Category: Music
Uncaged Stairway to Heaven — the only version that makes the song sound fresh
Via Fernand Pajot.
My Conversation with Mark Carney
Here is the audio, video, and transcript, definitely recommended. Here is part of his closing statement:
COWEN: Last question. You wake up each morning. Surely you still think about central banking. What for you is the open question about central banking, where you don’t know the answer, that you think about the most?
CARNEY: I gave a speech at Jackson Hole on this issue, and I started — which is the future of the international monetary system and how we adjust the international monetary system.
I’ll say parenthetically that we’re potentially headed to another example of where the structure of the system is going to cause big problems for the global economy. Because it’s quite realistic, sadly, that we’re going to have a fairly divergent recovery with a number of emerging, developing economies really lagging because of COVID — not vaccinated, limited policy space, and the knock-on effects, while major advanced economies move forward. That’s a world where rates rise and the US dollar strengthens and you get this asymmetry, and the challenge of the way our system works bears down on these economies. I think about that a lot.
And this:
COWEN: If you’re speaking in a meeting as the central bank president, do you prefer to speak first or speak last?
CARNEY: I prefer — I tend to speak early. Yes, I tend to speak early. I’m not sure that’s always the best strategy, but I tend to speak early. I will say, one thing that’s happened over the years at places like the G20, I noticed, is the prevalence of social media and devices. The audience drifts away over time, even at the G20, even on a discussion of the global economy.
And from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, do note this:
CARNEY: …I think you’re absolutely right on that, there wasn’t. It is revealed that there wasn’t a liquidity trap.
Rooftops! Finally, on more important matters:
COWEN: Are the Toronto Raptors doomed to be, on average, a subpar NBA team due to higher taxes?
And:
COWEN: What’s the best Clash album?
CARNEY: Fantastic question. London Calling, and one of my best memories — I was very fortunate; they came to Edmonton when I was in 12th grade in high school. I went to the concert and that was fantastic, yes.
COWEN: I also saw them, I think in what would have been 12th grade had I been in school that year. But London Calling is too commercial for me. I much prefer the Green album, like “Career Opportunities,” “Janie Jones.”
CARNEY: Well, “I Fought the Law” was the best song at the concert. I have to say, they had got to Combat Rock by this time, which was relative — [laughs] Combat Rock was more commercial, I thought, than London Calling, although they threw it all out the door with Sandinista!
Again, here is Mark’s new book Value(s): Building a Better World For All.
Who is the best-known, non-political American married couple?
With Bill and Melinda Gates divorcing, and Kanye and Kim doing the same, America now has a paucity of very well-known married couples, at least outside of politics, where Barack and Michelle Obama reign supreme.
Who is the Lucy and Desi of our time? The George Burns and Gracie Allen? The Sonny and Cher?
George and Amal Clooney are in the running, but is she so well known to most Americans? Could they tell you her name from scratch, or cite what she is known for?
Kurt Cobain has passed away, as has Kobe Bryant, Larry and Laurie David split some time ago, and John and Yoko and Paul and Linda (an honorary American couple, for media purposes) are distant memories. Movie stars barely still exist these days.
Perhaps Elon Musk will marry Grimes, who is a musical star of some renown.
Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn have been married for 24 years, and they are pretty well known.
Harry and Meghan maybe are becoming an American couple, at least for media purposes?
Who else?
The science rave culture that is British
Thousands of people at a mass nightclub rave in the U.K. this week will be a key test of whether live events halted during the pandemic can reopen at full capacity as planned from the end of June.
The two-day event in Liverpool, northwest England, is part of a national research program which so far appears to show people are happy to be tested for coronavirus to secure entry to large-scale events.
There are also no early signs that live events are spreading the disease, according to government scientist Paul Monks, and the program is expected to move to its second phase next month — with live events held at a “full range” of indoor and outdoor venues with “different scales” of capacity.
Here is the full story, via Vith E.
Christa Ludwig, RIP
Here is one obituary (NYT), here is The Guardian.
My Conversation with the excellent Dana Gioia
Here is the audio, transcript, and video. As I mention in the beginning, Dana is the (only?) CWT guest who can answer all of my questions. Here is part of the summary:
Dana and Tyler discuss his latest book and more, including how he transformed several businesses as a corporate executive, why going to business school made him a better poet, the only two obscene topics left in American poetry, why narrative is necessary for coping with life’s hardships, how Virgil influenced Catholic traditions, what Augustus understood about the cultural power of art, the reasons most libretti are so bad, the optimism of the Beach Boys, the best art museum you’ve never heard of, the Jungianism of Star Trek, his favorite Tolstoy work, depictions of Catholicism in American pop culture, what he finds fascinating about Houellebecq, why we stopped building cathedrals, how he was able to effectively lead the National Endowment for the Arts, the aesthetic differences between him and his brother Ted, his advice for young people who want to cultivate their minds, and what he wants to learn next.
And here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Why is Olaf Stapledon an important writer?
GIOIA: It’s not a question I expected.
COWEN: How could you not expect that?
GIOIA: Well, first of all, I hope people know who Olaf Stapleton was. Tremendously influential, rather clumsy, visionary, early science fiction writer who wrote novels like Odd John and the First and Last Man. What Olaf Stapleton did was I think he was the first really great science fiction writer to think in absolutely cosmic terms, beyond human conceptions of time and space. That, essentially, created the mature science fiction sensibility. If you go even watch a show like Expanse now, it’s about Stapledonian concerns.
COWEN: He was also a Hegelian philosopher, as you know. My friend Dan Wang thinks Last and First Men is better than Star Maker. Though virtually all critics prefer Star Maker.
GIOIA: Michael Lind, the political writer, and historian, Stapledon is one of his formative writers. Star Maker is kind of an evolution of the Last and First Men. Odd John is kind of the odd, the first great mutant novel.
Definitely recommended. And I am very happy to recommend Dana’s latest book (and indeed all of his books) Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a Young Writer’s Life.
My Caribbean podcast with the excellent Rasheed Griffith
One hour, fifteen minutes, almost all of it about the history and culture and economic future of the Caribbean, here is the audio. It starts with Rasheed interviewing me, but later becomes more of a back-and-forth dialog, covering Cuba, Trinidad, Barbados, the best music from Jamaica, why Haiti has failed so badly, whether the Caribbean will be Latinized, and much more. This one is pretty much entirely fresh material and I enjoyed doing it very much.
Rasheed is from Barbados, he is a very recent Emergent Ventures winner, and more generally his podcast focuses on the role of China in the Caribbean. Newsletter and some prestigious podcast guests coming soon!
Here is Rasheed on Twitter.
Danny Ray, RIP
Here is the NYT obituary for Danny Ray, who (among other things) handled the cape for James Brown.
That is what people did and watched before they had an internet, and for years I treasured the battered video cassette I had of that televised performance, playing it for guests who would come over.
What should I ask Dana Gioia?
Dana is what I call one of the world’s information billionaires. For more specifics, here is part of his Wikipedia page:
Michael Dana Gioia (/ˈdʒɔɪ.ə/; born December 24, 1950) is an American poet and writer. He spent the first fifteen years of his career writing at night while working for General Foods Corporation. After his 1991 essay “Can Poetry Matter?” in The Atlantic generated international attention, Gioia quit business to pursue writing full-time. He served as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) between 2003 and 2009. Gioia has published five books of poetry and three volumes of literary criticism as well as opera libretti, song cycles, translations, and over two dozen literary anthologies.
Gioia is the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California, where he teaches, as well as a Senior Fellow at the Trinity Forum. In December 2015 he became the California State Poet Laureate.
He is also well-known as a composer of opera libretti, and more recently as a spokesperson for the importance of Catholicism for culture. And he is brother of TedGioia, former CWT guest. And here is Dana’s home page.
I will be doing a Conversation with him — so what should I ask?
My Conversation with the excellent Noubar Afeyan
Among his other achievements, he is the Chairman and co-founder of Moderna. Here is the audio and video and transcript. Here is part of the summary:
He joined Tyler to discuss which aspect of entrepreneurship is hardest to teach, his predictions on the future of gene editing and CRISPR technology, why the pharmaceutical field can’t be winner takes all, why “basic research” is a poor term, the secret to Boston’s culture of innovation, the potential of plant biotech, why Montreal is (still) a special place to him, how his classical pianist mother influenced his musical tastes, his discussion-based approach to ethical dilemmas, how thinking future-backward shapes his approach to business and philanthropy, the blessing and curse of Lebanese optimism, the importance of creating a culture where people can say things that are wrong, what we can all learn by being an American by choice, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
AFEYAN:
I should point out, Tyler, what these people don’t yet realize is that mRNA, in addition to being unique in that it’s really the first broadly applied code molecule, information molecule that is used as a medicine and with all the advantages that come with information — digital versus analog — or where you actually have to do everything bespoke, the way drugs usually work.
The other major advantage that it has is that it is something that is actually taking advantage of nature. There was a lot of know-how we had going into this around how the process could be done. In fact, let me tell you the parallel that we used.
We have a program in cancer vaccines. You might say, “What does a cancer vaccine have to do with coronavirus?” The answer is the way we work with cancer vaccines is that we take a patient’s tumor, sequence it, obtain the information around all the different mutations in that tumor, then design de novo — completely nonexistent before — a set of peptides that contain those mutations, make the mRNA for them, and stick them into a lipid nanoparticle, and give it back to that patient in a matter of weeks.
That has been an ongoing — for a couple of years — clinical trial that we’re doing. Well, guess what? For every one of those patients, we’re doing what we did for the virus, over and over and over again. We get DNA sequence. We convert it into the antigenic part. We make it into an RNA. We put it in a particle. In an interesting way, we had interesting precedents that allowed us to move pretty quickly.
And at the close:
Imagine if all of us were also born imagining a better future for ourselves. Well, we should be, but we’ve got to work to get that. An immigrant who comes here understands that they’ve got to work to get that. They have to adapt. The problem is, if you’re born here, you may not actually think that you’ve got to work to get that. You might think you’re born into it.
This will be a funny thing to say, and I apologize to anybody that I offend. If we were all Americans by choice, we’d have a better America because Americans by choice, of which I’m one, actually have a stronger commitment to whatever it takes to make America be the place I chose to be, versus not thinking about that as a core responsibility.
Definitely recommended, he is working to save many many lives, and with great success.
Paul McCartney as management study
I am listening to McCartney III, the new Paul album, recorded at age 78 with Paul playing all of the instruments and doing all of the production at home. There is no “Hey Jude” on here, but it is pretty good and given the broader context it is remarkable. I recently linked to an Ian Leslie post on 64 reasons why Paul is underrated, but I don’t think he comes close to the reality.
Paul has been writing songs and performing since 1956, with no real breaks. Perhaps he has written more hit songs than anyone else. He brought the innovations of Cage and Stockhausen into popular music, despite having no musical education and growing up in the Liverpool dumps. His second act, Wings, sold more records in its time than the Beatles did. On a lark he decided to learn techno/EDM and put out five perfectly credible albums in that area. He decided to learn how to compose classical music, and after some initial missteps his Ecce Cor Meum is perhaps the finest British choral work in a generation, worthy of say Britten or Nicholas Maw. And that is from a guy who can’t really read music. He has learned how to play most of the major musical instruments, typically well. He can compose and play and perform in virtually every musical genre, including heavy metal, blues, music hall, country and western, gospel, show tunes, ballads, rockers, Latin music, pastiche, psychedelia, electronic music, Devo-style robot-pop, drone, lounge, reggae, and more and more and more.
His vocal range once spanned over four octaves, he is sometimes considered the greatest bass player in the history of rock and roll, and he was the first popular musician to truly master the recording studio, again with zero initial technical or musical education of any sort.
He is perhaps the quickest learner the music world ever has seen.
He has collaborated with John Lennon, George Harrison, George Martin, Ravi Shankar, Jimmy McCullough, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Elvis Costello, Carl Perkins, Kiri Te Kanawa, David Gilmour, Kanye West, Rihanna, and numerous others. He wrote the best theme song for any James Bond movie. He was the workaholic of the Beatles. He was one of the most influential individuals worldwide, including behind the Iron Curtain, in the 1960s and sometimes beyond.
He was a very keen businessman in buying up the rights to music IP at just the right time, making him a billionaire.
He is OK enough as a painter, has been an effective propagandist for vegetarianism, active in numerous charities, and has put out two (?) children’s books, which I strongly doubt are ghostwritten. He has been very active as a father in raising five children, while touring regularly, often intensely. He had planned to be touring this summer at age 78, with a world class show spanning two and a half hours with Paul taking no break or even letting up (I saw the previous tour).
There is no backward-bending supply curve for this one.
If you are looking to study careers, Paul McCartney’s career is one of the very best and most instructive.
*A Sound Mind: How I Fell in Love with Classical Music*
That is the new book by Paul Morley, with the parenthetical subtitle “(And Decided to Rewrite its Entire History)”.
It is one of my favorite books of the year, though I recommend it most to those who already have a background in the topic. It is wide-ranging, with plenty of emphasis on the contemporary and why Harrison Birtwistle is the brilliant composer you never properly understood. If you grade music books on “how many different pieces of music does it make me want to listen to/relisten to,” this is one of the best music books of all time.
Here is one excerpt I liked:
Eno said that he was interested in the Borgesian idea that you could invent a world in reverse by inventing the artefacts that ought to be in its first. You think what kind of music would be in that world — in this case, background music made as art — then you make the music and the world forms itself around the music…
Bang on a Can produced a live instrumental version of the four pieces, and Eno has humbly said that their interpretation moved him to tears. Husband-and-wife artists Lou reed and Laurie Anderson heard it performed live and they said it was heartbreaking. Without thinking, or rather, with thinking, Eno had composed a piece of music that is all at once flat and multidimensional, barren and detailed, near and far, music and sound, feeling and unfeeling, spiritual and vacant, real and unreal, mundane and magical.
It is the kind of book that suddenly stops and reels off 89 numbered points you are supposed to be interested in. And I am. But sprawling it is, and your mileage may vary. And yes most of it is about actual “classical” music, whatever that is supposed to mean these days. This is one book I will not throw out.
My excellent Conversation with Zach Carter
Zach is author of the recent book The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, which has been on many year-end “best of” lists. Here is the audio, transcript, and video. Here is part of the CWT summary:
Zach joined Tyler to discuss what Keynes got right — and wrong — about the Treaty of Versailles, how working in the India Office influenced his economic thinking, the seemingly strange paradox of his “liberal imperialism,” the elusive central message of The General Theory, the true extent of Keynes’ interest in eugenics, why he had a conservative streak, why Zach loves Samuel Delaney’s novel Nova, whether Bretton Woods was doomed to fail, the Enlightenment intuitions behind early defenses of the gold standard, what’s changed since Zach became a father, his next project, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: [Keynes is] sympathetic to his own ideas and wants to promote them. But to me, there’s a discord. Milton Friedman spends, what, 45 minutes talking to Pinochet, has a very long record of insisting economic and political freedom come together — maybe even too simplistically — writes against the system of apartheid in South Africa and Rhodesia, calls for free markets there. And people give Friedman hell over that.
Keynes writes the preface for the Nazis and favors eugenics his whole life, and that’s hardly ever mentioned.
CARTER: I don’t know that the way that Keynes talks about eugenics is as salient as you suggest. The best article that I came across on Keynes and eugenics is by this guy — I think David Singerman. It’s in the Journal of British Studies. It’s a pretty in-depth look at the way Keynes came to eugenics and what he did and did not support. It’s very clear that Keynes didn’t support eugenics in the way that Americans sterilizing poor Black workers in the South were interested in eugenics.
Keynes was broadly interested in it from the perspective of birth control. This is a time when eugenics and genetics are not as clearly defined as they are today, so he’s thinking about heritability of eye colors — how he gets involved in this stuff. He never really supports anything other than birth control.
When he actually has power as a policymaker, he just doesn’t do any of this stuff. He is working on the Beveridge plan. He is working on financial stuff that is much more egalitarian than what we think of him when we think about eugenics.
COWEN: But he is chair of the British Eugenics Society for eight years late in his career.
CARTER: He doesn’t do much there. There are big debates that are happening within that society, and he’s mostly sitting them out. Singerman goes into this in much more detail. It’s been a while since I read the article, but Singerman seems to think that this is a useful way of understanding Keynes’s worldview, but not that Keynes is some guy who’s going around wanting to sterilize people and do the things that we think of with the eugenics movement in the United States.
COWEN: I don’t think he wants to sterilize people, but he has those essays on population, which are not put into the collected works. They’re not mentioned by Roy Harrod. He is greatly worried that the people from some countries — I think including India — will outbreed the people from Britain, and this will wreak havoc on prices and wages, and it’s a big crisis. He even says, “We need to worry not only about the quantity of people, but the quality of people in the world.”
A very good episode, definitely recommended. And here is Zach on Twitter.
Best classical music recordings of 2020
As you might expect, this has been a pretty spectacular year for listening to classical music on disc, too good you might say. Here is what I enjoyed the most:
Beethoven Complete Piano works, by Martino Tirimo. I probably know the performance canon for Beethoven piano sonatas better than any other area of classical music, and this is one of my two or three favorite sets of all time. They are fresh, direct, and to the point, and remind me of the earlier Yves Nat set, though with better sound and the mistakes edited out. Here is one review: “It’s decades since a pianist has managed to convey such an overwhelming sense that we’re listening to pure Beethoven. And there are 20 hours of it — surely the greatest recorded achievement of this anniversary year.” The pianist is a 78-year-old Cypriot who is barely known even to most of the concert-going public.
Beethoven Bagatelles, by Tanguy de Williencourt. This is Beethoven at his most arbitrary and willful and whimsical, all good things. I have many recordings of these pieces, but these are perhaps my favorite. Why again is it that French pianists are so good with Beethoven?
Beethoven, Complete works for Piano Trio, van Baerle Trio. Again, the best recording of these works I have heard, and there is stiff competition.
Masaaki Suzuki put out more Bach organ music, and conducted an incredible version of Beethoven’s 9th symphony. His genius remains under-discussed, as he is also a world-class harpsichord and keyboard player, and has produced the definitive recording of Bach’s entire cycle of cantatas. Why is there no biography of him? He is one of the greatest creators and performers in the entire world in any area. If you are wondering, his parents were Japanese Protestants and he is a Calvinist.
Chopin CD of the year would be by Jean-Paul Gasparian.
Morton Feldman piano box set, played by Philip Thomas. Five CDs if you go that route, this is what I listened to most this year. It is also very good played at low volume, a useful feature in crowded pandemic homes.
I listened to a good deal of Szymanowski, who has finally started to make sense to me. In prep for my CWT with Alex Ross, I relistened to a great deal of Wagner. What rose in my eyes was the von Karajan Die Meistersinger and the Clemens Krauss Ring cycle.
As for contemporary classical music, I enjoyed:
Hans Abrahamsen, String Quartets.
Philippe Manoury, Temps Mode d’Emploi.
Caroline Shaw, Orange, Attaca Quartet.
This year I also rediscovered Robert Ashley’s opera Atalanta (Acts of God), and Raymond Lewenthal’s Alkan CD, one of my favorite recordings of all time, a kind of proto-rock and roll.
As for concert life, I did manage to see Trifonov play “Art of the Fugue” at the Kennedy Center before the whole season shut down, and in January the Danish Quartet playing Beethoven in NYC.
Free Britney Spears
Jamie Spears was authorized by the California Superior Court to control his daughter’s finances, health care, and aspects of her daily routine. The conservatorship was initially temporary. Twelve years later, it’s still in place. The court documents and hearings—there have been many over the years—have been mostly sealed to the public, so little is known about the actual nature and conditions of the agreement.
Britney’s father can control virtually all of the terms of her life, and Britney is vociferously opposed to having him as her “conservator.” I know very little about the mental condition of Britney Spears, but I would think the case for enslaving her — as we have done — should face a very high bar indeed. She hardly seems totally unable to function:
She released four albums, went on as many world tours and, for her successful Piece of Me residency in Las Vegas, played 248 shows in the span of four years, grossing $500,000 per show.
Guess who controls the money and the terms of employment? The Straussian element shows up on Instagram:
What appears to the uninitiated as a random assortment of selfies, inspirational quotes, and dance videos is, according to supporters of the so-called #FreeBritney movement, a desperate plea for help. First, there was the color of her shirt, which appeared to match commenters’ calls for her to wear yellow (or red, or blue, or white, or anything) if she were in trouble. Then there were the roses, “a symbol of secrecy and silence,” as one user pointed out. In one video, Spears walks back and forth nine times, obviously Morse code for SOS. And then of course there were her eyelashes.
Here is the full article from Vanity Fair. Don’t forget this:
“Conservatorships are very hard to get out of—much, much harder to get out of than to get into, and that’s something many people don’t realize, even people who are seeking conservatorships,” said Zoe Brennan-Krohn, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s Disability Rights Project.
Britney’s life matters, free Britney Spears.