Category: Music

There are many injustices in the world, so it is good that we have people willing to speak out against them:

Media regulator Ofcom today said it had received nearly 350 complaints about the weekend's Britain's Got Talent shows – but fewer than 20 were about the treatment of runner-up Susan Boyle, who was admitted to a private medical clinic on Sunday suffering from exhaustion.

Ofcom
said most of the complaints, 331, were about 10-year-old singer Hollie
Steel, who broke down in tears on Friday night's Britain's Got Talent
live semi-final.

The story is here.

From Mark Blankenship, here is one stab at the question:

No matter how much we mock those we consider beneath us, it's much more satisfying to be reminded that everyone has dignity.

That's because when we laugh at someone for being a freak, we're
laughing out of fear. We're laughing because we want to prove that we
are not like that loser over there. If we can shame the people who don't belong, then we can prove that we do.

When we embrace an outsider, though, we're paving the way
for our own acceptance in the future. Eventually, we'll all feel like
outcasts, and none of us wants to be laughed at. The Susan Boyle Story
suggests we won't be. Instead of fearing for our own eventual shame, we
can count on society to hear what's beautiful in us. We can trust that
if we just show our true selves, we will be embraced.

Whether or not that moral is true in the real world, it's alluringly
true in the Susan Boyle Story. By participating in the narrative that
television has constructed for her, by cheering her on and watching her
video over and over, we can not only feel good about graciously
welcoming an outsider, but also feel relief for helping create a world
that will someday welcome us.

I thank Mary Anne Sieghart, at TheBrowser, for the pointer.

From Freakonomics blog:

Terry Teachout, meditating on a rare outburst of booing
at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, wonders if classical music and
theater are being diminished by a superabundance of standing ovations
and a scarcity of negative feedback. What if theater and orchestra audiences behaved more like blog commenters?

What are the options?  You might argue that older people are less grumpy but I'm not sure that approach will succeed.

"Signaling refined taste" comes to mind but that, taken alone, requires some negative feedback as well.  Try listening to what informed viewers say to each other in art galleries.  There is plenty of negative mixed in with the positive, even if you think the blend is a phony one.

I believe that the opera-going demographic wishes to signal "magnanimity."  When these high-status people are slighted, as they might be by a bad performance, their privately optimal response is to ignore the slight.  Reacting to the slight suggests that they have let it bother them; it is a sign of low status to be bothered by what are ultimately low status entities.

Magnanimity is an underrated concept in signaling theory, in part because it has such quiet manifestations.  It is Holmes's "dog that didn't bark." 

That so many people signal magnanimity in the very public opera house, but less so in the private art gallery, is a telling indication of how you should interpret much of the positive public feedback you receive.

How many of you are into signaling magnanimity?

Robin Hanson proceeds with "Who Likes Band Music?"

Smiling politely through yet another performance by my son's school
band tonight, I wondered: why do school bands play music so different
from what the kids, or even their parents, choose in their free time? 
Music at parties, movies, etc. is pretty different.  The novels kids
read in English class differ from the novels they or their parents read
in their free time, but most people accept that school novels are
deeper, subtler, etc., so that kids learn more by studying them.  But
do most people really accept a similar claim about band music?  What
gives?

Maybe the point of band music is that many of the instruments are relatively easy to play, or at least they are easy to play poorly.  The noise drowns out the children who cannot play much at all.  More children playing recruits more parental support and also more support from administrators, who like to point to participation.  What numbers would you get if the students had to learn Hindemuth's sonatas for solo viola?  Yes, conformity and discipline have some social value but still this does not look like a Pareto optimum to me either.

It's sometimes called "the most famous chord in rock n' roll."  I have wondered about this question for thirty-four years (all this time I'd been thinking it is an odd hybrid G7/9/13).  Here is a history of thought on the controversy, including a list of nominated chords.  It now turns out there is an answer.  A mathematician applied Fourier transforms to break the sound into its constituent parts.  Here's the bottom line:

The Beatles producer [George Martin] added a piano chord that included an F note,
impossible to play with the other notes on the guitar. The resulting
chord was completely different than anything found in songbooks and
scores for the song, which is one reason why Dr. Brown’s findings
garnered international attention. He laughs that he may be the only
mathematician ever to be published in Guitar Player magazine.

Here is a pdf of the researcher's findings.  I thank Eric H. for the pointer.

The old rating system granted up to five stars but now the maximum number of stars is ten.  This signals that they wish to start exaggerating the quality of the product.  When there are only five stars you know that they are laying their reputation on the line when they grant five stars to a new CD.  (Michelin of course won't give a restaurant more than three stars.  They don't calculate out to the fourth decimal place along a scale of one thousand.)  If the music isn't good you can decide to stop trusting them.  But say they give a new release eight, nine, or who knows maybe eight and a half stars?  What exactly are they trying to say?  Yes they are putting their reputation on the line when they give ten stars, but this will happen so infrequently that it will be harder to judge their overall trustworthiness.

Evaluation systems with fewer and grosser distinctions are often more credible because they are easier to monitor.

Instead, the majority of songs will drop to 69 cents beginning in
April, while the biggest hits and newest songs will go for $1.29.
Others that are moderately popular will remain at 99 cents.

DRM will change too, here is much more information.  This is first a way to raise prices, yet without the consumer seeing nothing in return.  But it’s also a sign of the maturing of the market.  The most popular songs will be less of a loss leader for the hardware.  Relaxation of DRM suggests that Apple fears long-run competition from less regulated sources, including CD burning from friends.  Most of all this is a sign that the music business continues to experience economic troubles.  You could call it the "do anything to increase revenue now" strategy.  For 30 cents a song you can make your entire current collection DRM-free.

By the way, on DRM and related issues, I recommend the new James Boyle book Public Domain.  The book is free and on-line here.  You can buy it from Amazon here.

I was listening to the new and excellent Vince Mira CD of Johnny Cash covers (some of them in an elegant Spanish), when Yana asked me to explain Johnny Cash to her.  "Does he sing about the South?" was a tough question to answer.  I place the center of his moral and musical universe somewhere between Little Rock, Arkansas and Oklahoma City.  (How about Fort Smith?)  That locale rules out neither trains nor cattle.  That allows him to straddle the South, West, Midwest, and Texas, while retaining the option of a rail connection to the North.  The town even has a prison.  (For the underinformed, here is a list of Johnny Cash songs.)  Is there a more appropriate center?

Addendum: I now discover that Vince is only fifteen years old!

Here is Vince performing "That’s All Right"; phenomenal.  Here is the overall YouTube listing.

My services as an aggregator are probably of most value in this area, if only because there are so few other reliable aggregators.  I very much liked the following:

The Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias from Peru; I bought it in 2008 at least.

Un Dia, Juana Molina.  Quirky, oddly textured songs from Argentina.  She’s not just a one-trick pony but she now has a string of excellent albums.

Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, Gurrumal.  Aboriginal music from Australia, on acoustic guitar, truly moving.  I don’t regret having paid $40 for it.

Calcutta Chronicles: Indian Slide Guitar, by Debashis Bhattacharya.

Anything from Network Medien.  Anything.  They’re the single best and most useful music label today.  The picks on any of their collections are impeccable and always worth the price.  This year I’ve been enjoying their Music of the Americas, Desert Blues (multiple parts), Golden Afriques Part II, and Sufi Music, among others.

Here are other world music picks.

On the popular music front, I’m now listening to Fleet Foxes at least once a day.  I’m also starting to like the new Bon Iver and the new Kanye West.

The remaining 3 “major” labels – Universal, Sony and
EMI – will be out of the classical business within 2 years. They will
create no more than a handful of additional classical CDs. With the
possible exception of a few “crossover” artists the labels will drop
all of their classical artists. The majors will focus on trying to
salvage their pop business and will abandon classical because it is
more trouble than it is worth. The 20th century recording industry and
business model is obsolete. It will soon be gone.

The
remaining viable classical label will be Naxos. Their costs are
dramatically lower and their business model allows them to operate
profitably in a smaller industry and with much lower sales numbers. A
primary contributor to Naxos’ lower costs is the fact that they don’t
pay any residuals to the performers. There is no income potential for performers in the Naxos model! They will profitably produce CDs for several years longer than the majors.

There
will be a small number of “vanity” labels left but their volume will be
microscopic and they will operate on the same financial model as Naxos.
They will ultimately disappear as well.

Virtually
the entire recorded history of classical music will vanish from the
world. None of the pre-2000 material had digital rights cleared when it
was recorded and the cost of clearing these rights now dwarfs any
income that could result. There is no commercially viable model for
reviving this material.

Here is more, interesting throughout and the comments are excellent.  The author does suggest that live concerts still will be broadcast over the web and in some other ways marketed.  An alternative is that governments assign the digital rights unilaterally or the whole model goes grey/illegal as people dump their CD content onto web sites.  Furthermore I don’t think recorded classical music will disappear, as the independent labels continue to issue releases, the demise of recording has been forecast for a long time, and my copy of Fanfare (classic music reviews) is much thicker now than two years ago. 

The best place to start is his Sonata for Cello and Piano, the Double Concerto for Harpischord and Piano, and the Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello, and Harpischord, all collected here.  The string quartets and the sonata for violin and piano are also important, plus the short late works for solo instruments or small ensembles or voice; choose by which instruments you like best.

Here is Q&A with Elliott Carter, interesting throughout.  It ends with this:

What are the things that people say to you that are meaningful?

People say they like my music very much, but I’m 100 years old.

Unlike last year, I didn’t buy many jazz CDs this year.  My meta-list recognizes two releases as popping up most frequently on year-end "best of" lists:

Charles Lloyd Quartet, Rabo de Nube

Bill Frisell, History, Mystery

Both are high quality but neither is a game-changer.  I liked Miles from India, a combination of Miles Davis’s jazz fusion with Indian riffs; that would be my jazz pick of the year.

From a previous post, here are the classical music meta-list picks for the year.

I’ve found one extant meta-list for popular music, here.  It is OK for a slow year; I won’t pass along the meta-list I came up with myself because I happen to believe its contents are mediocre, noting that my copy of Santogold has yet to arrive in the mail.  If you wish, scour these lists to construct your own meta-list.

In popular music what I enjoyed most this year was:

Roger McGuinn’s acoustic cover (listen here) of Leadbelly’s On Easter Morn He Rose (there is a different version of the song, free, at that link), and

Neil Young’s 1968 acoustic takes on Buffalo Springfield songs, and

The Kevin Shields/Patti Smith two-CD collaboration, which oddly lots of people don’t seem to know about.

I’m not usually so old-fashioned.

Here is a Times of UK list.  You’ll find a zillion Amazon lists here, most are OK but too mainstream.  I’ll cover world music — which had a good year — soon.