music

Cloud Burst

By in music, technology No Comments

Ted Gioia:

I’d love to think I was wrong on this, but there’s simply too much evidence to support Theory #2. If Apple wanted to offer exclusive music to subscribers it wouldn’t buy a label that records so many works in the public domain. This is the first warning sign.

My favorite offerings on the BIS label are the Bach cantatas recorded by Bach Collegium Japan under Masaaki Suzuki. (I recommended them last year in my article about the cantatas.)

The BIS label has also released the full Beethoven symphony cycle—performed by the Minnesota Orchestra under Osmo Vänskä, as well as lots of Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and other core contributors to the classical repertoires. However, unlike the cantatas, these other BIS albums are seldom the most esteemed versions on the market.

But how many music fans searching for Beethoven or Mozart on streaming are picky about conductors and orchestras? If the first search results are the Minnesota Orchestra are they really going to dig deeper to find the Berlin Philharmonic?

Of course, some unique offerings can be found on BIS—especially of obscure Nordic composers. But do you really believe that Apple made this acquisition in order to corner the market on Kalevi Aho or Geirr Tveitt?

The very idea is ridiculous.

If Apple wanted to offer exclusive music, they would cut a deal with Taylor Swift. They have the cash to do it. They wouldn’t waste time on locking up Kalevi Aho. That’s so obvious I shouldn’t even have to say it, but (given all the smoke and mirrors here), I really do.

So we’re clearly dealing with the bad Apple here. And the fact that the company refused to comment on the deal, when CNBC tried to get more details, is revealing. If they really were proud of their sexy new classical label, they would take the opportunity to boast.

In my opinion, Apple Music is the least worst option for streaming music in the background while doing something else. That’s not saying much, of course. I’ve hated everything about the streaming age since it began. For me, the last straw was going to one of my playlists and seeing that one of the songs had been greyed-out and couldn’t be played. OK, fine, that’s always been the condition of using their service. You don’t own any of the music you download through their app. You pay ten bucks a month for the privilege of listening to whatever they have to offer. But if they decide to stop carrying a certain artist, album, or track, you’re out of luck. In this case, I just went to Amazon, bought the mp3 for a dollar, downloaded it to my hard drive, and uploaded it back into my iTunes library. Ah, but you see, iTunes and Apple Music are not the same thing. When I tried to add the song back to the playlist, I got a pop-up telling me that if I persisted in adding this foreign element, the entire playlist would be removed from Apple Music and I would only be able to listen to it on this computer.

So, I finally took Charles Cooke’s advice and set up my Plex library:

Over time, I have ripped all my music, my movies, and my TV shows and put them into Plex. It doesn’t matter where the files originally came from — be it DVDs, downloads, or even my iPhone (for home movies) — Plex is agnostic as to the source of the material, and it’s capable of playing pretty much any filetype you throw at it. Once it’s up and running, adding new material is as simple as putting it into the relevant folder on your computer, and then entering the metadata so that it shows up nicely in your apps (this is largely automated, but occasionally you need to intervene and correct its guess).

Why do this? Well, because while Netflix, Hulu, Disney + and so on are terrific — and I subscribe to all three — I have no control over what they keep in their library, and how. There’s something nice about having a large collection of media that can’t be removed at some else’s whim, especially given that the scolds have started to scour old material and remove anything from the canon that they consider offensive. In effect, Plex gives me the best of both worlds: I don’t have 5,000 DVDs and CDs cluttering up my house, but I’m also not reliant upon mega-corporations for access to my entertainment. If you have the interest and a little technical know-how, I’d highly recommend setting it up.

By which I mean, I pitched the idea to the Lady of the House as the sort of fun technical project that she loves, and she set it up while I sat there looking pretty and offering moral support. The important thing is, though, that now I have all my music library in one location, backed up on a detachable hard drive, and synced up so that any track I purchase from any source goes straight into my library. I highly recommend it for any other music-preppers who rightly distrust the reigning corporate dictum of, “You will own nothing and like it.”

 

Wallowing Without Thought

By in books, music No Comments

The mode of listening that Brahms condemned Bruckner for fostering — wallowing without thought in a bath of sonority and emotion — is how audiences today largely listen to Bruckner symphonies, Bach fugues, Wagnerian opera, and Brahms.

— Jan Swafford, Johannes Brahms: A Biography

I feel seen, and not in a good way!

I’ve always been aware that I don’t “get” classical music on its own terms, and that’s my loss. I’m aware that there are all sorts of subtle nuances that my coarse understanding is incapable of detecting. Like many simpletons, I just know what I like, even if I have no idea what the composer was trying to communicate, or how a composition would have been understood in context. I imagine it’s like trying to follow a conversation in a foreign language, having to rely entirely on tone and body language to have the slightest sense of what’s going on. Well, life is full of trade-offs and opportunity costs, and that just happens to be one of mine.

He’s the One Who Likes All Our Pretty Songs

By in media/propaganda, music 1 Comment

Casey Chalk:

But who would accuse the favored bands of the last quarter-century of being truly innovative, of carving out new, uncharted territory? Most of them seem as artificial and intentionally mainstream as The Monkees. Does Maroon 5 even play their own instruments? And as much as I adore the Black Keys, a band that in its early years perfectly represented the frustrated, post-industrial tenor of Rust Belt Ohio, they are at their best when retreading, or modifying and improving, paths made by earlier blues rock musicians many years before. And they are self-aware and self-deprecating enough to make light of their wealth and mainstream fame.

But Creed, like many of the other post-grunge poser bands of the late 1990s—Nickelback, Puddle of Mudd, Staind—were simply jejune copycats of perhaps the last legitimately novel rock movement, the authentically counter-cultural grunge bands of the late 1980s and early 1990s, most of whom hailed from the Pacific Northwest.

If I were feeling like an ornery li’l cuss, I might argue that “the last legitimately novel rock movement” was actually the rap-metal hybrid generally known as nü-metal. In the late-80s and early-90s, there were a few cross-genre collaborations, like Run-DMC and Aerosmith, Anthrax and Public Enemy, and the Judgment Night soundtrack. Rage Against the Machine was probably the first band to make it big by combining elements of rap and rock, and given that they were basically Noam Chomsky’s politics set to music, they were widely acclaimed by music journalists. The same could not be said, to put it mildly, for those who followed in their wake around the turn of the century. Bands like Korn, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park and Hed PE were seen as the worst of both worlds. I have my theories about why this was so, but regardless, allowing that the whole debate over “originality” in such a mongrel beast as popular music is a fool’s errand to begin with, I think it’s still fair to say that the nü-metal bands were, if not original, certainly no less derivative than the punk/metal/alternative hybrid that we call grunge music. The fact that one style is glorified while the other is vilified tells you more about the agenda of the music journalists themselves, who often seem to suffer from sociology-envy, much to the detriment of their craft.

Which brings me to my real point, which is that Chalk is doing the same thing. He feels nostalgic for grunge music, and he wants to arrange a shotgun wedding between it and his national conservative/populist politics somehow. Grunge is vital because he sees it as a musical expression of the abandoned white working-class. If only they hadn’t been so hostile to organized religion, he sighs. Well, yes, that, combined with their predictable left-wing politics, is what makes this an exercise in fantastical narrative-crafting. Grunge was inextricably part of that first wave of political correctness in the early-90s and music journalism was right there with it. Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder were just as insufferably snobbish and full of themselves as their descendants are today.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Only aspiring commissars want or expect their favorite artists to reflect their own opinions back to them. Most of us have long since made our peace with the fact that the majority of the people whom we pay to entertain us are abject morons. (I made the mistake years ago of reading Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge, and my respect for the artists still hasn’t entirely recovered.) We wince when they share their vapid opinions on world events, and then get back to the important business of enjoying their acting, athleticism, or songwriting. It’s only when journalists in search of a narrative show up that we get these exercises in Procrustean plastic surgery. It’s fine, even laudatory, that Chalk loves grunge despite its inherent antipathy to his political ideology. The heart wants what it wants, and all that. That’s where it should end, though. Don’t try to reconcile the two and diminish them both in the process.

Superficial From Profundity

By in foolosophy, music No Comments

Charles C.W. Cooke:

Occasionally, I meet people who are unimpressed by Mozart. They insist that his music is “light” and “simple.” They are irritated by the myth-making around him. They’re so used to hearing about him that they’ve relegated him to being part of the wallpaper. I must confess that I’ve never understood this. In my view, Mozart isn’t a composer; he’s the composer. He’s the Shakespeare of the genre. He’s The One.

The writer Douglas Adams has an oft-repeated line that “Beethoven tells you what it’s like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it’s like to be human. Bach tells you what it’s like to be the universe.” I agree with Adams’s characterization of Beethoven, and I agree with his characterization of Bach. But he’s wrong about Mozart. Mozart doesn’t tell you what it’s like to be human, because Mozart barely was human. I forget who said that they didn’t believe in God but that Mozart made them wonder, but whomever it was, I understand it. The scale of Mozart’s talent is such that it’s almost impossible to accept at face value without wondering whether he was merely transcribing from somewhere else.

Cooke seems to have an Epicurean sensibility of his own, as evidenced by this and his previous appreciation of P.G. Wodehouse. I love Mozart and Wodehouse for the same reason: it’s a delight to watch virtuosos at play, especially when they’re so obviously enjoying themselves.

Oooh, I Wanna Make Up My Mind, But I Don’t Know Myself

By in foolosophy, music, the statusphere No Comments

Liz Pelly:

Meg Lethem was working at her bakery job one morning in Boston when she had an epiphany. Tasked with choosing the day’s soundtrack, she opened Spotify, then flicked and flicked, endlessly searching for something to play. Nothing was perfect for the moment. She looked some more, through playlist after playlist. An uncomfortably familiar loop, it made her realise: she hated how music was being used in her life. “That was the problem,” she says. “Using music, rather than having it be its own experience … What kind of music am I going to use to set a mood for the day? What am I going to use to enjoy my walk? I started not really liking what that meant.”

It wasn’t just passive listening, but a utilitarian approach to music that felt like a creation of the streaming environment. “I decided that having music be this tool to [create] an experience instead of an experience itself was not something I was into,” she reflects. So she cut off her Spotify service, and later, Apple Music too, to focus on making her listening more “home-based” and less of a background experience.

Such reckonings have become increasingly commonplace in recent years, as dedicated music listeners continue to grapple with the unethical economics of streaming companies, and feel the effects of engagement-obsessed, habit-forming business models on their own listening and discovery habits. In the process, they are seeking alternatives.

Ah, yes. Shallow people catch an unwelcome glimpse of self-awareness, immediately decide it must be “the system” that’s to blame.

Wendy Eisenberg, a musician and teacher who recently deleted their account with Napster Music (formerly called Rhapsody), put it this way: “The one thing I’ve noticed since divesting is that music sounds better to me because I’ve put in the work to either locate it on a hard drive or download it from a friend’s Bandcamp or something. And every time I listen to it, even if it’s just on the way to work, I can hear the spiritual irreverence of that choice. And so it doesn’t feel like I am just receiving music from some distant tastemaker. But it seems like I have some relationship to the music, of ritual, which is where I come to it as a practising musician.

“Taking the extra step to load it on to my phone, or the extra step to flip over the tape, or put the CD on in the car, it feels like something that I’m doing, rather than something I’m receiving,” they continue. “And that sense of agency makes me a more dedicated and involved listener than the kind of passive listening-without-listening that streaming was making me do.”

She’s “put in the work,” the spiritually irreverent work, of searching through a file folder or clicking a download button, which is categorically different from compulsively thumbfucking a smartphone. The labor of ejecting a cassette or inserting a CD, the absence of which was the only thing preventing her from, you know, really hearing the music, man. Who says there are no heroes anymore?

I feel like an elderly farmer, watching kids come home from college in the big city for the weekend and rhapsodizing about how authentic and spiritual and mindfulness-inducing it must be for me to work so closely with nature. In reality, streaming music is too common to be special anymore, so the status-obsessed have to find new ways to signal their elevation above the masses. When technological abundance reaches the wrong sort of people, you have to romanticize the inefficient and inconvenient ways we used to do things. Get rid of your dishwasher, turn off all your electronic devices, and have musicians come play chamber music live in your living room if you really want to live deep and suck the marrow out of life.

Like most people who have used a pencil to fix a spaghetti-pile of unwound cassette tape, or who have lugged a small briefcase of compact discs around the car, I appreciate the ease and convenience of streaming. My smartphone is essentially a glorified mp3 player anyway. I have several thousand of my own songs in Apple Music, either bought as digital downloads or uploaded from CDs, organized into playlists. If I don’t feel like listening to any of those, I can just pick a song or a genre and let the algorithm do the work of finding whatever it considers to be related music. I’ve discovered lots of interesting new music this way. How is this “distant tastemaker” any different from the ones who decide which songs get played on the radio station you listen to, or from the ones who choose which bands get featured in the music magazines and websites you read? As always, the relevant question when faced with stupid romantic fantasies is “Compared to what?” The previous status quo wasn’t more authentic; you simply had fewer options. I’m sorry your digital agoraphobia prevents you from appreciating that.

That Day of Tears and Mourning

By in books, music No Comments

Thirty years before, when Leopold Mozart saw what his son was capable of, he determined to show the world what he declared a miracle of God, thereby to turn the world to thoughts of God’s miracles, also thereby to profit from this one. Now Leopold’s son was dead at not quite thirty-six years old, having surpassed nearly all men in his art and on the brink of surpassing himself in unimaginable ways. He had been named Theophilus, “beloved of God.” But it turns out that the gods do not care. They do not care. The gods, nature, whatever it was that made Mozart, had indifferently created a miracle, and indifferently let it be erased long before its time. Ah, that day of tears and mourning!

— Jan Swafford, Mozart: The Reign of Love

I got this book for Christmas last year and have only just finished it. I don’t think I’ve ever taken so long to finish a book. Partly, that’s due to having to pause throughout and listen to the compositions being described. Mainly, though, this is one of those books that’s made for luxuriating in. Swafford is a great storyteller, and Mozart is always an antidote to the mean and sickly minds of the everyday world. Highly recommended.

1 2 3 4›»