Category: Music
The culture that is Sweden
Sweden’s The Local reports: A Swedish heavy metal fan has had his musical preferences officially classified as a disability. The results of a psychological analysis mean that the metal lover can now count on having his income supplemented by state benefits.
Roger Tullgren …Photo#3, Photo#4, Photo#5), 42, from Hässleholm in southern Sweden, has just got a new job as a dishwasher at a local restaurant.
Because heavy metal dominates so many aspects of his life, the Employment Service has agreed to pay part of Tullgren‘s salary. His new boss meanwhile has given him a special dispensation to play loud music at work.
“The fact that I am so into music has affected my work situation to the extent that I have had to quit some jobs,” he said.
Here is the link and for the pointer I thank Marcela V.
From Brian Eno
“Something I’ve realized lately, to my shock, is that I am an optimist, in that I think humans are almost infinitely capable of self-change and self-modification, and that we really can build the future that we want if we’re smart about it,” he said. Given Mr. Eno’s characteristically eclectic form of brain gymnastics, the conversation was only partly about his new album, “Drums Between the Bells” (Warp), to be released on Tuesday. Ask Mr. Eno a question — about lyrics, say, or his songwriting process — and an hour later you walk away with an unsummarizable catalog of big ideas on music, history and technology, as well as a reading list to keep you occupied for a month…
“In my normal life I’m a very unadventurous person,” Mr. Eno said. “I take the same walk every day and I eat in the same restaurants, and often eat exactly the same things in the same restaurants. I don’t adventure much except when I’m in the studio, and then I only want to adventure. I cannot bear doing something again, or thinking that I’m doing something again.”
The article is here and for the pointer I thank James Crimmins.
Favorite Hungarian composers
1. Franz Liszt: The “late, serious” pieces are important but I don’t think they are much fun to listen to. I recommend the Transcendental Etudes, performance preferences here. “Funerailles,” played by the young Lazar Berman. “Years of Pilgrimage, the Swiss years,” by Aldo Ciccolini. The Hungarian Rhapsodies, played by Cziffa or Robert Szidon. Many of the opera transcriptions are subtler than they are made out to be, as creative examples of early mash-ups. The B Minor Sonata is a bit too long but Clifford Curzon has a lovely version. The organ music remains undervalued and the instrument well suited the composer’s chromatic tendencies.
2. Bela Bartok: The orchestral music is easier to enjoy live, when the different colors and melodic strands stand out more. Concerto for Orchestra is a good place to start (for a Hungarian conductor try Fritz Reiner) and also Piano Concerto #1, get both Pollini/Abbado and Barenboim/Boulez for contrasting interpretations, both brilliant. The six string quartets, by the Emerson Quartet. The piano sonata by Youri Egorov and “Out of Doors” and “Allegro Barbaro.” The Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, by Bartok himself if you wish.
3. Gyorgy Ligeti. My favorite piece is Lux Aeterna but that is best heard in concert, like a lot of choral music. On disc the horn trio works best. The Sony collection volumes are uniformly excellent and perhaps the piano music is the easiest place to start.
Other notable Hungarian composers are Kodaly and Péter Eötvös, sorry that I have not in every case mastered the diacritical marks. Most Kurtag leaves me cold but the Kafka Fragments are one place to start. There are many fine Hungarian film music composers.
Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday
It is today, here are a few underrated highlights of his career:
1. No Direction Home, the biopic directed by Martin Scorsese. It’s one of the best documentaries on American music more generally, and a superb albeit hagiographic portrait of Dylan and his music.
2. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and Another Side of Bob Dylan and Blood on the Tracks and most of all Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits volume II are the albums I listen to most often. The last one sounds horrible from its name, but it was conceived conceptually, avoids the traditional problems of greatest hits albums (unlike Vol. I), and has some not otherwise available tracks; highly recommended. Then comes Time Out of Mind. I think of Bringing it All Back Home as the “best” Dylan album, but I enjoyed it so much at age fifteen that I don’t listen to it much today. Blonde on Blonde is overreaching and Highway 61 Revisited is half wonderful, half embarrassment in the lyrics.
3. Dylan as disc jockey is first-rate, and you can buy his XM Satellite Radio selections of early American music. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the period.
4. As a singer Dylan is influenced by Al Jolson and Bing Crosby, as an acoustic guitarist he remains underrated.
5. Dylan once said that Barry Goldwater was his favorite politician.
What is the most neglected and underrated *accessible* pop music album?
You may have your favorite neglected microtonal drone guitar album, but let’s take this in another direction. What’s the best accessible pop album that never caught on with listeners and buyers?
Of course that’s a funny question. If it never caught on, what makes it so accessible? What makes you think it is so accessible? Those are exactly the sort of questions which require the high-octane collective intelligence of MR readers. And I do have a nomination:
Pop Said…, by The Darling Buds.
It’s pitched at the level of good ABBA, and yet few people other than my friend Eric Lyon know it. It has only five Amazon reviews and the band found little commercial success.
Another pick would be Pato Fu’s Televisao De Cachorro, which has only two Amazon reviews. It is better known in Brazil, though it still sounds as if it should have serious crossover potential. Some of the songs are in English, too.
What is your nomination? How can such albums fail to take off?
Bryan Caplan defends pacifism
In the real-world, however, pacifism is a sound guide to action.
And that includes an unwillingness to kill innocent civilians as collateral damage while acting in defense of one’s country. The original post is here, the defense against critics is here.
There is not enough consideration of specific times and place. Had England been pacifist in 1914, that might have yielded a better outcome. Had England been pacifist in 1939, likely not. Switzerland has done better for itself, and likely for the world, by being ready to fight back. Pacifism today could quite possibly doom Taiwan, Israel, large parts of India (from both Pakistan and internal dissent), any government threatened by civil war (who would end up ruling Saudi Arabia and how quickly?), and I predict we would see a larger-scale African tyrant arise, gobbling up non-resisting pacifist neighbors. Would China request the vassalage of any countries, besides Taiwan that is? Would Russia “request” Georgia and the Baltics? Would West Germany have survived?
And this is the best we can do? It’s much worse than the status quo, which is hardly delightful enlightenment. I don’t see these examples mentioned in Bryan’s post. There is also a Lucas critique issue of how the bad guys start behaving once they figure out that the good guys are pacifist, and I don’t see him discussing that either.
It would be a mistake to add up all the wars and say pacifism is still better overall, because we do not face an all-or-nothing choice. Many selective instances of non-pacifism are still a good idea, with benefits substantially in excess of their costs. Bryan, however, has to embrace pacifism, otherwise his moral theory becomes too tangled up in the empirics of the daily newspaper…
Which is exactly where I am urging him to go.
What determined the playing length of an audio CD?
Here is one account:
Sony had initially preferred a smaller diameter, but soon after the beginning of the collaboration started to argue vehemently for a diameter of 120mm. Sony’s argument was simple and compelling: to maximize the consumer appear of a switch to the new technology, any major piece of music needed to fit on a single CD…Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was quickly identified as the point of reference — according to some accounts, it was the favorite piece of Sony vice-president Norio Ohga’s wife. And thorough research identified the 1951 recording by the orchestra of the Bayreuther Festspiele under Wilhelm Furtwängler, at seventy-four minutes, as the slowest performance of the Ninth Symphony on record. And so, according to the official history, Sony and Philips top executives agreed in their May 1980 meeting that “a diameter of 12 centimeters was required for this playing time.”
That is from the new and interesting book by Tim Büthe and Walter Mattli, The New Global Rulers: The Privatization of Regulation in the World Economy, the book’s home page, with free chapter one, is here. Speaking of which, Garth Saloner is another very good South African economist and he is now Dean of Stanford Business School.
Let us Now Praise Non-Famous Men
Charles H. Kaman, an innovator in the development and manufacture of helicopter technology and, following a wholly different passion, the inventor of one of the first electrically amplified acoustic guitars, died on Monday in Bloomfield, Conn. He was 91.
Here is more. This bit is neat:
Mr. Kaman, a guitar enthusiast, also invented the Ovation guitar, effectively reversing the vibration-reducing technology of helicopters to create a generously vibrating instrument that incorporated aerospace materials into its rounded back. In the mid-1960s he created Ovation Instruments, a division of his [aerospace] company, to manufacture it.
And this:
With his second wife, Roberta Hallock Kaman, Mr. Kaman founded the Fidelco Guide Dog Foundation, which trains German shepherds as guide dogs for the blind and the police. Since 1981, Fidelco has placed 1,300 guide dogs in 35 states and four Canadian provinces, said Eliot D. Russman, the foundation’s executive director.
“It came down to the helicopters, guitars and dogs,” Mr. Kaman’s eldest son, C. William Kaman II, said in a telephone interview.
It is a well-written obituary.
Stan Kenton and Leslie Kenton
I never knew my paternal grandfather, but I was told he loved the music of Bartok, Stravinsky, Hindemith, and above all, Stan Kenton. My grandfather was a professional jazz drummer in the era of big band, supposedly with more talent than workplace discipline. Maybe because it's a way of keeping a connection with Grandpa Tom, but I've been listening to the music of Stan Kenton for about thirty-five years. In any case the best Kenton cuts (download here) still strike me as underrated. Despite the clunky and sometimes elephantine side of Kenton's style, his work draws upon, and anticipates, developments in compositional jazz, European modernism, Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound," and early Latin rhythms, all topped off with an energetic American brashness. I eagerly lapped up last year's new Kenton biography. But now — what am I to do? I've just read Leslie Kenton's Love Affair: A Memoir of a Forbidden Father-Daughter Union, which among other things is a very good treatment of how little consent lies behind father-daughter incest (review here, and it was from ages 11 to 13).
None of Kenton's previous biographers seems to have suspected this horror and overall he had the reputation of a straight-laced man. I had long thought of him as a somewhat dour disciplinarian, firmly wrapped up in middle American values.
The lesson is how little we know of an individual life. And what do we still not know? When we judge others, or decide not to, that is worth keeping in mind.
My favorite things Egypt
1. Novel: I like all of the Mahfouz I have read, but the Cairo Trilogy is the obvious pick. Here is a very useful list of someone's favorite Egyptian authors and novels.
2. Musical CD: The Music of Islam, vol.1: Al-Qahirah, Classical Music of Cairo, Egypt. The opening sweep of this is a stunner, and it shows both the Islamic and European influences on Egyptian music. Musicians of the Nile are a good group, there is Hamza El Din, and there is plenty of rai. What else? I can't say I actually enjoy listening to Um Kalthoum, but her voice and phrasing are impressive.
3. Non-fiction book, about: Max Rodenbeck, Cairo: The City Victorious. Few cities have a book this good. There is also Dream Palace of the Arabs and Tom Segev's 1967. Which again is the really good book on the 1973 War?
4. Movie, set in: Cairo Time. This recent Canadian film avoids cliche, brings modern Cairo to life, and is an alternative to many schlocky (but sometimes good) alternatives, such as The Mummy, Death on the Nile, Exodus, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and so on. There is Agora. Egyptian cinema surely has masterpieces but I do not know them. If you're wondering, for books, I could not finish Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings.
5. Favorite food: I was impressed by the seafood restaurants on the promenade in Alexandria. Food in Cairo did not thrill me, though I never had a bad meal there.
6. Philosopher: Must I say Plotinus? I don't find him especially readable.
7. City: I enjoyed Alexandria, but I can't say I liked Cairo beyond the museum (much better than any Egyptian collection outside of Egypt) and the major mosques. The Sphinx bored me. The air pollution prevented me from walking for more than an hour and there was cement, cement. and more cement. The ride between Cairo and Alexandria was one of the ugliest, most uninspiring journeys of my life. The Egyptians were nice to me but I never had the sense that anything beautiful was being done with the country. Let's hope that changes.
8. Opera, about: Philip Glass, Akhnaten. But wait, there's also Aida, with Callas. And there's Handel's Israel in Egypt. Handel set a lot of his operas in Egypt, including Berenice and Giulio Cesare.
Diane Rehm is Egyptian-American but I don't know her show. The new biography of Cleopatra is smooth but the narratives made me suspicious. Was Euclid Egyptian?
Charlie Louvin has passed away at 83
One obiturary is here. Tragic Songs of Life, by the Louvin Brothers, is one of my favorite recordings of all time, any genre. I'm often surprised how many people do not know this music.
Why do we care so much about sovereignty?
IVV, a loyal MR reader, asks:
With all the talks about sovereign debt and default, the various EU problems, libertarian rumblings and increasing globalization, I'm mightily curious about one thing:
Why do we care so much about sovereignty?
Why are we trying so hard to declare this patch of land one place or another, and not neither nor both? Why are we trying to identify the people on that land as under one or another jurisdiction? What does being under a jurisdiction mean, and why must that choice be kept out of the hands of individuals? What's the economic value of all this?
We need units which produce public goods and we need people willing to declare their income and pay their taxes and, sometimes, fight and die for those units. Therefore we need some amount of irrational belief in the idea of sovereignty, nation, and the like. (Read Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities.) Today's distributional pattern of nation-states probably isn't ideal (I would prefer smaller units on the whole), but when it comes to OECD nations it works well enough. We also don't know of good transition paths to something better, though within an overarching framework such as the EU such paths may be possible.
Arguably the whole thing is sustained by evolutionary programming. We cling to small groups, because we once needed to for purposes of survival. Political entrepreneurs piggyback upon this sentiment to give us a largely illusory attachment to a bigger unit than just a band of hunter-gatherers or however it worked. The large is made to feel small, through radio, TV, and local organization of political groups, among other methods.
At the margin, policies which "slip out" of sovereignty, without wrecking the entire superstructure of the nation-state, are usually a good idea. Such as more immigration. Diverting $1 million from Medicare to a helicopter drop over Haiti is also a good idea, although it cannot be made politically incentive-compatible on a larger scale. So we have a simple formula for massive gains: subvert sovereignty, at the margin, without subverting belief in sovereignty.
Elsewhere, here is Bryan Caplan on "the stranger":
What fraction of your "fellow citizens" have you actually met? Virtually zero. The vast majority of your countrymen are, in fact, utter strangers to you. When you tell your kid "Don't take rides from strangers," you don't make an exception for anyone who happens to share your citizenship. Modern government – and most of political philosophy – is just a massive effort to pretend otherwise.
Bryan's right, but he's not facing up to the need for a certain amount of false belief, even though his rhetoric brings him very close to recognizing it. If we all regard ourselves as nothing more than "strangers," what will happen to "the cement of society"? The price system does not suffice and in fact the price system itself requires legal and cultural foundations. Those foundations arise, and are sustained, only when people believe in something, and it can't be just anything they believe in. Some of those beliefs have to consist of a loyalty to a workable political unit, even to some irrational degree, compared to true cosmopolitanism.
Markets in everything China fact of the day
A Chinese online store is selling hacked, illegal iTunes accounts tied to active credit cards, offering $200 worth of content from Apple's service for as little as $30.
China's Global Times this week revealed that about 50,000 illegal accounts are being sold through taobao.com, with prices ranging from just 1 yuan to about 200 yuan, or $30. Many of the sales are said to be stolen iTunes user accounts being re-sold by hackers.
Here is more.
Classical music for $100
Enda asks:
Loyal MR reader and consumer of alternative/indie/rock music here. If someone asked me for a broad introduction to the best of the genre with a budget of $100, my personal recommendation would be to purchase Sgt Pepper (The Beatles), skip most of the next two decades, Doolittle (Pixies), OK Computer (Radiohead), Pinkerton (Weezer), Siamese Dream (Smashing Pumpkins), Loveless (My Bloody Valentine), Is This It (The Strokes), Songs for the Deaf (Queens of the Stone Age) and Funeral (Arcade Fire).I have a $100 budget for an introduction to classical music and an essentially blank canvas. Your recommendations?
I'll price this by the CDs rather than the MP3s:
1. Start with a box of the Beethoven symphonies, either Gardiner or van Karajan cost only $20. (For $43 the Klemperer set offers the piano concerti as well.)
5. Mozart, symphonies 40 and 41 and other late symphonies, $15.
That brings us to about $68. For the rest I would draw from Dvorak's New World Symphony, Schubert (Symphony 9 or Trout Quintet, with superb pairings on both CDs), assorted Chopin, Beethoven piano sonatas, or Monteverdi, or Philip Glass Songs from the Trilogy. In general, try whichever pieces might have personal meaning to you; for instance if you liked the movie Black Swan, buy Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake (by either Previn or Pletnev) I've focused on the most accessible pieces, but if you wish to skip ahead Schubert's String Quintet is better than the Trout, Op.31, etc.
Love song for (Friedrich) Hayek
View it here, I like the rhyme with "kayak." For the pointer I thank Bob Cottrell.