Category: Music

The remaining 3 “major” labels – Universal, Sony and
EMI – will be out of the classical business within 2 years. They will
create no more than a handful of additional classical CDs. With the
possible exception of a few “crossover” artists the labels will drop
all of their classical artists. The majors will focus on trying to
salvage their pop business and will abandon classical because it is
more trouble than it is worth. The 20th century recording industry and
business model is obsolete. It will soon be gone.

The
remaining viable classical label will be Naxos. Their costs are
dramatically lower and their business model allows them to operate
profitably in a smaller industry and with much lower sales numbers. A
primary contributor to Naxos’ lower costs is the fact that they don’t
pay any residuals to the performers. There is no income potential for performers in the Naxos model! They will profitably produce CDs for several years longer than the majors.

There
will be a small number of “vanity” labels left but their volume will be
microscopic and they will operate on the same financial model as Naxos.
They will ultimately disappear as well.

Virtually
the entire recorded history of classical music will vanish from the
world. None of the pre-2000 material had digital rights cleared when it
was recorded and the cost of clearing these rights now dwarfs any
income that could result. There is no commercially viable model for
reviving this material.

Here is more, interesting throughout and the comments are excellent.  The author does suggest that live concerts still will be broadcast over the web and in some other ways marketed.  An alternative is that governments assign the digital rights unilaterally or the whole model goes grey/illegal as people dump their CD content onto web sites.  Furthermore I don’t think recorded classical music will disappear, as the independent labels continue to issue releases, the demise of recording has been forecast for a long time, and my copy of Fanfare (classic music reviews) is much thicker now than two years ago. 

The best place to start is his Sonata for Cello and Piano, the Double Concerto for Harpischord and Piano, and the Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello, and Harpischord, all collected here.  The string quartets and the sonata for violin and piano are also important, plus the short late works for solo instruments or small ensembles or voice; choose by which instruments you like best.

Here is Q&A with Elliott Carter, interesting throughout.  It ends with this:

What are the things that people say to you that are meaningful?

People say they like my music very much, but I’m 100 years old.

Unlike last year, I didn’t buy many jazz CDs this year.  My meta-list recognizes two releases as popping up most frequently on year-end "best of" lists:

Charles Lloyd Quartet, Rabo de Nube

Bill Frisell, History, Mystery

Both are high quality but neither is a game-changer.  I liked Miles from India, a combination of Miles Davis’s jazz fusion with Indian riffs; that would be my jazz pick of the year.

From a previous post, here are the classical music meta-list picks for the year.

I’ve found one extant meta-list for popular music, here.  It is OK for a slow year; I won’t pass along the meta-list I came up with myself because I happen to believe its contents are mediocre, noting that my copy of Santogold has yet to arrive in the mail.  If you wish, scour these lists to construct your own meta-list.

In popular music what I enjoyed most this year was:

Roger McGuinn’s acoustic cover (listen here) of Leadbelly’s On Easter Morn He Rose (there is a different version of the song, free, at that link), and

Neil Young’s 1968 acoustic takes on Buffalo Springfield songs, and

The Kevin Shields/Patti Smith two-CD collaboration, which oddly lots of people don’t seem to know about.

I’m not usually so old-fashioned.

Here is a Times of UK list.  You’ll find a zillion Amazon lists here, most are OK but too mainstream.  I’ll cover world music — which had a good year — soon.

Gramophone magazine polled music critics and here is the top ten list they came up with:

1 Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra

2 Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

3 Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

4 London Symphony Orchestra

5 Chicago Symphony Orchestra

6 Bavarian Radio Symphony

7 Cleveland Orchestra

8 Los Angeles Philharmonic

9 Budapest Festival Orchestra

10 Dresden Staatskapelle

You’ll find 10-20 here, along with some discussion.  The news, if that is what you would call it, is that Philadelphia does not make the list at all.  Here is another discussion of the results.

The end of the year is coming and so I will digest the numerous "best of" lists for you once again.  These picks are for classical music CDs and they are from Fanfare, the number one source of criticism for new classical releases.  Here are the CDs that appeared more than once on their reviewers’ "best of the year" lists:

Vincent Persichetti: Piano Sonatas; knotty American piano music.

Morton Feldman: The Viola in My Life, I-IV.

Alkan Organ Works, vol.II, by Kevin Bowyer

Bach, Brandenburg Concerti, rerecorded by Trevor Pinnock.

Brahms, Sonatas for Clarinet and Piano, by Manasse and Nakamatsu.

Thomas Simaku, String Quartets; intense, from Albania.

As usual, classical "best of" lists give disproportionate weight to material which had not previously been recorded, in this case the Persichetti which of all the entries is named the most often.  The Brahms is the one most likely to please you, or the Pinnock.  I can vouch for the quality of the others but when it comes to genre they won’t convert the unpersuaded.

Recommended.  I didn’t know he was such a collector of jazz LPs.

I entered the mourning profession at the age of twelve.  My teacher forced me to practice the basic suona tunes, as well as to learn how to wail and chant.  Having a solid foundation in the basics enables a performer to improvise with ease, and to produce an earth-shattering effect.  Our wailing sounds more authentic than that of the children or relatives of the deceased.

Most people who have lost their family members burst into tears and begin wailing upon seeing the body of the deceased.  But their wailing doesn’t last.  Soon they are overcome with grief.  When grief reaches into their hearts, they either suffer from shock or pass out.  But for us, once we get into the mood, we control our emotions and improvise with great ease.  We can wail as long as is requested.  If it’s a grand funeral and the money is good, we do lots of improvisation to please the host.

"How long can you wail?  What was your record?"

Two days and two nights…Voices are our capital and we know how to protect them…

…Frankly speaking, the hired mourners are the ones who can stick to the very end.

That is from Liao Yiwu’s excellent The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up.  Here is a previous installment in the series.  Here is an out of date book, by comedian Eddie Cantor.  Here is a photo:

Or will there be?

Robert Burns’s poetry might have been dismissed as "sentimental
doggerel" by Jeremy Paxman but that hasn’t stopped diminutive I’m A
Celebrity contestant David Gest and pop legend Michael Jackson from
recording an album of the much-loved Scottish poet’s work. Gest’s
spokesman said the album is a modern musical take on some of Burns’
classic poems, and had been a long cherished project.

Here is the full story.  Here is the evolution of earnings on some of MJ’s other albums.  Here is a man who just died.

The eyes.  Other results vary across genre, for instance gospel and blues sing more about hands than eyes.  And get this:

As for the genre that talks about body parts the most, hip hop takes the honors with more references than any other genre. Meanwhile, gospel refers to the body the least. There are plenty of other data points to peruse. It’s nice to know that 23.64 percent of hip hop songs refer to the behind, while 11.83 percent of rock songs talk about eyes.

Here is a summary of the results:

Economists who secretly want to be rock stars and rock stars who secretly want to be economists.

Remember the guy who wrote the song about trying to survive in 1000 A.D.?  He has a new and excellent tune, based on your comments about books having so much chaff and extra material in them.  Here is the link to the MP3 (and other songs by him).  Here are the lyrics.

Going back to some old requests, Eric H., a loyal and perceptive MR reader and commentator, asks:

Why do the US (a wealthy country) and Africa (a poor continent) put out
more influential modern music than Asia (a populated continent of both
wealthy and poor extremes)?

Where do I start?

1. Most African music has scales very similar to those of European music and thus we are arguably considering a unified and indeed accessible style.

2. Many African musics emphasize rhythms and rhythm is arguably the most universal element of music and thus it is relatively easy to export.  American music has in this regard a strong African component, for obvious historical reasons.

3. The micro-tonal musics, as we find in India and the Middle East, don’t spread to many countries which do not already have a micro-tonal tradition.  Cats wailing, etc., though it is a shame if you haven’t trained your ear by now to like the stuff.  It’s some of the world’s finest music.

4. Many Asian musics, such as some of the major styles of China and Japan, emphasize timbre.  That makes them a) often too subtle, and b) very hard to translate to disc or to radio.  African-derived musics are perfect for radio or for the car.

5. African music is really, really good.  And America is really, really good at entertaining people.  It’s an unstoppable alliance.