Category: Music

What I listened to in 2022

by  Tyler Cowen in

I am listing only new releases:

Bach, Johann Sebastian, complete Sonatas and Partitas for violin, Fabio Biondi.  Perhaps the only recording I like as much as the older (stereo) Milstein performance?

Bach, Johann Sebastian, The Art of Life, Daniil Trifonov, The Art of the Fugue (favorite of Thomas Schelling!) is the main work here.  Schelling, by the way, was especially fond of the Grigory Sokolov recording of this work.

van Baerle Trio, Beethoven complete piano trios

Beethoven, Kreuzer sonata for violin and piano, Clara-Jumi Kang and Sunwook Kim

William Byrd, John Bull, The Visionaries of Piano Music, played by Kit Armstrong

Handel, George Frideric, Eight Great Suites and Overtures, by Francesco Corti on harpischord

Matthias Kirschnereit plays Mozart, the complete piano concerti, and two Rondos

Mozart, La flûte enchantée (yes in French), conducted by Hervé Niquet

Shostakovich/Stevenson, mostly Op.87, piano music, by Igor Levit

Szymanowski, Karol, Piano Works, by Krystian Zimerman

By far my biggest discovery was Benjamin Alard playing the complete keyboard works of Bach, mostly on organ and clavichord.  These are some of the best recordings of the best music I have heard, ever.

There is much more, but those were the highlights.  I listened to plenty of so-called “popular music” too, but I don’t think anything you would need me to tell you about.

*Love and Let Die*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is John Higgs, and the subtitle is Bond, the Beatles and the British Psyche.  I loved this book, and reading it induced me to order the author’s other books, the ultimate compliment.  It is not for everyone, nor is it easy to describe, but imagine the stories of The Beatles and James Bond films told as “parallel careers.”  After all, “Love Me Do” and Dr. No were released on the same day in 1962.

It is striking that they have been making James Bond films for sixty years now, and every single one of them has made money.  We are still talking about the Beatles too.  Will anything from current Britain have such staying power?

From the book here is one excerpt:

Had Paul not then finally found success outside the band, it is possible they may have agreed to a reunion.  The success of ‘Live and Let Die’, followed by the album Band on the Run, made Paul McCartney and Wings a going concern at exactly the point when a Beatles reunion looked most plausible.  Bond didn’t kill the Beatles, but it is a strange irony that once they had split , he kept them dead.

I hadn’t known that the Soviet edition of the Band on the Run album replaced the title track with “Silly Love Songs” as the lead song, as the lyrics to the “Band on the Run” song were considered too subversive.  There is for instance talk of a prison break in the song.  And when Paul much later performed a short solo concert for Vladimir Putin, he chose to play “Let It Be.”

The book excels in its portraits of George Harrison, especially in his solo career.  I enjoyed this tidbit about the Harrison family:

In 1978, George married Olivia Arias and in the same year they had a son, Dhani.  Dhani only discovered his father’s past when he was at school.  ‘I came home one day from school after being chased by kids singing “Yellow Submarine”, and I didn’t understand why,’ he has said.  ‘It just seemed surreal: why are they singing that song to me?  I came home and freaked out to my dad: “Why didn’t you tell me you were in the Beatles?”  And he said: “Oh, sorry. Probably should have told you that.”  It’s impossible to imagine, John, Paul or Ringo neglecting to mention they were in the Beatles to their children.

Recommended, for me at least.

*The Philosophy of Modern Song*

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes the author is Bob Dylan, and I give this one a thumbs up.  You can buy it here.  Here is one bit:

A-Wop-Bop-A-Loo-Bop-A-Wop-Bam-Boom.  Little Richard was speaking in tongues across the airwaves long before anybody knew what was happening.  He took speaking in tongues right out of the sweaty canvas tent and put it on the mainstream radio, even screamed like a holy preacher — which is what he was.  Little Richard is a master of the double entendre.  “Tutti Frutti” is a good example.  A fruit, a male homosexual, and “tutti frutti” is “all fruit.”  It’s also a sugary ice cream.  A gal named Sue and a gal named Daisy and they’re both transvestites.  Did you ever see Elvis singing “Tutti Frutti” on Ed Sullivan?  Does he know what he’s singing about?  Do you think Ed Sullivan knows?  Do you think they both know?  Of all the people who sing “Tutti Fruitti,” Pat Boone was probably the only one who knew what he was singing about.  And Pat knows about speaking in tongues as well.

And:

The Grateful Dead are not your usual rock and roll band.  They’re essentially a dance band.  They have more in common with Arie Shaw and bebop than they do with the Byrds or the Stones…There is a big difference in the types of women that you see from the stage when you are with the Stones compared to the Dead.  With the Stones it’s like being at a porno convention.  With the Dead, it’s more like the women you see by the river in the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?  Free floating, snaky and slithering like in a typical daydream.  Thousands of them….With the Dead, the audience is part of the band — they might as well be on the stage.

Or how about this:

Bluegrass is the other side of heavy metal.  Both are musical forms steeped in tradition.  They are the two forms of music that visually and audibly have not changed in decades.  People in their respective fields still dress like Bill Monroe and Ronnie James Dio.  Both forms have a traditional instrumental lineup and a parochial adherence to form.

Bluegrass is the more direct emotional music and, though it might not be obvious to the casual listener, the more adventurous.

This is one of the better books on America, and one of the best books on American popular song.  But then again, that is what you would expect from a Nobel Laureate in literature, right?

The new *Revolver* boxed set

by  Tyler Cowen in

Not nearly as good as the White Album “Esher” sessions.  I enjoyed the original, much speedier version of “Rain” (not actually good, but the slowed down, distorted track we all know suddenly makes more sense), hearing the evolution of “Yellow Submarine” through early acoustic John demos to the almost finished song, and George’s “Love You To” with acoustic guitar rather than Indian instrumentation.

I don’t like the newer remixes of Beatles and John Lennon material, and yes I mean you Giles Martin.  In contrast, I am pleased to own a version of the Mono mix of the album.

I’m one of those who prefers The White Album to Revolver.  The Revolver songs do not flow organically for me, and it is perhaps the Beatles’s fourth greatest creation?  The three George songs are not outstanding, and I sympathize with “Yellow Submarine” more than wishing to hear it again.  “Eleanor Rigby” runs the risk of sliding into that same status.  The very greatest track in the box — “Rain” — wasn’t even on the album.

I don’t regret having spent more than $100 on these five CDs (could have been fit on two discs!), but Coase’s theory of durable goods monopoly was nonetheless foremost in my mind.

The wisdom of Bono

by  Tyler Cowen in

I ended up as an activist in a very different place from where I started. I thought that if we just redistributed resources, then we could solve every problem. I now know that’s not true. There’s a funny moment when you realize that as an activist: The off-ramp out of extreme poverty is, ugh, commerce, it’s entrepreneurial capitalism. I spend a lot of time in countries all over Africa, and they’re like, Eh, we wouldn’t mind a little more globalization actually.

And:

Isn’t citing Thomas Piketty a little dicey for you, given what he says about fairer taxation?

Yes, he has a system of progressive taxation and I get it, but the question that I’m compelled to answer is: How are things going for the bottom billion? Be careful to placard the poorest of the poor on politics when they are fighting for their lives. It’s very easy to become patronizing. Capitalism is a wild beast. We need to tame it. But globalization has brought more people out of poverty than any other -ism. If somebody comes to me with a better idea, I’ll sign up. I didn’t grow up to like the idea that we’ve made heroes out of businesspeople, but if you’re bringing jobs to a community and treating people well, then you are a hero. That’s where I’ve ended up. God spare us from lyricists who quote themselves, but if I wrote only one lyric that was any good, it might have been: Choose your enemies carefully because they will define you. Turning the establishment into the enemy — it’s a little easy, isn’t it?

Here is the full NYT interview.

How to discover Indian classical music

by  Tyler Cowen in

Versions of that request were repeated a few times, along with a request for a YouTube or Spotify list.  Given the visual element, I would say that YouTube >> Spotify.  But mostly you are looking to hear world class performers in live concert, there is no substitute for that, most of all for the percussion, but also for the overall sense of energy.

I first heard Indian classical music by stumbling upon the Ravi Shankar section of the Concert for Bangladesh album, at a young age (thirteen or so?).  It seemed obvious to me this was better than “Within You, Without You,” but it was a long time before I really would get back to it.  Shankar never ended up clicking with me, but definitely he was the introduction.

As a young teen I also loved the Byrds song “Eight Miles High,” with its opening riff taken from John Coltrane’s “India.”  Not exactly Indian classical music, but a clue there was much more to discover, and again I took this very seriously.  The raga bits on the Byrds 5D album intrigued me more than the lugubrious Harrison tunes.

I recall my high friend friend (and composer) Eric Lyon insisting to me that Carnatic classic music was better than American jazz improvisation.  I didn’t follow him at the time, but I always took Eric’s opinions very seriously, and so I filed this away mentally for later reexamination.

I also recall Thomas Schelling telling me that his son decided to become a professional Indian classical musician (in fact he ended up as more of a poet and translator).  I had the vague sense this was something quite admirable to do.  So the data points were piling up.

Years passed, and I spent most of my time listening to traditional Western classical music, and with fantastic aesthetic returns.

Still, I grew restless to learn more, and kept on returning to musics I did not understand very well.  My best and most common entry point was simply to listen to a lot of other musics that are (were?) somewhat atypical to Western ears, whether it be atonal music, guitar drone music, or Arabic microtonal tunes.  Nonetheless progress was slow.

In the 1990s, I started going to lots of world music concerts in the DC area, often at University of Maryland or GWU.  These years were a kind of golden age for world music (a terrible term, btw) in the U.S., as post 9/11 visa restrictions were not yet around.

Twice I heard L. Subramaniam play Indian classical violin.  Wow!  My head was spinning, and from there on out I was determined to hear as many Indian classical concerts as possible.  Maybe his melodic lines are not the very deepest, but he was a remarkably exciting performer.  A whole new world was opened up to me.  I also heard Shakti, with Zakir Hussein and John McLaughlin, play at GWU.  That was fusion yes, but it owed more to Indian classical traditions than anything else.  To this day it remains one of the three or four best concerts I’ve ever seen.

The Ali Akbar Khan Signature Series CDs made increasing sense to me, and I grew to love them and many others.  I did go back to Shankar, but decided he was, all along, far from the top of the heap.  Maybe a great marketer, though.

S. Balachandar on the veena was another early discovery, via Fanfare.

Later in the 1990s I read Frederick Turner write that Indian classical music was one of humanity’s greatest spiritual and aesthetic achievements, and around the same time I chatted a bit with Turner too.  I had never quite heard anyone claim that before, but instinctively I realized I very much agreed with him.  I decided that I believed that too.

Shikha Dalmia helped me out with some recommendations as well, and she was the first one to mention to me the Indian classical music festival in what is now called Chennai.  For many years I wanted to go.

Then followed more years of listening.  On my first India trips, I carried back a large number of $2 CDs, high variance but many of them excellent, such as Kishori Amonkar.  I bought as much as I could plausibly carry back home.

About eight years ago, I took daughter Yana to the Chennai Indian classical music festival held every December.  We saw a number of incredible performers, most notably the great U. Srinivas (mandolin!), before his demise.  I can recommend this experience to you all, and I plan on going again.

So what is the lesson of all this?  My path was so inefficient and roundabout!  You can avoid all of that, just read this blog post and be there…voila!

But that doesn’t quite work either.

My Conversation with Jamal Greene

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the summary:

Jamal and Tyler discuss what he’d change about America’s legal education system, the utility of having non-judges or even non-lawyers on the Supreme Court, how America’s racial history influences our conception of rights, the potential unintended consequences of implementing his vision of rights for America, how the law should view economic liberty, the ideal moral framework for adjudicating conflicts, whether social media companies should consider interdependencies when moderating content on their platforms, how growing up in different parts of New York City shaped his views on pluralism, the qualities that make some law students stand out, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: There is a crude view in popular American society — even possibly correct — that, simply, American society is too legalistic. There’s that book, Three Felonies a Day. If you have expired prescription medicine in your cabinet, you’re committing a felony. People who are very smart will just tell me, “Never talk to a cop. Never talk to an FBI agent.” I’m an upper-class White guy who’s literally never smoked marijuana once, and they’re telling me, “Don’t ever speak with the law.”

Isn’t something wrong there? Is the common intuition that we’re too legalistic correct?

GREENE: I think that we are too apt to submit political disputes to legal resolution. I think that for sure. What your friends are telling you about police officers is slightly different, insofar as one can have a deeply non-legalistic culture in which the correct advice is to not talk to police officers if those people are corrupt, if those people are abusive.

When I hear that advice — and I might be differently situated than you — that’s what people are saying is, someone might be out to trick you. And that might be a mistrust of state power, as you mentioned before. Maybe it’s a rational mistrust of state power, but I don’t know that that’s about legalism, which again, is a separate potential problem.

We tend to formulate our problems in legal terms, as if the right way to solve them is to decide how they are to be resolved by a court, or how they are to be resolved by some adjudicative official, as opposed to thinking about our problems in terms of just inherent in, again, pluralism, which has to be solved through politics, has to be solved through conversation.

COWEN: But we still have whatever is upstream of the American law, the steep historical and cultural background, so anything we do is going to be flavored by that. We’re not ever going to get to a system where the policemen are like the policemen in Germany, for instance, or that the courts are like the courts in Germany.

Given that cultural upstream, again, isn’t the intuition basically correct? Just be suspicious of the law. We should have fewer laws, rely less on the legal process, in essence, deregulate as many different things as we can. Why isn’t that the correct conclusion, rather than building in more rights?

Interesting throughout.

Contemporary music listening

by  Tyler Cowen in

A few of you have asked me what I am listening to lately in terms of contemporary releases.  I don’t feel this list contains any unusual revelations, but here goes:

Poppy, I Disagree.

Iceage, Seek Shelter.

Finneas, Optimist.

Brittany Howard, Jaime.

Courtney Barnett, Things Take Time, Take Time.

Michael Hurley, The Time of the Foxgloves.

Some kind of Moroccan (?) “noise” CD, but I can no longer read the group name or title.

Also, it is not contemporary but I weakened and bought the 30-CD Fela Kuti box.

The very best parts of the best Beatle songs

by  Tyler Cowen in

You also might title this post “How to listen to The Beatles.”  Here are the best parts, in no particular order:

1. The violins/voices warm-up to Sgt. Pepper.

2. The George/John background vocals to “You Won’t See Me.”

3. The sounds during the fade out section of “You Never Give Me Your Money.”  This is perhaps my #1 pick.

4. The total, sudden silence at the end of “I Want You “She’s So Heavy.”  Radio stations and streaming services don’t get this one right.

5. The drums/bass collision, combined with backward tape on the vocal, at the end of “Rain.”

6. The short Indian drone segment in one of the latter choruses of “She’s Leaving Home.”  Starts at about 2:57.

7. The airiness/breathing aspect of “Long Long Long.”  Not George’s very best song, but still notable for its acoustic properties.

8. Paul’s brief “return to the womb” piano and vocal close to “Cry, Baby, Cry.”

9. The parts of “Blue Jay Way” (starts about 3:44) and “I am the Walrus” (1:59) when the normal music stops and a bunch of sounds, including cello and also some “acoustic-electric” sounds, come together in a crescendo.  Try also Paul’s much later “Cosmically Conscious,” originally written in 1968 and obviously so (how?).  The cacophony and fade at the end of “All You Need is Love” is the best part of that (very good) song!

10. All of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” which apparently was produced so as to be in two different keys at the same time.

In an earlier post, I suggested that to understand the Beach Boys and their sound world you should listen carefully to “Vegetables” on a high-quality sound system.  Figure out that sound world, and then apply that understanding to the rest of your Beach Boys listening.  Well, here are my comparable tips for The Beatles.

Emergent Ventures winners, eighteenth cohort

by  Tyler Cowen in

Zvi Mowshowitz, TheZvi, New York City, to develop his career as idea generator and public intellectual.

Nadia Eghbal, Miami, to study and write on philanthropy for tech and crypto wealth.

Henry Oliver, London, to write a book on talent and late bloomers.  Substack here.

Geffen Avrahan, Bay Area, founder at Skyline Celestial, an earlier winner, omitted from an early list by mistake, apologies Geffen!

Subaita Rahman of Scarborough, Ontario, to enable a one-year visiting student appointment at Church Labs at Harvard University.

Gareth Black, Dublin, to start YIMBY Dublin.

Pradyumna Shyama Prasad, blog and podcast, Singapore.  Here is his substack newsletter, here is his podcast about both economics and history.

Ulkar Aghayeva, New York City, Azerbaijani music and bioscience.

Steven Lu, Seattle, to create GenesisFund, a new project for nurturing talent, and general career development.

Ashley Lin, University of Pennsylvania gap year, Center for Effective Altruism, for general career development and to learn talent search in China, India, Russia.

James Lin, McMaster University gap year, from Toronto area, general career development and to support his interests in effective altruism and also biosecurity.

Santiago Tobar Potes, Oxford, from Colombia and DACA in the United States, general career development, interest in public service, law, and foreign policy.

Martin Borch Jensen of Longevity Impetus Grants (a kind of Fast Grants for longevity research), Bay Area and from Denmark, for a new project Talent Bridge, to help talented foreigners reach the US and contribute to longevity R&D.

Jessica Watson Miller, from Sydney now in the Bay Area, to start a non-profit to improve the treatment of mental illness.

Congratulations to you all!  We are honored to have you as Emergent Ventures winners.

Claims about taste

by  Tyler Cowen in

Chen et al. show that people’s aesthetic tastes are not arbitrarily different from each other in different sensory modalities but vary primarily along only a single dimension across sights and sounds: how similar a person’s taste is to the average taste. People who have atypical taste for images also tend to have atypical taste for sounds.

Here is the paper, via Michelle Dawson.

Jesse Michels interviews me at Hereticon

by  Tyler Cowen in

Jesse’s description was “Wide ranging discussion with the brilliant @tylercowen. Topics include: Satoshi’s identity, Straussian Jesus, the Beatles and UFOs. Taped in early January but he presciently expresses concerns around Russia/Ukraine”

Great fun was had by all, and they added in nice visuals.