Category: Music

How much did you pay?  Just let us know in the comments, and those of you who wouldn’t otherwise answer, please answer and help us defeat selection bias at least in part.  Just as the heroic Tim has done (please see the second comment), I’m sure he stands up to terrorists as well.

And it’s simple: just cook the cheeseburger in milk, what’s so hard about that?  Do note the burnt milk will ruin any good pan you use.  If you’d like to read some Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook is compelling even though it is one of those books which old school feminists feel no man can possibly like.  Just be wary of the date who tells you it is his all-time favorite book.  I’ve never been persuaded by Lessing’s science fiction but some of you will wish to try it.

Here is the link.  Over the last week I went back and listened to their major works again; I’m not that impressed.  Try Christopher O’Riley’s album of piano arrangements, and you will see just how thin and unmemorable their compositions are.  Admittedly not all great music would transfer well to the piano, but the Radiohead "sound" isn’t that original either, at least not compared to the frontiers of electronica or for that matter punk.  This morning I put on Boris’s Pink; it is hardly my favorite album but it was a welcome relief.

From Alex Ross.  I am eagerly awaiting Ross’s The Rest is Noise, due out mid-October; Ross is currently my favorite writer on music.

Here is the story, but no this model won’t much change the music industry.  Yes you really can download this album and "tip" Radiohead as you feel inclined to.  But note that:

1. Radiohead is an indie cult band with extreme loyalties from its partisans and the possibility of attracting more such partisans by seeming "cool."

2. Radiohead peaks high on the charts (#3 for their last release, if I recall…) but I believe they sell the product pretty quickly and don’t have a long run at the top.  Again, they’d like to widen their fan base.

3. Radiohead’s gambit has reaped enormous publicity, but this won’t be the case next time.

4. Many donors will give to a highly visible "cause of the month" (remember the outpouring of support for the tsunami victims?) but they won’t necessarily give on a regular basis.

5. Radiohead probably has an especially high ratio of touring to CD and iTunes income; see #1.  This scheme is a natural for them but not for Kelly Clarkson. 

What we will see is lots of lesser bands (and authors) giving their work away for free, but that trend has been underway for some time.  And by the way, Radiohead’s best album is Kid A.

When blogging I try to keep book rehash to a minimum.  But tonight I cannot resist making a point from Good and Plenty:

In the past most people didn’t much like or listen to most of the music they bought, or in any case most of the value came from their very favorites.  A relatively small percentage of our music purchases accounted for most of our listening pleasure.  So if people can sample music in advance, and know in advance what they will like, music sales will plummet.  This will be a sign of market efficiency, not market failure.

Admittedly copyright issues are being superimposed on this scenario at the same time, so the net assessment of current music trends is complex.  But when there is uncertainty about consumer tastes, falling output can be a strong Pareto improvement.  (It’s just like how having lots of dates is not necessarily the sign of a happy love life.)  Less music is being produced, but we’re getting more of the stuff we want.

Stan Liebowitz says yes, rebutting the well-known arguments of Koleman Strumpf, published in the Journal of Political Economy.  I would be happy to link to a response by Strumpf.  In the meantime, two notes: a) I suspect non-fair use CD burning is in any case the bigger issue, and b) significantly lower musical sales, and yes sales are falling, still can be welfare-improving.  The real consumption of music seems to be up.

Is her Goldberg Variations as good as The New York Times (and other reviews) claims?  In a word, yes.

No, it doesn’t displace Gould for me, but it comes closer than I thought any recording ever would.  I’m a Gould-obsessive who resold his Murray Perahia recording of the Goldbergs in disgust and never cottoned to the Goldbergs on harpischord (Egarr and Hantai being truly splendid, however).  Schepkin, Hewitt, Tipo, and Peter Serkin were fine, Pi-hsien Chen was surprisingly good, Schiff wasn’t so hot, and then there was Gould, Gould, Gould.  After Gould, I was just as happy to hear the transcribed version for guitar.

Now there is another.

How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care), by Ross W. Duffin, is a cranky but fascinating look at how music went astray:

For nearly a century, equal temperament–the practice of dividing an
octave into twelve equally proportioned half-steps–has held a virtual
monopoly on the way in which instruments are tuned and played. In his
new book, Duffin explains how we came to rely exclusively on equal
temperament by charting the fascinating evolution of tuning through the
ages. Along the way, he challenges the widely held belief that equal
temperament is a perfect, "naturally selected" musical system, and
proposes a radical reevaluation of how we play and hear music.

You can get Bach’s Well-Tempered Klavier played this way, but to my ears it is not a revelation.  Of course unequal temperament (not my preferred terminology) has struck back through popular music, whether it be bent blues notes, pedal steel guitar, and the drone tunings of My Bloody Valentine or Sonic Youth.  Oddly the author doesn’t mention this.  Listeners want variety, and simply "pegging the scale" does not control the real sound which results, just as in um…macroeconomics.

Queen guitarist and songwriter Brian May, who gave up studying the stars to become one, will soon complete his doctorate in astrophysics.

May, 60, will submit a thesis titled Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud next week at Imperial College London.

Here is the story.  Thanks to Daniel Klein for the pointer.  It’s long been my view that most rock stars are very very smart people.

Addendum: Read Dubner on smart rock stars.

Carrying around my iPhone, I listen more to an iPod than before and I’ve upgraded the music collection on my iPod.

I suspect that iPods encourage musical nuggets which are short, to the point, and complementary to adrenalin.  I’ve heard the ? and the Mysterians song "99 Teardrops" more often in the last week than in the preceding last year.

The iPod means we listen more on the go, and with background noise, so the music should have energy.  iPod listening also brings more frequent interruptions, which discriminates against longer pieces.  Unlike with a CD player there is no particular reason to listen to a whole album straight through and what’s an album anymore anyway?

The curmudgeonly side of me worries a little.  What about slowly enfolding, architectonically subtle musical structures?  I love LaMonte Young, Pandit Kumar, and Andrew Violette, but thery’re not on my iPod.  I also resent that now my brain is more likely to expect music to be fun, though often I would rather hear music that is good for me.

I’ve read that classical music is more popular on iTunes than in music stores; I wonder if the preference is for arias and energetic movements of snappy symphonies, or if the iTunes purchase doesn’t end up very active on the iPod.

A loyal MR reader asked for mbaqanga recommendations for iPod; start with The Indestructible Beat of Soweto, Mahlathini (best without the Mahotella Queens), and Township Jazz n’ Jive; the last is not exactly mbqanga but you will love it anyway.

My Danish host, Nicolai Foss, has a blog on archtop jazz guitar.  Here are his posts on the best of jazz guitar.  I’ll nominate Joe Pass’s Virtuoso album, any number of Django Reinhardt collections, the Jim Hall-Sonny Rollins album, and the Wes Montgomery live album Smokin’ at the Half Note as my top picks.  George van Eps and the old Kress and McDonough recordings are particular favorites as well.  John McLaughlin is not to be neglected, and there is also the incomparable Bola Sete from Brazil.

Here is Nicolai’s home page, with many papers on management and also Austrian economics.  Nicolai, of course, also blogs at Organizations and Markets, which has been on our blog roll for some time.  Here is my other host, Mark Lorenzen.

Bryan Caplan has been lending me CDs from the splendid series Lebendige Vergangenheit (and here), so I’ve been hearing or rehearing the best opera singers from the past.  I’m no cultural pessimist, but I share the common opinion that opera singing has declined since, say, 1935.  Why might this be?

1. Opera is less culturally central, and so the best voices do something else, or they are more likely to be narrow technicians rather than inspired musical creators and interpreters. 

2. The best voices grow up watching TV, rather than reading Romain Rolland and Thomas Mann.  The Zeitgeist makes them dull.

3. The average voice is much better, there is simply less individuality in approach and thus lower peaks.  This sort of culturally mysterious process also seems to be governing fiction.

4. The best voices came from Germany and Italy and Austria, and World War II destroyed the musical and vocal training networks of those countries.

5. Conservatories and agents choke off musical individuality in the interests of technique and conformity.

6. Opera is now more heavily subsidized and more organizationally bureaucratic.  The programs, while still excellent, are biased against individualistic, crowd-pleasing singers and biased toward singers who don’t make many identifiable mistakes.  It’s a bit like the advent of peer review in economics.

Your thoughts?

My Eddie Cumberbatch CD came today (markets in everything, indeed), courtesy of Amazon.de.  Eddie sings tenor and lead role on Samuel Felsted’s 18th century Jamaican oratorio Jonah.  I’m not crazy; although the music is not to my taste Eddie is as good as I had remembered him.

Here are also some MP3s, truly brief, stirring at times, but shakier in quality and sound; thanks to the ingenious Chug for the pointer.  Here is my previous post on Edward Cumberbatch.

Eddie wants to continue improving the quality of his performances but does not envision himself as a full-time professional singer.  A life on the road, a continuity of auditions for roles do not fit his preferred ordered lifestyle.  However, should an opportunity arise to work with a famed Music Company he would welcome the experience.

Edward Cumberbatch is a national treasure of Trinidad.  I heard Eddie in concert about ten years ago, in a high school auditorium in Port of Spain.  His sister played piano.  I was blown away by Eddie’s voice and his stage presence.  He could sing anything from gospel (his origins) to classical to swing.  His creole version of the love duet in Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love remains one of the musical highlights of my life.  At the time, Eddie seemed like a more compelling artist than Domingo, Bryn Terfel, or any of the other voices I have heard in concert.  But mostly he sings in his church choir for no remuneration or even fame.

Joshua Bell’s Washington Metro performance has got me thinking more about Eddie.  Is Eddie an undiscovered vocal genius?  An unreliable charismatic who swindles the ears of lesser mortals?  An eccentric who simply refuses to step into his rightful place on the global stage?  A beneficiary from low expectations, who would choke if given a recital at the Met?  A wise man who knows where true happiness lies?  Here is more on Eddie.

I was shocked when I read in the program notes that Eddie also has a Ph.d. in Physics from Indiana University.

I continue to believe in him.  Can I go through life not doing more about Eddie?

Addendum: Read this article on how social forces influence our evaluation of music.

Looking for the perfect Mother’s Day gift for that mom who loves Schoenberg?  The Schoenberg Center in Vienna can cover your needs.  The Schoenberg Shop is offering Schoenberg T-shirts (mit Aphorismen), pencils, mousepads, and postcards.  Also check out Schoenberg on YouTube.  And, of course, Schoenberg Webradio and Schoenberg Jukebox are still going strong.

Here is the link.