Scott Timberg's Blog, page 33

Jeremy Denk Responds re The Classical Style

MUSICOLOGISTS will already have seen this, but the rest may enjoy this defense from pianist Jeremy Denk, who conceived and wrote the libretto for The Classical Style (An Opera of Sorts.) The opera was performed last month at the Ojai Music Festival. I was one of a handful who were frustrated by it. Another was Los Angeles musicologist Kristi Brown-Montesano; Denk is responding to her. (Her critique is not quite the same as mine, though we do overlap in some fronts.)

Denk’s main point seems to be that he did not mean to be anti-intellectual in his portrayal of a nebbish academic:

I was saddened, and not a little astonished, to see this response to The Classical Style. After having written a libretto based on Charles Rosen’s music-analytical tome, arguably the nerdiest opera ever written, to be accused of “American anti-intellectualism” in the comments is … strange?

He also gets into some of the concerns of my dissent, in which I said the opera was frivolous and insular.

I totally agree with you that opera is a “humanist genre,” and one of the great humanist gestures is to laugh at ourselves. I don’t think it’s a stretch, either, to imagine that Beethoven/Mozart/Haydn might be mystified by the current jargon of musicological discourse.

I’ve said before that despite my disappointment with this piece, I have a lot of respect for Denk, and his willingness to respond to criticism in a civil way reinforces my sense.

 

Publishing’s Shrinking Attention Span

THE Scottish novelist Val McDermid, who has sold 10 million books, says she wouldn’t have a career in today’s relentless marketplace. One of the things the Internet and the superstar economy have done is to shrink our already shrunken attention spans further, and that’s doubly true in the culture industries.

Crime writer McDermid, best known for her Dr. Tony Hills books, tells the Telegraph that these days, publishers want an instant hit, or a big award, or writers get cut loose. It’s part of a larger collapse of the midlist writer or artist and a still larger threat to the middle class of the creative class. Says McDermid:

Back in the day when I started you were still allowed to make mistakes. You got to make your mistakes in public, in a way. I think the world was a more forgiving place when I started my career, in the sense that we got time and space to develop as a writer… If you don’t make the best-seller list, if you don’t get shortlisted for any prizes, it’s goodbye.

Literary agent Jonny Geller told the paper something similar:

It’s never quite as bleak as that but publishing is a lottery. What they are doing is putting big bets on some unknowns and it’s all or nothing. There’s a whole mid-range of novels that don’t have a hook or spectacular angle that would have been published five years ago, but fewer publishers want to take the risk.

We’ve had famous and celebrity writers for centuries now. But much of publishing seems to be joining Hollywood and the rest of the US and UK economies in a march toward a winner-take-all culture. Part of me wonders, what took them so long?

The Trouble With Opera

IS it more prominent than ever, or disappearing from American eyes and ears? It may be some of both, in a time in which opera is played in movie theaters and opera companies struggle to survive.

An aptly ambivalent story by Mark Swed in the Los Angeles Times looks at the strange predicament of American opera in 2014. Things were looking fine for a while, he says. “But during the final days of winter, a deadly opera virus hit. The first case was discovered in Southern California, threatening to fell San Diego Opera… Now, the virus has crossed the country. Metropolitan Opera General Manager Peter Gelb recently told the Guardian newspaper in England that opera as an art form was in trouble.”

In some ways, things are lively and dynamic, he writes.

Opera has never had a wider or more anarchic reach. You can’t escape it. Opera is broadcast in cinemas and at Times Square in New York. Opera pops up on the streets, in parks and at clubs. Museums mount operas, often with the intention of reinvention. There have been opera performances of late in grocery stores and banks as well as at a wax museum in New York and Union Station in Los Angeles. Symphony orchestras everywhere do it. Hipsters in Brooklyn do it.

For what it’s worth, in the last year or so I’ve seen one of the most thrilling (Invisible Cities) and most frustrating (The Classical Style) operas of my life.

Swed’s story is well worth reading. And we’ll be curious how the trouble in San Diego, New York and elsewhere works out in the medium term.

 

 

 

Music in the Age of Streaming

THE battle between artists and indie labels on one side and gigantic tech corporations on the other has taken on a sharp pitch. A New York Times story serves as a good summation of the terms of the fight, and gets at how it hits indie record labels in particular.

Executives and advocates for the indies say they are vulnerable to strong-arm tactics by Internet giants like YouTube, which has recently threatened to block some labels’ videos unless they sign new licensing deals. Like the standoff between Amazon and the book publisher Hachette, the dispute has crystallized a fear that access to the online marketplace controlled by a few has become a privilege affordable only by the biggest and richest players.

“In the growth of the Internet, what was to be a utopian leveling of the playing field, a democratization for all, what is actually happening is a form of cultural apartheid,” said Alison Wenham, chief executive of the Worldwide Independent Network, an umbrella group for small labels.

Specifically, the current fight has a lot to do about music streaming and especially the new YouTube streaming service Google is launching.

The YouTube battle involves a long-delayed effort by the online video giant to develop a paid, advertising-free premium version to compete against subscription music services like Spotify, Rdio and Beats Music. YouTube, a division of Google, has made licensing deals with Universal, Sony and Warner, the three major labels, but it has stalled with the independents, which contend that YouTube has offered them inferior terms.

One of the groups that understands these issues the best is Content Creators Coalition; the CCC staged a protest in New York the other day,  and “picketed Google’s office in Chelsea, playing New Orleans-style marches on horns and carrying signs like “Economic justice in the digital domain” and “What YouTube pays? Nothing.”

The story quotes the great avant-guitarist Marc Ribot (pictured): “If we can’t make enough from digital media to pay for the record that we’ve just made, then we can’t make another one.”

Working for Free, Pro and Con

AMAZINGLY, there are still gurus urging creatives that working for free — for for-profit companies — is a good “branding” move. An article in the Financial Times describes some who believe in the great opportunities of the digital age, and says that asking for — and receiving — free labor has continues to increase.

But as these trends have become more entrenched, the backlash has become more fierce. The blogosphere is replete with much-tweeted tirades from those who have simply had enough. Some workers have deployed their creative talents to denounce the practice, for example by producing witty manifestos and flow-charts to help you decide whether to accept commissions for no pay. A much-shared email exchange by humorist David Thorne ad­dresses the debate. Other detractors have even embraced their own motto: “If you’re good at something, never do it for free,” as spoken by Batman’s nemesis The Joker in the film The Dark Knight.

The piece describes the stop-working-for-free fight waged by British music journalist Barney Hoskyns — whose history of Los Angeles music, Waiting for the Sun, is absolutely first-rate. Says Hoskyns: “If you allow yourself to be seduced by the myth that your unpaid labour will ‘look good on your CV’, try to see that you jeopardise not only the welfare of your replaceable elders but your own long-term future.” You’ve basically said that your work has no value.

The whole notion that we should give our work away — in some ways the logical end-point of the “information wants to be free” movement – spells very bad short- and long-term implications for the creative class.

“The Disruption Machine” and the Arts

Jill Lepore’s New Yorker article, “The Disruption Machine,” which looks at one of the key fallacies of the digital crowd, has become much discussed. Her challenge to a theory that describes how newer, smaller companies destroy old ones may not seem to relate to the world of arts and culture. But these things are intimately connected. “Disruption theory” is in some ways an extension of Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” (the original name for my book about the creative class); it’s something of great interest to your humble blogger.

Lepore’s piece is worth reading in full, but I want to concentrate on one of her concluding points, where she argues that, “Innovation and disruption are ideas that originated in the arena of business but which have since been applied to arenas whose values and goals are remote from the values and goals of business.” Here she goes:

People aren’t disk drives. Public schools, colleges and universities, churches, museums, and many hospitals, all of which have been subjected to disruptive innovation, have revenues and expenses and infrastructures, but they aren’t industries in the same way that manufacturers of hard-disk drives or truck engines or drygoods are industries. Journalism isn’t an industry in that sense, either.

Doctors have obligations to their patients, teachers to their students, pastors to their congregations, curators to the public, and journalists to their readers—obligations that lie outside the realm of earnings, and are fundamentally different from the obligations that a business executive has to employees, partners, and investors. Historically, institutions like museums, hospitals, schools, and universities have been supported by patronage, donations made by individuals or funding from church or state. The press has generally supported itself by charging subscribers and selling advertising. (Underwriting by corporations and foundations is a funding source of more recent vintage.) Charging for admission, membership, subscriptions and, for some, earning profits are similarities these institutions have with businesses. Still, that doesn’t make them industries, which turn things into commodities and sell them for gain.

Truer words have never been spoken.

Eric Fischl and Steve Martin

THE artist and comedian will speak tonight at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica, part of what’s shaping up to a strong series called The Un-Private Collection. Fischl’s memoir, Bad Boy: My Life on and Off the Canvas, is fascinating not only about the path of an artist, but about the strange cultural spot we find ourselves now. Here’s something he told the LA Times when the book came out:

My primary thing is to make a painting, not necessarily to make a painting to sell for gazillions of dollars. But somehow the market has it such that nobody talks about talent anymore. It’s almost politically incorrect to talk about an artist having talent… The price tag has replaced it, and it’s certainly not a critical dialogue. It’s just… a symbolic thing where it means the person who sells for the most money is the best artist.

There’s also a show of Fischl’s work opening in LA.

 

 

 

“American Top 40,” Poptimism and Winner-Take-All

IS it possible to hate Casey Kasem? Probably not. His show was a lot of fun, and he was the voice of Shaggy. But his death is being received in an odd way that’s unfair to him and wrong about the way culture, popularity and economics work. In short, he’s being drafted into a war in which he never fought.

My new story in Salon gets into some of this. Prepare to see your humble blogger denounced as pernicious, elitist, indier-than-thou rockist.

Anyway, I especially welcome comments on this one.

Q & A with Nightmares on Wax

NIGHTMARES on Wax is not a horror movie, but one of the best electronica bands too many people have never heard of. A collage of dub, R&B, and trip hop, mixing recorded beats with live instruments, the British collective headed by George Evelyn is somewhere between Curtis Mayfield and Massive Attack. They’ve covered a lot of ground over the years.

The group performs in Los Angeles Sunday night at the Fonda Theatre. Evelyn – aka DJ Ease – is also the subject of a new documentary, which you can watch here.

CultureCrash corresponded with Evelyn via email.

Q: You came out of a Leeds scene that most Americans don’t know much about; we tend to know the city for the Who album and Gang of Four. What was happening there when you were developing your sound, and how did it shape your early stuff? Did Bristol bands like Massive Attack or Portishead have an influence?

A: My Leeds influence was mainly based around reggae sound systems in the late 70′s to early 80′s , then when hip hop came to meet in 82 that changed my world , it also tied into the DJ thing, which reggae sound systems had given to me earlier. So growing i was into battling, be it Dj ing or break dancing . So through hip hop Djing came my obsession for finding records/cuts/breaks which opened up my horizon to all kinds of music. Through talking with Daddy G from Massive attack we came up through the same background and around the same time DJ wise . so our backgrounds are quite close, Portishead came much later.

Q: You have a song called “70s 80s,” about a time when “everybody’s head was gettin’ shaved or spiked.” Was that period musically formative to you?

A: Yes! would i say all my upbringing was musically informative to me , you could not get away from music and it’s importance when i was growing up, which is why we wrote 70′s 80′s.

Q: How did the documentary happen?

A: Warp came up with idea to do it , all i had to do was tell the story , easy !

Q: Your music is a mix of electronic/pre-recorded stuff and live playing. How do you decide which is which, and how do you get the balance right?

A: I’m always searching for the balance in music , my mission is to create the perfect marriage between analogue and digital , the mission continues.

Q:Recent years have been tough on the rock musicians I know, as recording sales have fallen. The electronica universe may be different, and driven more by club and DJ gigs. How has it worked out for you and the musicians you know?

A: I know it’s not as easy as it maybe was in the past, but why should you not have to work hard and be pushed in what you do? At the end of the day this is something in love and things are always gonna come along to challenge that, but my love is my love whether i sell records do gigs or not , i will still make music for me . It is a real blessing to be paid anything for something that you love , better still it;s blessing to find something that you love.

Q: What kind of music — new or old — are you listening to with pleasure these days?

A: The album I’ve been plugging is a artist called Sangdo from Chicago he’s gotta  album called Rochina 2 go check it out , also the Acid Mondays who have done a remix on the deep down edition are doing some incredible productions of their own.

peace

Ease

Jazz and Starbucks

WHO listens to jazz these days? Besides a small, dwindling number of purists, almost anyone who goes to a chain coffee shop, it seems. Are they really listening? Those are some of the questions music historian Ted Gioia gets into in a fascinating essay in The Daily Beast, in which he talks about the mostly mid-century jazz that plays in Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts and, soon, Peet’s:

What’s going on here? Even as total album sales shrink, jazz shrinks faster—and now represents a tiny 2 percent of album purchases. Many high-profile jazz artists struggle to sell more than 10,000 copies of their new releases. Yet as jazz disappears from the mainstream culture, it dominates the ambiance at eateries, and especially coffee shops.

It’s happening, he expects, because jazz now signifies “classy” in commercial settings.

Some day a smart cultural historian will trace how this happened, and it will certainl be a strange and surprising story. Jazz originated as the music of the underclass and the impoverished, but these days you hear it in the background of commercials for luxury cars and other high-end merchandise. Jazz is perceived as the music of the educated—and what an amazing attitudinal change that is! When I was learning about the music, it was excluded from most schools and universities. During my 21 years of formal education, not one of the institutions I attended had a jazz studies program.

We’re left with the question of whether this is good or bad for the music. Ted thinks, for instance, that jazz has won the battle to seem “culturally significant,” but that it’s traded that for its former reputation for pleasure.

And jazz’s status as coffee achiever is happening in a time in which it’s hard to find jazz on the radio, on television, or anywhere else outside the realm of specialists.

This piece had a lot of depth – please check it out.