Category: Music
What should I ask Coleman Hughes?
I will be doing a Conversation with him, based in part around his new book The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America. On Coleman more generally, here is Wikipedia:
Coleman Cruz Hughes (born February 25, 1996) is an American writer and podcast host. He was a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a fellow and contributing editor at their City Journal, and he is the host of the podcast Conversations with Coleman.
Also from Wikipedia:
Hughes began studying violin at age three. He is a hobbyist rapper—in 2021 and 2022, he released several rap singles on YouTube and Spotify, using the moniker COLDXMAN, including a music video for a track titled “Blasphemy”, which appeared in January 2022. Hughes also plays jazz trombone with a Charles Mingus tribute band that plays regularly at the Jazz Standard in New York City.
I saw Coleman perform quite recently, and I can vouch for his musical excellence, including as a singer. So what should I ask Coleman?
Should AM radios be mandated in cars?
No. Here is my Bloomberg column to that effect, excerpt:
Personally, I prefer to listen to XM satellite radio, a paid subscription service. It features channels that appeal to my specific tastes (in this case, if you’re asking, the Beatles, classical music and various Spanish-language programs). AM radio, which is usually advertiser-supported, tends to have more of a “least common denominator” flavor, as it must attract many listeners to pull in the ad revenue. I do not think the federal government should be using the force of law to favor cultural options that are already trying to appeal to the least common denominator.
When I bought my current car, it was capable of receiving a satellite radio signal, and I simply had to request that it be turned on. (This ease of use is one reason why I purchased the model, so the commercial considerations here are real.) There was no law requiring the satellite radio option — just as there should be none requiring an AM radio option. This symmetry of treatment meets standards of both fairness and economic efficiency.
So I’ll say it again, no AM radio should not be mandated in cars, even though Congress is thinking of doing this on a bipartisan basis.
The Gershwins on free trade (that was then, this is now)
In 1927, George and Ira Gershwin put on a musical satire about trade and war entitled Strike Up the Band. The plot centres around a middle-aged US cheesemaker, Horace J. Fletcher of Connecticut, who wants to corner the domestic dairy market. When Fletcher hears that the US government has just slapped a fifty per cent tariff on foreign-made cheese, he sees dollar signs. High tariffs mean his fellow citizens will have little choice but to ‘buy American’. What’s more, the tariff’s impact soon reaches beyond the national market to sour the country’s trade relationships.. Swiss cheesemakers are particularly sharp in their demands for retaliation. Fletcher surmises that a prolonged Swiss-American military conflict would provide the necessary fiscal and nationalistic incentives to maintain the costly tariff on foreign cheese in perpetuity.
To make his monopolistic dream of market control a reality, Fletcher sees to it that the tariff spat between the two countries leads to an all-out war. He first creates the Very Patriotic League to drum up support for the Alpine military adventure, as well as to weed out any ‘un-American’ agitation at home. The Very Patriotic League’s members, donning white hoods reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan, go about excising all things Swiss from the nativist nation. Not even the classic adventure The Swiss Family Robinson escapes notice: it gets rebranded The American Family Robinson. With domestic anti-war dissent quelled, Fletcher next orchestrates a military invasion of Switzerland. The farcical imperial intervention ends with a US victory. But just as the war with Switzerland winds down and a peaceful League of Cheese established, an ultimatum arrives from Russia objecting to a US tariff on caviar. And, it’s implied, the militant cycle repeats.
That is from the new and interesting Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World, by Marc-William Palen.
I appear with Nicolas Bejarano on the Art Salon podcast
The Spotify and other links are here, mostly we discuss economics of the arts and thus this differs from many of my recent podcasts.
Rasheed Griffith podcast with Andrew Mellor
Here is the audio and transcript, Mellor is the author of one of my favorite books in recent years The Northern Silence: Journeys in Nordic Music & Culture. Excerpt:
Rasheed: I’m going to jump right into the first question. Why are there no great Swedish composers?
Andrew: That’s a good question. That is one many of us have asked ourselves many times. There’s something about Sweden’s status in the 18th, 19th and early 20th century, where it didn’t have this desperation to prove itself and to emancipate itself.
It had been a great nation, and it had been a huge imperial power, and it had lost everything. In a very modern sense, it came to the conclusion that that’s fine. We can exist as a small nation. Again, we don’t need to prove ourselves. We can just focus on a kind of creativity and happiness. And the legacy of that is still felt very much in Sweden today.
I just think the Swedish music isn’t that interesting in relation to theirs. It’s not that progressive. It’s very nice, but it didn’t push the envelope like Sibelius and Nielsen did. And therefore, it doesn’t still seem so relevant. I don’t know why.
It must be somehow connected to Sweden’s grand aristocratic history. It’s idea of itself. It’s always been the Nordic nation with nothing to prove almost. Maybe it still enjoys that status today. So yes, I don’t know, maybe, maybe there are more boring reasons for it, like the education system there or the system of progress and patronage was a little more tied up feudally, so talent didn’t necessarily get through. That’s the interesting thing about Carl Nielsen, of course, is that he was an absolute nobody, a working-class poor young man from a nothing family who, succeeded as a classical musician at a time when normally that you would have had to have status and education to have succeeded.
And of course, he had an education, but only because he was pushed into it by his community kind of gathering around him and raising the money for him to study. The short answer is, I don’t know, I haven’t worked it out yet. Maybe you have some thoughts on it.
And:
In the UK, Every BBC orchestra is headed by a Finn.
Recommended.
Rashid Khan, RIP
2023 CWT retrospective episode
Here is the link, here is the episode summary:
On this special year-in-review episode, Tyler and producer Jeff Holmes look back on the past year in the show and more, including the most popular and underrated episodes, the origins of the show as an occasional event series, the most difficult guests to prep for, the story behind EconGOAT.AI, Tyler’s favorite podcast appearance of the year, and his evolving LLM-powered production function. They also answer listener questions and conclude with an assessment of Tyler’s top pop culture recommendations from 2013 across movies, music, and books.
And one excerpt:
COWEN: That’s a unique experience. You have a chance to do Chomsky. Maybe you don’t even want to do it, but you feel, “If I don’t do it, I’ll regret not having done it.” Just like we didn’t get to chat with Charlie Munger in time, though he’s far more, I would say, closer to truth than Chomsky is.
I thought half of Chomsky was quite good, and the other half was beyond terrible, but that’s okay. People, I think, wanted to gawk at it in some manner. They had this picture — what’s it like, Tyler talking with Chomsky? Then they get to see it and maybe recoil, but that’s what they came for, like a horror movie.
HOLMES: The engagement on the Chomsky episode was very good. Some people on MR were saying, “I turned it off. I couldn’t listen to it.” But actually, most people listened to it. It did, actually, probably better than average in terms of engagement, in terms of how much of the episode, on average, people listen to.
COWEN: How can you turn it off? What does that say about you? Were you surprised? You thought that Chomsky had become George Stigler or something? No.
Fun and interesting throughout. If you are wondering, the most popular episode of the year, by far, was with Paul Graham.
Why is the quality of recorded classical music so rising? (from my email)
…hypotheses as to why we are blessed with the avalanche of fine new young musicians:
1. (I feel the evidence for this one is conclusive) Technology (e.g. YouTube) allows young musicians anywhere in the world to see what the world standard is. If you see someone performing at skill level X, which years ago you would have dismissed as out of reach, you know you, too, may be able to do it. The bar has been raised. Members of the LA Phil famously declared Boulez’s music “unplayable” a few decades back. Now it is standard repertoire. The global standard is now local, and musicians rise to the challenge.
2. (I feel the evidence for this one is less conclusive, but still strong.) The increasing pervasiveness of pedagogy. Decades ago, one assumed that the best teacher of violin playing (e.g.) was a great violinist. This is like assuming the best coach of running backs is a great running back. Over time, while the “exposure to a great player” tradition is still strong, a parallel tradition of “exposure to a great teacher” has emerged. These teachers understand biomechanics, clarity of terms in instruction, technical developments, etc. See e.g. Paul Rolland (RIP), another one of the Hungarian exiles, whose string teaching method is superb but who personally was not a major performer.
From anonymous, someone in the world of classical music…
My classical music listening for the year 2023
2023 has been one of my very best years for classic music listening. I’ve discovered an unusually high number of excellent recordings, and made a lot of progress in understanding many composers better. Most of all, that would be Bach, Scriabin, Byrd, Handel, Robert Ashley, and Caroline Shaw, but by no means exhausting the list. For whatever reasons, I’ve just had an immense amount of emotional energy to put into these discoveries.
I thought I would write up a list of my favorite new recordings, but there are too many of them. Here are just a few:
Handel, The Eight Great Suites and Overtures, Francesco Corti. My whole life I’ve preferred these for piano, say by Richter. Corti is converting me to the harpsichord versions.
Frank Peter Zimmermann, Bach, sonatas and partitas for solo violin, volumes one and two. These are some of my favorite works to buy multiple versions of. I started off preferring the Milstein recordings, which still are wonderful. Last year went through a Biondi phase, now am enamored of these. I never tire of these pieces.
Monteverdi, Vespro Della Beata Vergine, conducted by Raphaël Pichon, covered here by the NYT. Monteverdi’s greatest work, and this recording has been receiving special praise from many quarters.
Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma!, the complete score (for the first time recorded), John Wilson and Sinfonia of London.
Here is the Alex Ross New Yorker classical music recording list: “I can’t remember a year of so many pleasure-inducing, addiction-triggering albums.”
You also might consult these 2023 recommendations from Gramophone, the ones I have heard are excellent, the others are high expected value.
It is a marvel that such a revenue-poor, streaming-intensive musical world is generating so many new and amazing recordings for virtually all kinds of classical music. This is not what I was expecting five to ten years ago.
Another marvel is how many world-beating recordings are coming from young performers who do not have mega-strong preestablished reputations. A lot of them I have never heard of before.
Most of all, I am pleased to see that beauty is proving so robust.
Merry Christmas everybody!
Denny Laine, RIP
My favorite non-classical music of the year 2023
I liked these best:
Lankum, False Lankum. Claims to be Irish folk music, but has ambient textures and is designed to alienate its core audience.
Yaeji, With a Hammer. A mix of English and Korean, house and hip hop. She lives in Brooklyn.
Boygenius, The Rest. Four songs, twelve minutes.
Christine and the Queens, Paranoia, Angels, True Love. Three CDs, weird, still growing on me. By some French person.
Paul Simon, Seven Psalms. Now he is partly deaf, and he was already singing about dying.
Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer, and Shahzad Ismaily, Love in Exile.
Cecile McLorin Salvant, Mélusine. Her track record (and consistency) at this point is simply staggering, and you can put her on a par with the very greatest of female jazz vocalists.
Irreversible Entanglements, Protect Your Light. From a free jazz collective, still vital.
Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays the Beatles.
Ches Smith and We All Break, Path of Seven Colors. From the year before, but I discovered it this year, a blend of Haitian vodou and jazz.
I will be doing a separate post on classical music. What do you all recommend in these categories?
Addendum: And, via Brett Reynolds, here is a Spotify playlist for those.
My Conversation with the excellent Brian Koppelman
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Brian Koppelman is a writer, director, and producer known for his work on films like Rounders and Solitary Man, the hit TV show Billions, and his podcast The Moment, which explores pivotal moments in creative careers.
Tyler and Brian sat down to discuss why TV wasn’t good for so long, whether he wants viewers to binge his shows, how he’d redesign movie theaters, why some smart people appreciate film and others don’t, which Spielberg movie and Murakami book is under appreciated, a surprising fact about poker, whether Jalen Brunson is overrated or underrated, Manhattan food tips, who he’d want to go on a three-day retreat with, whether movies are too long, how happy people are in show business, his unmade dream projects, the next thing he’ll learn about, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Thank you. I have some very simple questions for you about the history of television to start with. I grew up in the 1970s and I’ve long wondered, “Why was TV so bad for so long before the so-called Golden Age?” Maybe you could date that to the 90s or the noughties, but why weren’t shows in the 70s and 80s better than they were? Would you challenge that premise?
KOPPELMAN: Well, I also grew up in the ’70s. I was born in ’66. I’m not sure that the hypothesis that it was bad is correct. It certainly wasn’t, in general, as an art form, operating on the level that cinema was operating on or the level that music, in part, was operating on during that time.
But if we look at, say, children’s television, I could argue that Jim Henson and Sesame Street, for what it was and aimed at what it was aimed at, was as important as any television that’s on today. I would say that Jim Henson moved the art form forward. He figured out a use case for TV that hadn’t really been done before, and he created a way of thinking about the medium that was really different.
Then, look, Hill Street Blues shows up in the ’80s and, I think, figures out how to use certain techniques of theater and cinema and novels to tell these TV stories. Like any other business, when that started to connect, then people in the business started to become aware of what was possible.
Yes, it was a function of three channels, to answer your question. Yes, in the main, of course, TV was worse. No doubt about it, but there were high points. I think those high points pointed the way toward the high points that came later. For me, NYPD Blue is the network show that’s fully on the level of any of these shows that came after. David Milch cut his teeth on Hill Street Blues.
There’s a wonderful book by Brett Martin, called Difficult Men, that’s about showrunners. It starts, in a way, with Bochco and Milch in that time period. It’s a great look into how this idea of showrunners created modern television. HBO needing something, all these business reasons underneath it, but how people who came up through, originally, Hill Street were able to go on and start this revolution.
COWEN: In your view, how good, really, was I Love Lucy? Is it just a few memorable moments, like Vitameatavegamin? Or is it actually a show where it’d be good episode after good episode, like The Sopranos?
And from Brian:
I don’t know Wes Anderson. I don’t know him, but I met him once. I love his movies, and I love that his movies are 90 minutes. The one time I met him, we were screening a film. He invited some people who happened to be in town, who he knew were film people, so I got to watch a movie with him. Afterwards, we were just talking about movies, and I said, “These movies of yours — they are 90 minutes,” and he said, “Yes. I found that the concepts I’m interested in don’t really support a journey that lasts longer than that.” He’s an incredibly disciplined filmmaker. I was like, “That makes total sense.”
Recommended, interesting and entertaining throughout.
Brazilian music bleg
What is new and good in Brazilian music? Say in the last ten years. Any genre. As usual, I thank you in advance for your wise counsel.
The culture that is Porirua (New Zealand)
The residents of a small city in New Zealand have been enduring sleepless nights for months due to drivers blasting Céline Dion songs from their cars in the early hours of the morning.
According to Agence France Press, car drivers in Porirua, a town of some 60,000 people, north of Wellington, have been loudly playing the singer’s tunes as late as 2 a.m.
They have been cranking up the volume on the Canadian songstress’s most famous ballads, including “My Heart Will Go On” and “It’s All Coming Back To Me Now,” according to AFP.
The nocturnal music-playing tends to begin as early as 7 p.m., continuing for many hours thereafter, Porirua Mayor Anita Baker told the news agency.
It’s part of the “siren battles” trend that has taken place in New Zealand for several years, which is particularly popular with indigenous people from the Pacific Islands.
These battles involve rival crews competing to blast the most powerful and clear sounds from loudspeakers attached to cars, or even bicycles, to win the title of “siren king.”
…They “love” Dion because they like “anyone with a high pitch and great tone in their voice,” the mayor explained to AFP.
Here is the full story, via the excellent Samir Varma. I have had very good fish and chips in Porirua.
*George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle*
By Philip Norman, a wonderful book of course. My “problem” (not with the book of course) is just how much John and Paul tower over the proceedings, from the very beginning. Here is one excerpt:
He [Hanton, an early drummer for the Quarrymen, a Beatles precursor] felt excluded from the others’ practice sessions at the art college and resented Paul, who was more than competent on drums as well as guitar and piano, for continually finding fault with his performances.
And:
John’s leadership remained unchallenged, but Paul was ever his zealous adjutant; convinced that they could be spotted by some talent scout at any moment, he called for maximum effort, however late the hour or sparse the audience. And Stu Sutcliffe’s bass playing, though now reasonably competent, was clearly never going to satisfy Paul.
Recommended, I will read every page. You can order here, Norman’s other bios are great too. And if you are wondering, a few of the most underrated George songs are the early instrumental “Cry for a Shadow,” “Don’t Bother Me,” and the much later “You.”