Category: Music

I am in trouble:

Security staff at a British airport stopped a businessman from catching a flight because the songs he had asked a taxi driver to play on the car stereo made the driver suspicious, police said.

The songs: "London Calling" by The Clash, and "Immigrant Song" by Led Zeppelin, here are the offending lyrics and the story.

Addendum: Daniel Strauss Vasques points my attention to a slightly different version of the story, where the guy was just singing along.

…under a rule to curb hazardous substances in electrical products, Europe is about to restrict the centuries-old business of building pipe organs for churches, concert halls and other institutions.

The reason? Organ pipes contain large amounts of lead, and the wind that blows through them is generated by electricity (rather than the older method of people pumping bellows behind the organ). The new directive, to come into force in July, limits the proportion of hazardous substances like lead, mercury or cadmium to 0.1 percent of a finished product that works on electricity.

Here is the full story.  And how is this for a bureaucratic runaround?

The Department of Trade and Industry, the government office responsible for the issue, insists it is the organ builders themselves who "must apply for an exemption directly" to the European Union, said a spokeswoman for the department, who insisted on anonymity in accordance with government rules for departmental spokespeople.

French parliamentarians finished drafting a law on Friday that would open up Apple’s market-leading iTunes online music store to portable music players other than its popular iPods.

The new law, now set for a vote on Tuesday, would allow consumers to
circumvent software that protects copyrighted material — known as
digital rights management (DRM) — if it is done to convert digital
content from one format to another. Using such software is currently
illegal in much of the world.

This is expected to pass, here is the article.

My take: The French are probably still at the point where the songs aren’t making money but rather serve as loss leaders for the hardware.  A legally forced unbundling could induce Apple to leave the market, if only to send other governments a message.

More generally, song prices are relatively low early on to induce people to lock into the technology.  If you forbid lock-in, early period song prices and indeed hardware prices will be higher than otherwise (think of market exit as the limiting case).  But will forced unbundling make prices lower in the long run, due to the growing competitiveness of the market?  My guess is no.  Something better than iPod will come along within five or ten years, so the relevant form of future lower prices is "higher quality."  Allowing monopoly profits, rather than confiscating them, is the way to get there more quickly and more decisively.  By enforcing interchangeability at such an early stage in the process, the French will more likely get a lame rather than a cool version of a universal access platform.  How’s that for lock-in?

Glen Whitman has got Coase in the brain.  In Against the New
Paternalism: Internalities and the Economics of Self-Control he puts Coasian insights to good use arguing against the new paternalism of internalities.

Writing the paper must have been hard, hard work because Glen has now got the Coasian Blues.  (More at the link!).

You can hire an agent to work in your basement
But you know there’s a
possible cost:
That dude could be shirkin’ yet oughta be workin’
If you
don’t hire monitors, boss!

You can bring on a man to run your food
stand,
But your firm could be courtin’ a loss.
‘Cause that helpful young
man might come up with a plan
To abscond with your so-special sauce!

Yeah you pick and you choose… the markets you use;
And if you
pick wrong… you’ll be singing the blues.

I know that one day if my
tears go away
Then my cheeks’ll be rosy in hue
But until that day comes to
pass I must say,
I’ll be singin’ the Coasean Blues.

I had thought classical music was flailing on-line, but perhaps I was wrong:

…classical music comprises twelve percent of sales on that site [iTunes]. Back in October I linked to a piece by Marc Shulgold in which Mark Berry of Naxos asserted that classical music accounted for six percent of all Internet downloads. We’ve been told for some years that classical music makes up only three or four percent of record sales overall. Something’s happening here, and Time, Newsweek, and Entertainment Weekly (to name three magazines that have dropped all classical-music coverage) don’t know what it is. For more, read Anastasia Tsioulcas in Billboard and Scott Timberg in the LA Times.

Read more here.  I suspect many people don’t want classical music to succeed on the Internet.  That would mean change.  Shorter pieces?  More celebrity-driven?  More pieces that can withstand poor sound quality?  More fusion and crossover?  Listeners who reassemble symphony movements to form their own medleys?  What is classical music anyway?  By the way, here are the classical grammy winners.  Nelson Freire playing Chopin deserved to win Best Instrumentalist.

While sales are down, more music is being produced and heard than ever before in history.

Here is the full story, which focuses on retailer bankruptcy.  Maybe I shouldn’t be sad that Aron’s in Los Angeles is shutting down.  Keep in mind that when consumers do not much like most of what they buy, standard metrics for measuring output do not track welfare very well.

To
my mind, no one has done a better job of concisely explaining what makes Mozart
Mozart than Donald Tovey,
whose essay on the G Minor Symphony, K. 550, the greatest of the minor-key
works, is a convenient starting point. Tovey offers a
seeming paradox that will startle many readers: “We can only belittle and
vulgarize our ideas of Mozart by trying to construe him as a tragic artist.”
What could he possibly mean, especially with reference to the G Minor Symphony,
still widely regarded as the locus classicus
of tragedy in music? The answer, Tovey replies, is that
Mozart was up to something altogether different: “Mozart’s whole musical
language is, and remains throughout, the language of comic opera.”

This
bald-faced assertion, so surprising at first glance, turns out on closer
inspection to be all but self-evident. From the rush and bustle of the outer
movements of the G Minor Symphony (whose compositional language Tovey likens to Rossini’s Overture to The
Barber of Seville) to the wittily “theatrical” exchanges between
soloist and orchestra in the later piano concertos, one finds in Mozart’s
mature instrumental works an abundance of proof that he thought of all his
music in dramatic terms–and that the kind of “drama” he had in mind was
18th-century opera buffa,
abstracted at times to the point of sublimity but still essentially comic.

Here is the Commentary article which cites Tovey.  The article also offers a useful discography of Mozart in minor keys; it was Alfred Brendel who said:

The pieces in the minor
do more than just present a dark backdrop to Mozart’s brilliance. . . . I know
of no other composer fundamentally transformed while writing in minor keys.

Happy Birthday Mozart!

The Operas: The peaks of his achievement.  For Figaro I recommend Carlos Guilini or Rene Jacob, for Cosi Fan Tutte, Karl Boehm, here is my post on Don Giovanni, and Klemperer is a sure thing for The Magic Flute.  For The Abduction from the Sergalio, how about Beecham with a nod to Krips?

The String Quintets: Grumiaux’s group, with Takacs as a good runner-up.  Most of the string quartets are boring.

Symphonies: I am courting hate mail, but 38-41 will suffice, toss in the first movement of 29 if need be.  I like von Karajan for the last two symphonies (not everyone does), and there are many good versions of the others.

Piano Concerti: Focus on 20-27; I grew up with Casadesus and Szell but you have many good choices.  Few areas of the repertoire have been better covered.

Piano sonatas: Uchida all the way.  They start getting good around K311.  Here are bloggers on the sonatas.  As a general rule, Mozart before K300 is not so special.

K563: Mozart’s least-known masterpiece, go for Grumiaux.  Even better is the currently unavailable L’Archibudelli version.

If you own these you have a decent chunk of the essential Mozart.

Most overrated Mozart: The Violin concerti and then the Requiem.  Contrary to cliche, Suessmayr ruined the ending.  The Clarinet Concerto was once wonderful, but it has been overexposed in muzak, Nordstrom, and overpriced faux Italian restaurants.  By the way, it won a listeners’ poll as "best Mozart," the Requiem came in second.

Most underrated Mozart: The violin and piano sonatas, and the short, comic vocal pieces.  Try also the Piano and Wind Quintet, K. 452, the Clarinet Trio, K. 498, the Piano Quartets (with George Szell as pianist), and the Clarinet Quintet, K. 581.

Comments are open, do offer your opinions…

This is a reprise from www.2blowhards.com.  Excerpt:

[Mozart] ran into another problem for an artist dependent
on an aristocractic audience: war. An unpopular war with Turkey that
began in 1788 limped on through 1791. Opera production virtually halted
and concert activity plummeted as the aristocracy, fearing conscription
into the army, headed for the provinces en masse. For Mozart, the
consequence of these economic reverses was, as Maynard Solomon notes,
something close to a total breakdown, leaving him deeply depressed and
impairing his productivity.

By the way, here is my earlier post on Mozart and Baumol’s cost-disease.  Here are Mozart’s economic insights, excerpted from his diary.  Under the fold, you can read Mozart on income and substitution effects…

[W]e can pore over him,
dissect him, marvel or carp at him. But in the end there remains something that
will not be seized. That is why, each time a
Mozart work begins . . . we composers listen with a certain awe and wonder, not
unmixed with despair. The wonder we share with everyone; the despair comes from
the realization that only this one man at this one moment in musical history
could have created works that seem so effortless and so close to perfection.

Here is the Commentary article offering the quotation.

It has comedy, drama, terror, and a sense of cosmic justice.  Freedom and dread are intermingled.  da Ponte’s libretto stands on its own; read Geoffrey Clive’s The Romantic Enlightenment for a good interpretation, or Kierkagaard’s Don Juan essay.  Leporello and the Don are among the most memorable characters of literature.  Don Giovanni might be the single most impressive, most magnificent, more comprehensive, and most complete piece of classical music (Bach’s Passions have a narrower emotional range, and no single Beethoven symphony compares).  You simply must buy it, if you don’t own it already.

Yet I cannot find the perfect recorded version.  Here are remarks on a few contenders:

1. Carlo Maria Giulini: This recording has splendid voices but the sound is muddy and the conducting is not always so sharp.  I much prefer his Figaro.

2. Otto Klemperer: I had high hopes, since his Magic Flute is the best performance of that opera.  But he is lugubrious with the Don and I find this one hard to get through.  Otto’s Beethoven (the mono, odd-numbered symphonies and his Fidelio) and his Bach remain pinnacles.

3. Colin Davis: Perhaps the most evenly rounded version.  More than adequate in every way.  But it is not a first choice along any particular dimension.  And I have never been a fan of Kiri Te Kanawa’s warbling.  But if you want modern sound, this may be your best bet.

4. Georg Solti: As usual, too muscular and too much whiplash.  His approach to the classics worked better live, and as the years recede, people will wonder what all the fuss was about.

5. von Karajan: Stiff, as was too often the case.  He is best for music which needs some additional stiffness, such as Richard Strauss or Sibelius.

6. Charles Mackerras: I’ve never heard this one, but this conductor has been getting better as he ages.  I might give it a shot someday.

7. Fritz Busch: It has the charm of age, but the performances are just not up to snuff.  It remains the sentimental favorite of some people, but not deservedly so.

8. Claudio Abbado: At the time most of the serious reviews declared it a disappointment, so I never bought it.  His recent Beethoven symphonies are gems.

9. Bernard Haitink: A good moderate pick, just as Davis is.  Haitink is one of the most reliable and "buyable" conductors.  Yet he has never developed a truly personal sound.  A good introduction to the opera nonetheless.

10. Ferenc Fricsay. Nope.

11. Erich Leinsdorf. Double nope, and I won’t even give you an Amazon link.

12. John Eliot Gardiner: Better than you might have expected.  It is short of first-rate vocalists, but the conductor’s musical intelligence elevates this.  Gardiner is almost always better than you think he will be, and I mean that as a compliment.

13. Dmitri Mitropoulos: Fiery; it grabs you by the balls and doesn’t let go.  Sloppy at times and not perfect.  So-so live sound from 1956.  At times this is my favorite Don.  Cesare Siepi sings the lead role with abandon.

14. Wilhelm Furtwangler: Do not neglect the differences between the 1950, 1953, and 1954 Salzburg versions by Furtwangler.  The link above is to the 1953 (only $18, plus you get part of Magic Flute).  I have a 1954 on EMI, but no Amazon link for that one.  Many people with better ears than I have prefer the 1953, which is supposed to be slightly more energetic.  Either way you get Cesare Siepi as the Don, passionate conducting, and a celestial feeling throughout.

Recommended, as they say.

How many Don Giovannis must one hear? 

The past ain’t what is used to be.  Norman Lebrecht, a fuddy-duddy if there ever was one, writes:

The key test of any composer’s importance is the extent to which he reshaped the art. Mozart, it is safe to say, failed to take music one step forward. Unlike Bach and Handel who inherited a dying legacy and vitalised it beyond recognition, unlike Haydn who invented the sonata form without which music would never have acquired its classical dimension, Mozart merely filled the space between staves with chords that he knew would gratify a pampered audience. He was a provider of easy listening, a progenitor of Muzak.

Lebrecht, well-known for his argument that classical music is dead, perhaps never thought it was alive in the first place.  Here is one good response.  I’ll offer more on the importance of Mozart next week; you’ll get Mozart blogging (but not just) up through his 250th birthday on the 27th [corrected from before].  I urge other bloggers to devote at least one post next week to Mozart; surely he has played some role in your life.

The Viktoria Institute in Gothenburg, Sweden, is working on a concept they call PUSH MUSIC, which is software that automatically shares music files with nearby users who have similar tastes. It monitors the listening history of the user, and develops awareness about what kind of new music he might like. The concept envisions Wi-Fi-enabled music players that automatically establish a peer-to-peer connection, enabling people to either "browse" the music collections of others and take a copy of whatever they like, or — here’s the magic part — just automatically receive music the software has selected for you.

Here is the link, and comments are open for those who know more about this.  Here are the comments from www.digg.com.  Can you be liable if some other listener "pushes" stolen property onto your computer?  Will the risk of passing malicious code make this unworkable?

Some of the stations have changed:

Out: African music, World music

In: French songs (Sur La Route), and also French rap and other French innovations (La Musique)

This was done to obtain entry into the Canadian market, which among other things required appeasement of the French-language minority.  It is funny what is sometimes done in the name of cultural diversity, eh?  Let’s hope that world music makes a comeback once those horrible Christmas music channels are gone.

Among the 20- to 25-year olds, the ones who initially produce the most
professional-sounding music will often be the least original – their
technical polish may be evidence more of a mimetic ability than an
original vision. The more “out there” a composer’s personal vision is,
the more awkward his or her early works will probably sound, and the
longer it will take his or her compositional language to crystallize
into something eloquent and communicative.

The early idioms of many composers testify to this. For instance,
Nancarrow didn’t discover his instrument until age 36, and took another
8 or 10 years to master it. Partch, having an even wider range of
unconventional elements to integrate, was nearly 50 when his style
started to feel compelling. Varése wrote romantic music that he later
abandoned, and struggled to bring his style into focus at just shy of
40. Feldman’s music seemed like a cute adjunct to Cage’s philosophy
until his ambitions suddenly blossomed at age 44. Elliott Carter wrote
an undistinguished neoclassicism into his 40s, and didn’t find what we
recognize as a Carterian idiom until age 43. Rzewski wrote some
charming minimalist works in his early 30s, but didn’t create his own
style until he was 37, with The People United. Robert Ashley was involved in the avant-garde all along, but didn’t begin to stand out until he wrote Perfect Lives at 48. Giacinto Scelsi was 54 when he found what he had been looking for in his 4 pezzi su una nota sola.

Here are my previous posts on age and achievement.