Category: Music
Japan, again, better than ever
Kanon Mori, Yuki Sakura, Hinako Kuroki and Jun Amaki have been following the Nikkei 225 stock average obsessively since Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took office in December. The oldest of the foursome is Mori, but she is still only 23. The youngest is Kuroki, 16 and still in high school.
None of them are studying for a degree in economics, let alone playing the stock market. Instead, the four are members of a new idol group, Machikado Keiki Japan, and stocks play an important part in their performances.
“We base our costumes on the price of the Nikkei average of the day. For example, when the index falls below 10,000 points, we go on stage with really long skirts,” Mori explained.
The higher stocks rise, the shorter their dresses get. With the Nikkei index ending above 13,000, the four went without skirts altogether on the day of their interview with The Japan Times, instead wearing only lacy shorts.
While some have raised eyebrows over the group’s daring concept, Mori explained that they are merely letting the economy take charge of how they dress — mimicking economic trends of the past.
…Machikado Keiki Japan (roughly translated as Economic Conditions on the Streets of Japan) released their debut single, “Abeno Mix,” on April 7. It pays homage to Abe’s ultraloose economic policies that have been dubbed “Abenomics” by the media.
“Fix the yen’s appreciation. Quantitative easing. Don’t forget public investment,” a line in the dance-pop tune goes. “Monetary easing. Construction bonds. Let’s just revise the Bank of Japan Law.”
The group’s fans — who not surprisingly are 95 percent male, from high school to their 50s — have special chants that they perform during the song’s interlude.
From Estonian Rhapsody to Estonian Opera
Estonian Rhapsody was the title of Paul Krugman’s 2011 blog post which argued that Estonia’s austerity program and rapid recovery wasn’t all it had been cracked up to be. The post led to a surprisingly nasty series of tweets from none other than Toomas Ilves, the President of Estonia. Krugman’s arguments against austerity and Illves response have now been turned into a real rhapsody, well, an opera to be precise. As noted on Fareed Zakarias’s GPS Blog:
The “cantata” premiered this week before a live audience in Tallinn and then was shown – all 18 minutes of it – on Estonian state television. The first act lays out the Krugman argument – even more sparingly than Krugman laid it out himself. Then the real drama begins in the second act with Ilves’ stinging response.
Why opera? Why song? Well, singing is in Estonians’ blood and has helped write their history. After all, the nation’s unraveling from the Soviet Union is known as the Singing Revolution. The Soviets had banned Estonia’s national songs and in the late 1980’s Estonians began to gather in ever increasing numbers to sing those songs as a sign of protest. By 1988, hundreds of thousands of people were gathering in a country of little more than a million. In November of that year, Estonia declared its sovereignty; three years later, it declared full independence.
Why a coach should be ambiguous
Remember how Mr. Miyagi taught The Karate Kid how to fight? Wax on/Wax off. Paint the fence. Don’t forget to breathe. A coach is the coach because he knows what the student needs to do to advance. A big problem for coaches is that the most precocious students also (naturally) think they know what they need to learn.
If Mr. Miyagi told Daniel that he needed endless repetition of certain specific hand movements to learn karate, Daniel would have rebelled and demanded to learn more and advance more quickly. Mr. Miyagi used ambiguity to evade conflict.
An artist with natural gift for expression needs to learn convention. But she may disagree with the teacher about how much time should be spent learning convention. If the teacher simply gives her exercises to do without explanation her decision to comply will be on the basis of an overall judgment of whether this teacher, on average, knows best. To instead say “You must learn conventions, here are some exercises for that” runs the risk that the student moderates the exercises in line with her own judgment about the importance of convention.
Online Education and Jazz
A common responses to my article, Why Online Education Works, is that there is something special, magical, and “almost sacred” about the live teaching experience. I agree that this is true for teaching at its best but it’s also irrelevant. It’s even more true that there is something special, magical and almost sacred about the live musical experience. The time I saw Otis Clay in a small Toronto bar, my first Springsteen concert, the Teenage Head riot at Ontario Place these are some of my favorite and most memorable cultural experiences and yet by orders of magnitude most of the music that I listen to is recorded music.
In The Trouble With Online Education Mark Edmundson makes the analogy between teaching and music explicit:
Every memorable class is a bit like a jazz composition.
Quite right but every non-memorable class is also a bit like a jazz composition, namely one that was expensive, took an hour to drive to (15 minutes just to find parking) and at the end of the day wasn’t very memorable. The correct conclusion to draw from the analogy between live teaching and live music is that at their best both are great but both are also costly and inefficient ways of delivering most teaching and most musical experiences.
Edmundson also says this about online courses:
You can get knowledge from an Internet course if you’re highly motivated to learn. But in real courses the students and teachers come together and create an immediate and vital community of learning. A real course creates intellectual joy, at least in some. I don’t think an Internet course ever will.
Edmundson reminds me of composer John Philip Sousa who in 1906 wrote The Menace of Mechanical Music, an attack on the phonograph that sounds very similar to the attack on online education today.
It is the living, breathing example alone that is valuable to the student and can set into motion his creative and performing abilities. The ingenuity of a phonograph’s mechanism may incite the inventive genius to its improvement, but I could not imagine that a performance by it would ever inspire embryotic Mendelssohns, Beethovens, Mozarts, and Wagners to the acquirement of technical skill, or to the grasp of human possibilities in the art.
Sousa could not imagine it, but needless to say recorded music has inspired many inventive geniuses. Edmundson’s failure of imagination is even worse than Sousa’s, online courses are already creating intellectual joy (scroll down).
(Sousa was right about a few things. Recorded music has reduced the number of musical amateurs and the playing of music in the home. Far fewer pianos are sold today, for example, than in 1906 when Sousa wrote and that is true even before adjusting for today’s much larger population. Online education will similarly change teaching and I don’t claim that every change will be beneficial even if the net is good.)
Sousa and Edmundson also underestimate how much recording can add to the pursuit of artistic excellence. Many musical works, for example, cannot be well understood or fully appreciated with just a few listens. Recording allows for repeated listening and study. Indeed, one might say that only with recording, can one truly hear.
Recording also let musicians truly hear and thus compare, contrast and improve. Most teachers will also benefit from hearing and seeing themselves teach. With recording, teaching will become more like writing and less like improv. How many people write perfect first drafts? Good writing is editing, editing, editing. Live teaching suffers from too much improv and not enough editing. Sometimes I improv in class–also called winging it–but like most people I am usually better when I am better prepared. (Tyler, in contrast, is the Charlie Parker of live teaching.)
Sousa and the modern critics of online education also miss how new technologies bring new possibilities. For Sousa then, as for Edmundson today, the new technologies are simply about recording the live experience. But recorded music brought the creation of new kinds of music. Indeed, a lot of today’s music can’t be played live.
In his excellent 1966 disquisition, The Prospects for Recording (highly recommended, fyi), pianist Glenn Gould said that using the technology of the studio “one can very often transcend the limitations that performance imposes upon the imagination.” The same will be true for online education.
Addendum: Andrew Gelman comments.
The 20 Greatest Songs About Work?
The list is here. Number one is Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons,” followed by Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm.” “Atlantic City” would not have been my Springsteen pick but overall the list is better than expected. There is, however, an odd under-representation of folk music, see for instance this list.
Why are the service sectors underrepresented on such lists? There is “Dr. Robert,” “Lawyers, Guns, and Money,” “Police and Thieves,” and many others from the more stagnant sectors of the economy, although arguably police productivity has risen quite a bit.
For the pointer I thank the estimable Chug.
World music CDs of recent times/2012
I now realize that last year I neglected to cover “Best World Music CDs of the year.” So here goes:
1. Bahamas: Goombay 1951-1959. I listened to this CD last year more than any other. It’s also some of the wittiest music I own, and it has plenty of economic themes.
2. Bwati Kono, by Lobi Traore, raw electric blues from Bamako, hypnotic, Jimi Hendrix of West Africa stuff.
3. Pete Seeger, The Complete Bowdoin College Concert 1960. Some people think of Seeger as a “right place, right time” sort of guy, but that does him an injustice. He was one of the most talented American musicians of his generation, and this live two-CD set shows him at his versatile peak, as a kind of walking human jukebox of American musical traditions, with lots of world music too.
For an honorable mention I would suggest Y’anbessaw Tezeta, by Getachew Mekuria and The Ex & Friends, Ethiopian saxophone.
Here are two free songs from Revue Noire a Tana, one of my favorite world music albums, years old but I am still listening to it regularly. It’s not on Amazon, maybe you can find a copy somewhere in these links.
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.