Category: Music
Good shop name
That is from the web site of Nancy Hanrahan, who teaches sociology and critical theory and music at George Mason. Just recently I was talking to a Polish man whom I met standing in front of The Village Vanguard, and who claims to own 20,000 jazz LPs, and he told me that Nancy is married to Kip Hanrahan, the esteemed yet still underrated jazz musician, start with Desire Develops an Edge.
The new music royalties
I’ve covered this before, but here is another update on a rapidly-evolving story in cultural economics:
Even for an under-the-radar artist like Ms. Keating, who describes her style as “avant cello,” the numbers painted a stark picture of what it is like to be a working musician these days. After her songs had been played more than 1.5 million times on Pandora over six months, she earned $1,652.74. On Spotify, 131,000 plays last year netted just $547.71, or an average of 0.42 cent a play.
Here is more, and you will recall that the streaming services don’t seem to be making money either.
Music markets in everything (the austerity opera)
A Twitter feud in June between the Estonian president and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman who questioned the impact of Estonia’s austerity measures, is being turned into an opera, US composer Eugene Birman told AFP on Wednesday.
“Our short opera will be first performed by Iris Oja and the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra conducted by Risto Joost during Tallinn Music Week on April 7,” Birman, who moved from Riga to the US at age of six, told AFP.
The piece, in two movements, uses two voices, those of Krugman and Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, reflecting their exchanges on the Twitter social network.
“‘Nostra Culpa’ (Our Fault) is a short 16 minutes operatic piece which takes up the age-old economic disagreement of austerity vs. stimulus,” journalist Scott Diel, who wrote the opera’s libretto, told AFP.
Here is more and for the pointer I thank Peter Metrinko. Major or minor key? Here is some Eugene Birman music. Here is Scott Diel, author of the libretto.
Of Monsters and Men
My favorite album of 2012 is My Head is an Animal (MP3 album just $3.99!) by the Icelandic group Of Monsters and Men–they mine the same vein as Arcade Fire and Fleet Foxes.
http://youtu.be/woGoM8T0gD8
Hat tip: Paul Krugman.
Markets in everything, high-frequency trading opera edition
London, 7th December 2012, PRNewswire – Reality TV is an old concept which we’re all familiar with. However, Alexis Kirke, a leading composer at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research at Plymouth University , and Dr Greg B Davies, Head of Behavioural and Quantitative Finance at Barclays, have taken reality performances to another level by partnering with Barclays to produce a reality opera. The performance, which was held on the 15th November 2012 at Egyptian Hall, Mansion House, focused on the drama unfolding on an “open outcry” stock trading floor, the type of trading floor on which traditionally traders shout and use hand-signals.
To view the Multimedia News Release, please click:
http://www.multivu.com/mnr/58659-barclays-operaThanks to melodies carefully crafted with evolutionary computer algorithms, during the performance singers sang what they wanted, when they wanted, within certain rules, just like the freedom people have in reality TV programmes. However, like a traditional opera, music was used alongside singers to demonstrate the emotion of the story.
The concept was conceived by Alexis and the opera brought to life in collaboration with
Dr Greg B Davies, Head of Behavioural and Quantitative Finance at Barclays. Alexis created the music while Greg applied his behavioural finance expertise to create the market within which the singer-traders were responding, generating the ebb and flow of emotion and money on a trading floor. Furthermore, the performance was directed by Alessandro Talevi, former winner of the European Opera Directing Prize.To enable the music to express the emotional activity on the trading floor, Kirke composed what he calls “trading phrases” such that when most singers were buying, the harmonies between them were pleasant, and when most are selling, the harmonies clashed. When two performers sang ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ melodies for the same asset, the two sounded in time and harmonious.
‘Open Outcry’ featured 12 singers and a cellist, Joseph Spooner. The audience sat at tables among the “traders” (in the trading pit), and the conductor rang a bell to signify the market opening. As the cellist played, large screens displayed stock information and the conductor guided some aspects of the permissible actions of the singers. The performers sang one musical phrase to buy each asset and another to sell. The prices were largely driven by random market movements generated by a computer model, though the conductor did have some power to influence stock prices, as did the effect of the “trading” between the singers themselves.
I believe that is the only press release I have ever covered on this blog. In general you press release people, unless you have something as important as Markets in Everything High-Frequency Trading Opera Edition, I don’t give a damn about what you send me! You all bore me! Really.
Sentences to ponder (who’s next?)
…by my calculation it would take songwriting royalties for roughly 312,000 plays on Pandora to earn us [Galaxie 500] the profit of one– one— LP sale. (On Spotify, one LP is equivalent to 47,680 plays.)
Oh, and there’s more:
Pandora and Spotify are not earning any income from their services, either. In the first quarter of 2012, Pandora– the same company that paid Galaxie 500 a total of $1.21 for their use of “Tugboat”– reported a net loss of more than $20 million dollars. As for Spotify, their latest annual report revealed a loss in 2011 of $56 million.
The full story is here, interesting throughout, and for the pointer I thank HL.
Sentences to ponder
Natasha later said she saw nothing strange in a musician’s ability to express emotions she has not experienced. “Had I experienced them, that wouldn’t necessarily help me to express them better in my music. I’m an actress, not a character; my job is to represent something, not to live it. Chopin wrote a mazurka, Person X in the audience wants to hear the mazurka and so I have to decipher the score and make it apprehensible to Person X, and it’s really hard to do. But it has nothing to do with my life experience.”
Here is more, from Andrew Solomon, mostly about prodigies, interesting throughout. I also like this bit:
…Marc sat on a phone book on the piano bench so his hands would be high enough to play comfortably and launched into Chopin’s “Fantasie-Impromptu,” which he imbued with a quality of nuanced yearning that seemed almost inconceivable in someone with a shelf of Cookie Monster videos.
*Searching for Sugar Man*
There is plenty of social science in this unexpected indie hit, which depicts the musical career of Sixto Rodriguez. Rodriguez had two very good albums in the early 1970s but faded into obscurity after failing to gain commercial traction. Unbeknown to the artist, he had become an enduring national celebrity in South Africa. His fans there had no idea he had been working in Detroit as a construction demolitionist (this is before the modern internet, although eventually the internet helped his daughter discover his fame in South Africa, through a fan’s web site). Here is Cass Sunstein on the movie and its portrayal of social and cultural dynamics.
The music is quite appealing — imagine a mix of Donovan, Motown, and low-tech psychedelia, the latter a’la Love. If you are looking to hear or download one song, I recommend the iconic “I Wonder.”
To my ear it sounds naive but charming, but to the South Africans it was revelatory and cool. Furthermore here was a non-Black coming out of Motown (Mexican ancestry but born in the United States), yet with much of the anti-establishment feel of a black artist of the time. The movie never touches on this racial angle as possibly relevant to his popularity; did the South Africans require a non-black version of a black idol? And what does he now symbolize, given that white rule has ended? When they show Rodriguez’s post-apartheid concerts in South Africa, there is not a black face to be seen, as if he has become a nostalgia act in a slightly unsettling manner with the anti-establishment gloss now drained away.
The full story has not yet been told, not even on the American side. From watching the movie, the viewer receives the feeling that Rodriguez fell into a hole circa 1973. The reality is that he was touring Australia as late as 1981 (more here) and even put out a live album from that country in the same year. Music aficionados will know all about the close cultural connections between Australia and South Africa at that time; did Rodriguez really have no idea of his South African following? And what kind of connections was he keeping with the commercial world of music?
I would gladly read a book about how failing artists string out their careers by playing in niche markets or writing for them. For instance Harry Nilsson released some of his late albums in the UK, Australia, and Japan only. Erwin Nyiregyhzai kept giving periodic piano recitals in Japan, well after his prodigy years were over and he supposedly was “lost” and thus before his “rediscovery.” What is a rediscovery anyway?
Here is Rodriguez’s eBook guide to happiness. For pointers I thank Cass Sunstein and also Angus.
Stock bubbles, Gangnam style?
Matt Yglesias reports:
Why is South Korean semiconductor manufacturer DI seeing its share prices surge? Is it a key supplier for the forthcoming iPad Mini? An integral element of Samsung’s next great smartphone? Nope. It’s surging because its chairman and main shareholder is Park Won-ho, father of Park Jae-sang, a.k.a. PSY, a.k.a. the “Gangnam Style” guy.
Why a family link to a viral video sensation should help this company is difficult to say, but apparently this kind of theme stock surge is a not-uncommon phenomenon in the Korean equity markets. South Korea, I would note, is one of the most recently affluent countries around so it’s simply possible that the Koreans markets haven’t had enough “learning” to avoid fast-rising momentum bubbles.
The making of K-Pop
Standing beside me was Jon Toth, a twenty-nine-year-old white guy, a computer scientist who had driven twelve hours straight from New Mexico. Toth is a fan of Girls’ Generation, a nine-member girl group in the process of recording its American début album, with Interscope Records. At the time he stumbled across the Girls, on YouTube, Toth was an alt-rock guy; he loved Weezer. “I was definitely not the kind of guy you’d expect to get into a nine-girl Asian group,” he told me. But before long Toth was studying Korean, in order to understand the lyrics and also Korean TV shows. Then he started cooking Korean food. Eventually, he travelled all the way to Seoul, where, for the first time, he was able to see the Girls—Tiffany, Sooyoung, Jessica, Taeyeon, Sunny, Hyoyeon, Yuri, Yoona, and Seohyun—perform live. It was a life-changing experience.
“You think you love them, but then you see Tiffany point directly at you and wink, and everything else that exists in the world just disappears,” Toth wrote on Soshified, a Girls’ fan site. “You think you love them, but then you see Sooyoung look you dead in the eye and say in English, ‘Thank you for coming.’ ” Toth concluded, “I might not know how much I love these girls.”
Here is much more, interesting throughout. How about this?:
Double-fold-eyelid surgery, which makes eyes look more Western, is a popular reward for children who get good marks on school exams. The popularity of the K-pop idols has also brought Chinese, Japanese, and Singaporean “medical tourists” to Seoul to have their faces altered to look more like the Korean stars. Some hotels have partnered with hospitals so that guests can have in-house procedures; the Ritz-Carlton Seoul, for example, offers an eighty-eight-thousand-dollar “anti-aging beauty package.” Women come to have their cheekbones shaved down and undergo “double jaw surgery,” in which the upper and lower jawbones are cracked apart and repositioned, to give the whole skull a more tapered look.
For the pointer I thank Viktor.
The science of conducting?, and homage to Clive Granger
DO ORCHESTRAL conductors do anything useful? Alessandro D’Ausilio of the Italian Institute of Technology, in Genoa, and his colleagues tried to answer that eternal question in a study published in the Public Library of Science.
And:
Each violinist had an infra-red reflector attached to the tip of his bow, and the conductors had them attached to their batons. Dr D’Ausilio and his team were thus able to follow the movements of both bows and batons by bathing their little orchestra in infra-red light, which their cameras could see, but human beings cannot. They then used the movements of the reflectors to analyse who was affecting whom.
To do this, Dr D’Ausilio employed a mathematical trick called the Granger causality test…
And the (tentative I would say) result:
The findings are in harmony with what conductors knew all along: that baton-toting despots, like the late Herbert von Karajan, do add value—but only if they rein in the uppity musicians in front of them.
Questions about John Cage
Wednesday will count as his 100th birthday. Here are a few of my views:
1. Is it actually good music?
Much of it is, once you get past the gimmicks. For direct musical listening (skip 4’33”) I recommend the piano music, most of all by Herbert Henck or David Tudor or Stephen Drury. The important pieces have held up very well, and even the lesser pieces still are worth hearing at least once.
2. If I wish to try one important piece?
Perhaps “In a Landscape,” on this CD.
3. What if I am looking for a good sampler to reflect his diverse contributions?
Try the Barton Workshop grab bag.
4. Are you pulling my leg?
No.
5. Is aleatory music interesting?
To me, no.
Here is Wikipedia on John Cage. Here is John Cage on a 1960 game show, being thwarted by a union dispute. Here is good commentary on that clip. Here is TNR commentary on that clip. Cage was also an expert mycologist. Here are the Italian prizes he won for mushroom identification. Here is the iTunes prepared piano app.
Here are good quotations from John Cage.
The next transformational technology?
Noah Smith writes:
Addendum: I seem to be the only person talking about Desire Modification as a transformational technology. Greg Egan and Vernor Vinge have written books in which this technology plays a central role. In my “spare time” I’m writing a couple of sci-fi short stories based on the idea. It’s a really big deal, and I’ll write a post about it soon.
The Open Goldberg Variations, by Kimiko Ishizaka
Download it here, for free, superb listening, first-rate performance. You can follow it with a free score as well. It received three excellent reviews in Fanfare as well.
Astronaut self-insurance durable goods monopoly problem
During the 60s and 70s it would appear that private life insurance was not available to astronauts. Autograph Magazine has a good post about how astronauts of the time used their own autographs as a form of life insurance for their families.