The Loose Filter Project

Filter bubbles - pt. 2

In a previous post I talked about the filter bubble I've created for myself in terms of my classical music world view, and resolved to search out other voices that would add to a mostly one-sided discussion. It's been tough because there aren't many folks outside the classical music world writing about it, but here are a few interesting perspectives.

MetaFilter - classical music is not a big discussion topic on the blue, but a few posts have generated some great discussions and sobering perspectives. For example, from this thread:

Great orchestra sounds incredible, and is an experience not to be missed; no doubt. But am I sad that a member of the orchestra gets paid only $40k for their part time work doing something that they love, which is about what the average full time American makes? Not exactly. Is it right to think that Joe Cellist is a truly fundamental piece of any given local music scene? No. - felix

 

West Coast Reading

Until recently most of my regular music reading tended to skew towards the East Coast. Many of my favorite bloggers, journalists, and musicians are based in New York, and it is, of course, the epicenter for innovative new music happenings, so it is completely understandable that happenings in other parts of the country aren't on their radar. With that in mind, I'm sharing some great sources for West Coast arts news.

My favorite is the Los Angeles Times' fantastic arts blog Culture Monster. It covers everything from architecture and graffiti to the LA Phil and the Hollywood Bowl. Recent posts included an interview with David Lang and a profile of Eric Whitacre.

For Bay Area music news there's the San Francisco Classical Voice. It's a great source of concert listings for smaller ensembles and one-off shows as well as profiles and interviews of local musicians. I blogged previously about this interview with Michael Morgan. If you were in town last weekend you could have caught this concert featuring cellist Zoe Keating and the Magik*Magik Orchestra.

As far as music critics go, there's none better than Joshua Kosman. He opines about the Philadelphia Orchestra and City Opera debacles here.

An interesting way to read a poem

Via the American Academy of Poets, here is a wonderful Whitman poem presented using Poem Flow:

 

Kinda fun.  More poems here.

John Cage Quote of the Day 8

        At all costs inspiration

must be avoided which is to say

act in such a way that inspiration

doesn't come up as an alternative

but exists eternally.

 

from 45' For A Speaker

John Cage Quote of the Day 7

Rhythm is not arithmetic. 

from 45' For A Speaker

Check please

In case you missed it, here is Proper Discord's contribution to Drew McManus's Take a Friend to the Orchestra project. He shares his experiences attending orchestral concerts with non-musicians, and the results are pretty much what you would expect. If the show was good, his guests enjoyed it; if it wasn't, they didn't.

PD explodes (IMHO) the argument that suggests that audience members have to have technical musical knowledge to enjoy musical structures like sonata form. His guests either liked the show or they didn't, and didn't need a technical explanation to justify their reaction. It's like eating out, PD says:

When you’re sitting in a restaurant and your food shows up cold, you don’t care why it wasn’t cooked properly. You just wanted it warm.

(previously)

 

Read this blog: Proper Discord

I recently discovered a terrific blog, Proper Discord: Trouble With Classical Music, and wanted to pass the link along.  Great stuff.

What's wrong with classical music, part 8 billion and oh hell I lost count....

The perenniel topic of "what's WRONG with classical music??" surfaces again in a thoughtful blog post over at 3QuarksDaily.  I agree and disagree with much of what Colin Eatock mentions in that piece (and am frustrated by some of the common misperceptions perpetuated in it), but it's excellent discussion fodder and it generated a  fairly interesting conversation in this thread over on Metafilter.  Food for thought.

If you haven't heard, Alex Ross has another fabulous new book out

Alex Ross hits another one out of the park (at least that's my opinion about 1/3 of the way through, and I don't see things falling off) with his new book Listen To This.  What's really fantastic about the book, aside from all of the great specifics, is the general philosophical approach to musical art that Ross takes in his commentary, explanation, discovery, etc.--he simply loves music, all of it, and makes no a priori distinctions about what can or can't be good.

Excellent overview from the New Yorker here.

There is even a FREE online audio guide on his website.

Read this, soon.

"And that is like joining a biker gang; that is."

John Waters speaks brilliantly about contemporary art and morality.   NSFW language at the end.

"... most people have great contempt about contemporary art and I find that hilarious because I did a piece, it said "contemporary art hates you."  And it does hate them because you can’t see it.  You don’t know the magic trick; you haven’t learned the vocabulary, you haven’t learned the special way of seeing something that changes it.  And that is like joining a biker gang; that is."

My wife and I had a conversation about this statement, and she felt that is was a bit unfair.  She feels that while many people may feel that contemporary art is couched in a language they don't understand, most artists aren't looking to deliberately mock or confuse their audience.  Rather, it is often self-imposed barriers to the perception of contemporary art that gets in the way.

Band music on the radio

Scott Stewart at Emory University does a terrific summer radio series featuring works for band and wind ensemble on WABE in Atlanta.  Entering its fourth year, SUMMER WINDS is well worth a listen--and the first show is TONIGHT, so tune in here at 9:00 Eastern time to hear some goooood music.  The show will run on Tuesday nights from July 20 to August 31.

Also, if you do give the show and listen and enjoy, please be sure to give the station some positive feedback here so that they know this show is desired and enjoyed!

Why band music matters

From Steve Layton at the always excellent Sequenza 21, a great essay about the modern American wind band and its (earned but unrecognized) place in concert musical life, in the form of a review of several recordings.  A taste:

I had a teacher who once said that the sound of a symphony orchestra was one of the great achievements of Western civilization. Whether that’s true or not is open for debate, but there seems to be no question that the survival of orchestras in small to medium markets in the United States is in doubt. There are also artistic questions about the viability of the model that makes a symphony orchestra the center of a town’s musical life. Wind music, whose players are more plentiful than string players, and whose audiences tend to be more open to new music and new artistic situations, can assume a more central role than it has in most places now.

All of the pieces are in place, then, for bands to play an important role in the revitalization (or continued growth, depending on how you see the current situation) of concert music in the United States. What may be needed are artists, presenters, and patrons with the will and the imagination to re-invent musical life in their cities and towns.

Great art needs a great audience

Poet Patrick Gillespie makes an impassioned argument ("Let Poetry Die") against institutional benevolence sustaining poetry, and his comments and insights hold true to a great degree for concert music as well.  He perceptively notes that the audience for great art is actually part of great art:

Monroe’s stance excluded the general public from the evolution of art, but as Walt Whitman wrote, great poetry isn’t possible without a great audience, and if the audience is excluded from the development of a given art form, then it will no longer reflect the audience’s own innate greatness. And that is precisely what has happened. The general public no longer turns to contemporary poetry because it ceases to find itself, its greatness, reflected in that poetry. The general public has been excluded.

He comes to a fairly strong conclusion along the way:

The best thing that could happen to poetry is to drive it out of the universities with burning pitch forks. Starve the lavish grants. Strangle them all in a barrel of water. Cast them out. The current culture, in which poetry is written for and supported by poets has created a kind of state-sanctioned poetry that  resists innovation. When and if poetry is ever made to answer to the broader public, then we may begin to see some great poetry again – the greatness that is the collaboration between audience and artist.

While I think that great music has certainly been composed in the past 60 years, I also believe we have lost much because of a commitment to narrow, self-reinforced artistic perspectives that in many ways disrespect the audience.  And how long has it been since American concert music could credibly be described as a "collaboration between audience and artist"?  Ever?  Gillespie's whole essay is here.

The everlasting blockbuster: why Michael Bay would beat Beethoven in a cage match

An excellent recent essay from The Economist, "A World of Hits," explores how the ever-increasing world of choice brought by the internet has given blockbuster hits, those cultural juggernauts so many discerning audience members loathe, more cultural and financial dominance, not less:

In “Formal Theories of Mass Behaviour”, William McPhee noted that a disproportionate share of the audience for a hit was made up of people who consumed few products of that type. (Many other studies have since reached the same conclusion.) A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read “The Lost Symbol”, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.

This explains why bestselling books, or blockbuster films, occasionally seem to grow not just more quickly than products which are merely very popular, but also in a wholly different way. As a media product moves from the pool of frequent consumers into the ocean of occasional consumers, the prevailing attitude to it—what Hollywood folk call word of mouth—can become less critical. The hit is carried along by a wave of ill-informed goodwill.

This is a problem.  As the essay further explains, it used to be that companies could make money on more obscure cultural offerings because there were fewer choices and something a little more narrow in appeal and/or risky in subject matter would be guaranteed at least a fair-sized--and therefore profitable--audience.  Not so much anymore.  It raises a specific possibility of how all of the creative freedom brought by the internet could be substantially harmful to creative work of substance.  It's excellent food for thought, read it here.

Loving audio: the Third Coast International Audio Festival

The Third Coast International Audio Festival (TCIAF) is an annual and 0n-going celebration of the best documentary and feature work produced worldwide for radio and the internet.  From the site:

TCIAF was created by Chicago Public Radio in 2000 to support producers and other artists creating audio documentary and feature work of all styles and to bring this fresh and vital work to audiences throughout the world.

There are some really, really fantastic audio programs here, lots to listen to--I recommend starting with their most recent broadcasts or their audio library.  Enjoy.

Art of work

Alain de Botton is concerned that the activity that occupies most of our waking moments - work - is being ignored by our artists.

We need an art that can proclaim the intelligence, peculiarity, beauty and horror of the modern workplace and, not least, its extraordinary claim to be able to provide us, along with love, despite current economic mayhem, with the principal source of life's meaning.

It seems to me that TV workplace sitcoms have fulfilled that function for some time, though perhaps not on the level to which de Botton aspires.  He hopes other art forms will rise (or sink, depending of your view of the function of art) to the occasion. 

One can hope for a day when photographs of electricity conductors might hang over dining tables and when someone might write a libretto for an opera set in the sales office of a packaging firm.

What will the music of work sound like?  Antheil, maybe?

ClassicalTV: performing arts online

Offering a whole bunch of great content, ClassicalTV is a fun place to go and watch and listen.

To get you started, how about renowned Strauss specialist Erich Leinsdorf conducting Strauss, or percussionist Evelyn Glennie in concert, or Ingo Metzmacher conducting Ensemble Modern playing John Cage, or maybe Penderecki conducting his seventh symphony, or perhaps Benjamin Zander giving a conducting masterclass....

Enjoy.

Congratulations Calvin!

Modesto's own Calvin Lee was selected to the YouTube Symphony Orchestra.  Dude can play.

 

Read more here.

Performance time

The latest concert endeavor from The Loose Filter Project.  Special thanks to Greg Edwards at Off The Air Productions, and the CSUS Department of Music.  Hope to see you there.

Reducto!

Bull.  An amazing series of 11 lithographs in which Picasso "visually dissects the image of a bull to discover its essential presence through a progressive analysis of its form."  It's a Schenkerian analysis of an image - remarkable.

The power of music and dance

OK, it's a commercial, and it's a great one.  But it also shows--by dropping some dancers in the middle of a crowded train station and playing a fun mix of music--the power of music and dance to connect people immediately.  Watch the faces of the unaware onlookers, the smiles and laughs and little bits of joy everyone was engaged in for a few minutes, together:

Via. 

Fighting for crumbs

A good NYT article on how the $50 million for the NEA in the stimulus package was, astonishingly, saved: Saving Federal Arts Funds: Selling Culture as an Economic Force.

While that's terrific, $50 million is only a tiny sliver of the total package, and look at the strength of influence and persuasion that had to be brought to bear to get even that.  This reminds me why one of my central artistic convictions is to engage with the culture I live in, and the people actually in it--not some idealized version I'd like to see, etc.  

It baffles me that so many people don't see how suffused with art their everyday lives are, that art is far from some liberal, elite, effete, condescending foolishness that practical people don't need to concern themselves with.  It is an important way that we share our experiences of the world with one another, it helps us develop and sustain community and empathy, it makes life more vibrant and enjoyable, etc. etc.  To those who pay attention, art is clearly important even without the powerfully persuasive quantitative arguments used to sway our congressional representatives.  I am astonished that we even have to say so, and dumbfounded that people had to argue so strenuously for crumbs.  But I am grateful for their efforts--read the article to know whom to credit.

Community creativity

The 2007 YouTube Video Awards were announced Friday, and this new community portal continues to fascinate. The nominees are here, and the winners here.

The winner in music is strangely compelling: Chocolate Rain. Among the music nominees be sure to watch Vegetable Orchestra and Harmonica + Beatbox.

A glimpse into a very different world....

....TV in America, 1960. Presented by radio station WFMU, here is a video clip of John Cage appearing on the popular TV show I've Got A Secret in January, 1960.

Reconsidering an important moral assertion in a masterful film

Stanley Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut, is an often overlooked masterpiece--the essay "Introducing Sociology: A Review of Eyes Wide Shut," by Tim Kreider makes this case quite convincingly, and illustrates much about the film most critics completely missed, including the important social messages that run throughout Kubrick’s work as a filmmaker.

Relish a Deeper Hum

Sarah Wyatt’s poems are hyper-clear experiences of reality that yield dense, rewarding, and resonant images. Each one is a microscope allowing us to see the glorious omnipresent interconnectivity (like prying a computer open and seeing the motherboard) found in even our most quotidian experiences.

Mind blowingly good

This is one of the finest commencement speeches I have ever read, it's by David Foster Wallace (one of my favorite writers). And because I know the term "commencement speech" isn't likely to inspire excited curiosity, here are a couple of choice excerpts to whet your appetite:

Calvin & Hobbes and social commentary

One of my favorite social critics is Bill Watterson, the artist/writer of the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip, which is of course the greatest comic strip ever in the history of comics. One of the great aspects of C&H is that, in addition to being fun, silly humor, many strips contain not-so-subtle social criticisms.

I present the dialogue from one here for your reflection:

The future of orchestras

There is an interesting article in the 8/21/05 Sunday NYTimes, called "New Overtures at the Symphony". It discusses some of the ways that America's major symphonies are trying to bring in audiences. As I've been on a soapbox about, this art form is in crisis, in more ways than just attendance. From the article:

Culture, paradigm shifts, and obstinance.

I just finished reading a terrific short essay in Wired magazine, by the novelist William Gibson. He's talking, essentially, about paradigm shifts in music making/listening brought about by technology. A short quote:

"Meanwhile, in the early '70s in Jamaica, King Tubby and Lee "Scratch" Perry, great visionaries, were deconstructing recorded music. Using astonishingly primitive predigital hardware, they created what they called versions. The recombinant nature of their means of production quickly spread to DJs in New York and London.

"Our culture no longer bothers to use words like appropriation or borrowing to describe those very activities. Today's audience isn't listening at all - it's participating. Indeed, audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital.