Adams’s Nixon in China.  For Nussbaum, “political freedom” is not exactly that of the classical liberal kind, but for at least eighty percent of the book those differences do not matter.

I do have some objections to her points.  While each seems to be a smaller matter, I fear they reflect a larger reality where Nussbaum subordinates her understanding of the operas to her broader political and social agenda.

She is highly suspicious of Don Giovanni, considering it a “problem opera,” which for her I suppose it is.  She cannot bring herself to admit that fair numbers of women might actually be attracted to the Don, instead suggesting it is their baleful economic plight that leads them into such liasions.  That seems to me a grossly rigid misunderstanding of the work, at variance with centuries of high-level commentary on the piece.  Kierkegaard’s understanding remains ahead of hers, as does that of the ordinary theatergoer.

More generally, she is highly suspicious of romanticism, and she works hard to resist the notion that romanticism was a natural and perhaps even inevitable outgrowth of the classical spirit in music.  Not surprisingly, Tristan is anathema to her — “I think Tristan is a tedious opera and that the view of love in it — all unsatisfied longing and no reciprocity — is adolescent and boring.”  I would agree that virtually all Wagner operas, except perhaps Das Rheingold, are too long and thus have an element of tedium.  Yet that is hardly an accurate understanding of the libretto or the love connection (no reciprocity??).

One would do well to supplement Nussbaum with Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat.  GPT Pro had a good summary of some of Koestenbaum’s quite contrasting perspectives:

“The operatic voice exceeds ordinary speech: it is too loud, too stylized, too bodily, too artificial, too emotional. That excess makes it politically charged because it disrupts norms of restraint, masculine self-control, realism, and “proper” social identity. Opera gives form to things that respectable culture often requires people—especially queer people—to hide: longing, hysteria, theatricality, shame, glamour, grief, fantasy, and desire……it is a place where identity is unstable, theatrical, mediated, and excessive.  Opera is full of secrecy, codes, hidden meanings, displaced passions, and voices that say indirectly what cannot be said directly.”

By no means are those entirely illiberal tendencies, but they complicate any identifications of opera with liberalism or indeed any other foundational political set of views.  In some fundamental fashion, opera is usually going a bit askew from strictly classical principles.

I take Beethoven to be modestly less liberal than she does, as I am concerned with the repeated sense of “culmination” in his work, and the implied notion of total communal integration as the final good.  It is not Beethoven’s fault that even the Nazis staged Fidelio, but it does point to the poliitically Romantic strand in his music, a strand that Nussbaum pushes off center stage.

Why so little Rossini in this book?  (He gets a brief mention on pp.303-304).  He is arguably the essence of opera, and the carrier of the Mozartean tradition, yet he also was a supporter of the French monarchy and its restoration.  Even Verdi was a conservative and monarchist, which puts his Don Carlo in a slightly different light.  I am reminded of Carl Schmitt’s critique of Romanticism, namely that it could transfer loyalties so readily from revolutionary republicanism to reactionary monarchism.  19th century opera is not altogether innocent of this charge, and a deeper look at the material would have confronted this issue.  Mazzini wrote a whole book on opera and saw it as supportive of nationalism above all else.  A look at the history of Auber’s La Muette de Portici, the performance of which spurred Belgian nationalism and a revolt in 1830, is consistent with this view.

Nussbaum is too concerned with her own classificatory impulses, and insufficiently aware of how much opera itself — most of all the music — keeps on diverting our attention in other directions.

Overall, this is a very thought-provoking book, full of deep knowledge of both opera and philosophy.  If it is afraid to follow down the path of where the music itself — and most of its major purveyors — were leading us, that makes it thought-provoking all the more.

Can liberals be pacifists?

by  Tyler Cowen in

This is mostly a podcast about Benjamin Britten, and in particular his War Requiem, with Rebecca Lowe (former singer and conductor, in addition to philosopher and also her current role at Mercatus).

Here is the YouTube, here is the transcript and further listening links.  Excerpt:

LOWE: Yeah, so we should think about what it means for a conscientious objector to have written this work, which is supposed, in some sense, to maybe pay tribute to the soldiers. Maybe, in some sense, it’s supposed to play some role in the British response to the war. At a time when, of course, conscientious objectors had been seen as maybe betraying the nation. There are very interesting, tense questions about the choice of Britten to compose this work.

COWEN: And Benjamin Britten himself, he described the work as a reparation.

LOWE: Yes.

COWEN: Paid to the dead soldiers.

LOWE: That’s right.

COWEN: I think in some ways, he always had World War I more in mind than World War II. But other parties involved, of course, didn’t see it that way.

LOWE: That’s true.

COWEN: But Wilfred Owen was a World War I poet. And that was the formative experience for him, was World War I. And also, the Spanish Civil War influenced him greatly. So, he wanted to do this work, and I’m not sure he ever found a way to make it succeed with World War II. That, to me, is one of the drawbacks of the work.

Definitely recommended, it is fresh material throughout.  Can you find a better podcast on Britten and his War Requiem, arguably his greatest work?  And here is the Rebecca Lowe Substack and podcast more generally.

My excellent Conversation with Bob Spitz

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Bob Spitz has written major biographies of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and now the Rolling Stones — but also, somehow, Ronald Reagan and Julia Child. In rock, his credentials were hard won: he started out hustling gigs for an unknown Bruce Springsteen for six years, moved on to handling Elton John’s American business, and spent long enough in the world to find himself jamming with Paul McCartney and chatting with Bob Dylan on a stoop in the Village. The Reagan and Julia Child books are harder to explain, and perhaps that’s the point—Spitz seems to do his best work when he has no business writing the book at all.

Tyler and Bob discuss how the Stones became so great so quickly, what they added to the blues, how their melodies stack up against the Beatles’, whether Exile on Main Street deserves its canonical status, which songs are most underrated, what Charlie Watts actually got out of playing in a rock band, the rise and fall of Brian Jones, how the Stones outlasted nearly everyone, the influence of Mick’s London School of Economics training, why popular music has lost its cultural influence, what we should still be asking Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, whether the Beatles’ breakup was good for the world, how senile Reagan really was in his second term and whether he was ever truly a communist, how good a cook Julia Child actually was, his next book on Lennon’s second act, and much more.

Excerpt:

SPITZ: Mick, from a very early age, was an exercise freak.

As we know from my investigation in the book, Mick’s father was the Jack Lalanne of the United Kingdom. He had a television show, an exercise show like Richard Simmons, and he always had a great person to show off the exercises, young Michael. He would say, Mike, get down, show him 50 pushups. Mike, do 100 chins, and Mick would jump to it and do it. That man still has a 27-inch waist at the age of 83.

Keith, on the other hand, is a medical miracle.

And this:

COWEN: Mick once said his favorite economist was Friedrich A. Hayek. Do you know anything more about that?

SPITZ: I do not, actually. I think it’s incredible that Mick had favorite economists. We do know that Mick was a scholarship student to the London School of Economics, and that for two and a half years, he attended and got pretty good grades. He did fairly well. The one thing that amazes me about Mick coming out of that London School of Economics is this. After 1967, when Andrew Loog Oldham stopped managing the Stones, they have never had another manager. They’ve had some money managers, but as far as managers go, Mick Jagger was their manager.

And:

COWEN: How good a cook was Julia Child? That’s another of your biographies. Actually, how good was she?

SPITZ: She was great. She was a wonderful person, but here’s the little secret. Julia was a great cooking teacher, but not a very good cook. There were people who left her house—and John Updike told me this. He was a frequent guest with her. Corby Kummer, who was a wonderful food writer, told me this as well. They’d leave Julia’s house. They’d go to a little park around the corner, and they’d get physically ill. They’d get sick. Julia used too much butter, too much cream. She really had no reins on her when it came to using things like that.

Bob was excellent throughout, and I very much enjoyed his new biography of the Rolling Stones.