Sounds & Fury

Things Do Seem To Be Looking Up

Hot on the heels of this, comes this:

I've just seen a preview of How Music Works, a new [BBC] Channel 4 series presented by the composer and broadcaster Howard Goodall (it begins on 11 November). In spite of the vague media hum that surrounds it, I came to it expecting the worst. I saw actors in powdered wigs, moody shots of Salzburg and, for good measure, yet another clip of George Martin explaining why 'Yesterday' is a really good song. But I was wrong. Somehow, Goodall and Tiger Aspect, the company which has made the series, have convinced Channel 4 to screen four hour-long programmes which, rather than fretting about the supposedly minute attention span of the audience, actually take the time to impart some real information.

For musical novices ... the result is properly enlightening. Goodall relies on music rather than actors and whizzy graphics to do his talking and — wouldn't you know it? — those semi-tones perform brilliantly. Things fall into place. In one scene he illustrates the flattening of notes in melody by pushing the 16th century 'Coventry Carol' up against early blues. Believe me when I tell you that this is thrilling. I could suddenly see myself enjoying, or at least understanding, all kinds of music — folk! world! — that, in the past has had me frantically stuffing cheese into my ears. Patterns formed. In Goodall's able hands, the familiar (the five notes of the pentatonic scale) grows mysterious, and the mysterious (a Bulgarian folk song) more familiar.

Things do seem to be looking up. I'm fairly certain this series will make it across the pond, and into PBS's hot little hands, in short order.

RTWT here.

Richter Plays Haydn (Or Maybe Scarlatti And Haydn)

I'm no fan of the piano nor of the piano literature past Mozart, but way back in the '60s I made a trip to New York with a CP (child prodigy) pianist friend of mine to hear the great Sviatoslav Richter in recital, and came away slack-jawed with amazement. I never thought the piano could sound like that, nor a pianist play like that. In particular, his Beethoven was simply not to be believed. Richter came across as a veritable force of nature, and I was fairly blown away.

On the Classical Music & Opera Forum, one of the posters put up a YouTube link to Richter playing Chopin, and I was again blown away. Following, another poster mentioned a YouTube video of Richter playing a Beethoven sonata, and yet once again I was blown away even though there was some rather sloppy playing in that performance.

Then another video, or rather a series of videos, of Richter caught my attention; videos of a recital given in Japan in 1984. Haydn and Debussy were on the menu. Well, I'd never heard Richter do any Haydn, and even though I'm no particular fan of Haydn's work although I've huge admiration for his craftsmanship, I just out of curiosity wanted to hear what Haydn might sound like under Richter's hands.

Absolutely revelatory is what. What an astonishing performance! None of the music on those live-concert videos was familiar to me, and I would have sworn that the opening number was something by Scarlatti, but the video identifies it as something by Haydn. If that identification is correct, I think I just might start to love Haydn.

To audition those videos, begin here, and then continue through Parts 2, 3, and 4 (links listed on the YouTube page on the sidebar on the right). That will take you through the Haydn (but I still swear that opening number is by Scarlatti and not Haydn), and up to the Debussy which, I feel constrained to confess, even Richter could not make me love. On that last, your mileage may vary.

Operatunity

I by chance stumbled across this year-old PBS Brit documentary (caution!: link contains spoilers)* while TV channel surfing last night (I tend to do that whenever I'm bored silly). Really fascinating stuff, and not a joke the competition this documentary chronicles. If you've never seen it, look out for it.

Oh, and, yes, I picked the winner — or, rather, one of the two winners — right-off in the first round. The other one I picked and thought should have been one of the two winners was bypassed in the final round. Bad mistake. ENO's, that is, not mine.

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* Here's a non-spoiler version taken from the above link:

The English National Opera took on an unprecedented challenge: it would conduct a nationwide search to find someone with no operatic experience, who could be coached to sing in Verdi's "Rigoletto" on the stage of the London Coliseum side by side with world-class performers. The result is OPERATUNITY, the compelling human story of raw talents whose operatic dreams finally meet reality. First, a casting call across all of England introduces viewers to a colorful array of characters with secret passions for Puccini, Wagner, and Mozart. Regional auditions lead to a London workshop where the final six participants -- including an investment banker, a supermarket cashier, and a blind mother of three -- are selected and receive coaching in vocal and dramatic technique, as well as physical training and the fundamentals of stagecraft. Finally, OPERATUNITY follows [the two competition winners] from the nerve-wracking final days before the performance to curtain-up and the exhilaration of their operatic debut, combining real-life drama with the high theatrical drama and emotional intensity of grand opera.

The really surprising thing about this competition was that the two winners didn't end up doing what was originally planned for them to do.

No, not another word. If you want to know, and don't mind spoilers, click on the above link.

And Now For Something Completely Different And Off-Topic

Microsoft announced the RTM (final) release of its new browser, Internet Explorer 7, to the public on 18 October (it was available in Beta Release for about a year before that), and I downloaded and started to use it almost the same day (it will become an automatic Windows XP update beginning in November).

For those interested, it's a great browser with lots of new goodies, and generally much improved over Internet Explorer 6 which was released in 2001. The new, simpler User Interface takes some getting used to for those used to IE6, but the getting-used-to time for me was short, and I just love the new UI. Lots of people seem to be having trouble with IE7 (I subscribed to the IE newsgroup after downloading IE7), but I just know that's in large part because the morons simply didn't take the time to install it properly (critical because unlike, say, the Firefox browser which is just another application to Windows, Internet Explorer is an integral part of the operating system itself, and installing it improperly is tantamount to crippling the very thing that runs the computer), or have so many pieces of unauthorized crap, software and hardware, on their machines, or made so many unsupported "tweaks" to the operating system, that it's a wonder their machines are running at all.

Try IE7. You'll like it.

Trust me.

The Way To Do It

The Brit Guardian Unlimited has completed a major restructuring of its comprehensive coverage of the arts, and it’s a thing of beauty and marvelous to behold. Of particular interest is the reordering of its music coverage that now has separate sections for each music genre which automatically segregates coverage of classical music and opera and of jazz and blues from coverage of pop, rock, C&W, and other crap. It's the way to do it, and the way it should be done by every mainstream publication that pretends to authority in the music universe.

The Guardian may be unregenerately left-leaning politically, which is too bad, but in its arts coverage it's spot-on right (as in correct), and makes the arts coverage of mainstream dailies such as The New York Times look like it was put together by pretentious but purblind yokels.

Keeping Score

Along with, we'd guess, every blog in the cultural blogosphere, we received the following press release from the San Francisco Symphony, and what it's flogging is worthwhile enough that we here pass it along verbatim and without further comment beyond saying the main Keeping Score website as well as its adjuncts is superbly crafted and the content first-rate, so be sure to click on all links.

I work with the San Francisco Symphony and wanted to let you know that its interactive Keeping Score web site just launched. The web site, www.keepingscore.org, is a companion piece to the San Francisco Symphony’s Keeping Score television series on PBS which explores the stories behind classical music; the series features works by Beethoven, Stravinsky and Copland.

The web site allows you to dig into the score, listen as musicians share their insights, and learn about the lives of the composers, music theory and keys. The site gives an understanding of classical music thru the dissection of a score and the examination of the history, personal lives, and politics that created the music. You have to play with it to get a true sense of the capabilities, but here are some highlights from the section on Beethoven’s Eroica:

• Learn about key, themes and markup – as the Eroica Symphony score plays you can choose to show keys, themes and markup on the screen. A video of the San Francisco Symphony in concert plays in tandem while you explore the score.

• Beethoven’s deafness story – two video clips of Dr. Goodhill, from Hope4Hearing Foundation, simulate what Beethoven heard as he was going deaf and describes Beethoven conducting the 9th Symphony after he was deaf. Also included is a musical excerpt of how the 9th Symphony possibly sounded to Beethoven.

Each composer’s section on the Keeping Score web site launches a week before the program featuring them airs on television (Beethoven is already up and running as Keeping Score begins airing on PBS stations nationwide next week). Let me know if you’d like a demo of the web site or have any questions.

Some online tools to learn more about Keeping Score if you’re interested:

You can find out when Keeping Score airs in your city by clicking on the link below:

http://www.pbs.org/keepingscore/airdates.html

You can find trailers for the Keeping Score television series at: http://www.keepingscore.org/preview1.html

A Better Way

Terry Teachout of About Last Night, links to this blog post by off-off-Broadway theater director and blogger Isaac Butler of Parabasis who offers his thoughts on the subject of artists and copyright the nub of which goes:

I don't think an artist should have ownership of their [sic] work in the conventional sense of the term. I believe that art is a gift we [artists] give the world. Cheesy, I know, but think through the implications of the metaphor. When you give a gift, you don't own it anymore. The receiver of the gift owns it. So if art is a gift we give the world, the world owns that gift, not us.

Now I'm not saying people shouldn't be paid for their work. They should. They just perhaps shouldn't have as much control over what happens to it once it's out there in the world. Because as artists, the giving activity is the useful, helpful, growthful one. Having control over that gift once it's out there is selfish.

Well, Mr. Butler is quite right, of course. His notion is indeed cheesy. Limburger cheesy. But were that all it was it could be dismissed or ignored easily despite its, um, pungent aroma. The mindset it betrays, however, is more pernicious than pungent; a mindset that's utterly, even lethally, immoral, not to say lunatic: the artist — the creative genius — as selfless laborer in the service of others, the products of his labor and his genius not his but theirs.

The mind boggles.

I much prefer the great Orson Welles's idea about society's relation to the artist which idea I'm here forced to paraphrase because I heard it voiced by Welles decades ago, and haven't a clue as to where it might now appear in print, although in print somewhere I'm certain it must be.

In any sane and just society, declared Mr. Welles, once a year every member of the working and bourgeois classes would, by law, be compelled to take every unspent dollar in his possession, be it ten dollars or ten million; seek out an artist — any artist — and on his knees beg — implore — that artist to take the money from him so that something meaningful and worthwhile might be done with it.

There. That's much better, wouldn't you agree?

What's that? You wouldn't?

Why am I not surprised.

Featured Past Post #18 (Administrative Note)

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Culture As A Competition

In an article for The Guardian, critic Jason Cowley writes:

There was a time when, as Wordsworth wrote, 'Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.'

The culture is no longer so patient. In a time of information overload - of cultural excess and superabundance - our taste is being increasingly created for us by prize juries and award ceremonies. Art is beginning to resemble sport, with its roster of winners and losers and its spectacles of competition: the Oscars, the Baftas, the Brits. Indeed, the larger cultural festivals and prizes, such as the Venice Biennale, the Oscars and the Nobels, are consciously imitative of international sporting competitions like the Olympics.

RTWT here.

Déjà vu All Over Again II

And just when we thought we'd finally learned the sad lesson taught by operatic history, and with the reforms of Wagner showing the way moved forward in the art of opera (and simultaneously back to opera's original conception as dramma per musica) to the point where we were safe from peacocks like this:

The attraction for [bass-baritone Bryn] Terfel is working with and singing the music of living composers. "You can't beat that," he says. "That's the one thing I would like in future. I'm asked many times, 'What's left for you to sing?' I would like an opera to be written for my voice, with my personality in mind."

Apparently not.

Mozart knew how to accommodate such peacocks and still turn out the most profound realizations of opera as dramma per musica in the entire history of the art form.*

But that was Mozart.

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*As opposed to the music-dramas of Wagner which are in fact not opera as dramma per musica but its transfigured apotheosis with no concessions made to singers, all of whom were expected by Wagner (and today are still expected) to submit and devote themselves wholly to the requirements of the (music-)drama, not the other way round à la the Italian school.

Eschenbach To Leave The Philadelphia Orchestra

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 4:11 AM Eastern on 23 Oct. See below.]

Christoph Eschenbach, music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra since its 2003-2004 season, today announced a parting of the ways with the venerable ensemble.

"I look upon my past three years as Music Director ... with satisfaction and great pride," he said in a statement. "While I look forward to future endeavors, I will always take pleasure in the fact that I was a part of an exciting era for this great orchestra."

RTWT here.

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Update (4:11 AM Eastern on 23 Oct): More here and here.

McCreesh On HIP

In an interview in the Brit Telegraph, "early music" pioneer and conductor Paul McCreesh has this to say concerning "authentic" early music performances:

I get increasingly impatient with this naive stupidity of early music directors that they always have to claim to be right. If you really know this repertoire, really work at it, the thing that staggers you is how much we don't know. Even in repertoire that we think of being mainstream — Monteverdi's Vespers, for example — we simply don't know the answer to some fundamental questions. So this 'earlier than thou' mentality, where everything had to be more and more hair-shirt, was always either a musical neurosis or a marketing company neurosis.

The whole glory of classical music is that we constantly revisit it, reinvent it, redefine it. That's the fundamental definition of a classical work – it's strong enough to be constantly reinterpreted. 'Authentic' is simply a word I would never use.

RTWT here.

(Apropos, you might also want to give this previous S&F article a read.)

Gee, What A Surprise III

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 7:17 PM Eastern on 21 Oct. See below.]

Jack of all arts — journalist, critic, and blogger Terry Teachout of About Last Night — in his review for The Wall Street Journal (link not given because paid subscription required) of the play, My Name Is Rachel Corrie, writes in part:

Politics makes artists stupid. Take "My Name Is Rachel Corrie," the one-woman play cobbled together from the diaries, emails and miscellaneous scribblings of the 23-year-old left-wing activist who was run over by an Israeli Army bulldozer in 2003 while protesting the demolition of a Palestinian house in the Gaza Strip. Co-written and directed by Alan Rickman, one of England's best actors, "Rachel Corrie" just opened Off Broadway after a successful London run. It's an ill-crafted piece of goopy give-peace-a-chance agitprop—yet it's being performed to cheers and tears before admiring crowds of theater-savvy New Yorkers who, like Mr. Rickman himself, ought to know better....

Compare with the following excerpted from a piece written for this blog on 12 March:

Rachel Corrie was the 23-year-old leftist idealist — of the type that no less than Stalin himself characterized as "useful idiots" — who in 2003, as a member of a pro-Palestinian international activist group calling itself the International Solidarity Movement, took it upon herself to step between an Israeli bulldozer and a Palestinian house to prevent the house from being demolished by said bulldozer, and in the process was crushed to death. The play [My Name Is Rachel Corrie], based on Ms. Corrie's diaries and scattered other documents written when she was much younger, and on her eMail messages sent home from the Gaza Strip, is intended to be, in the words of Mr. Rickman, "a balanced portrait" of Ms. Corrie. "We were never going to paint Rachel as a golden saint or sentimentalise her," he said in 2005 in advance of the play's premier, "but we also needed to face the fact that she'd been demonised." And in the words of Ms. Viner at that same time, "We've tried to do justice to the whole of Rachel: neither saint nor traitor, both serious and funny, messy and talented, devastatingly prescient and human and whole."

I'm quite certain that both Mr. Rickman and Ms. Viner are sincere, and earnestly believe the play they jointly wrote reflects honestly those intentions. However, the very fact that their self-confessed intention was to write a play about a specific leftist heroine and martyr — a literal leftist poster girl — in a specific politically charged circumstance and context, who, as revealed by her own writings, was besotted by leftist social and political ideals, makes the declaration of those high-minded intentions by the leftist playwrights ironically and unwittingly reek of an advance apologia for the hagiographic, and makes the work they produced — text unread and sight unseen, and intended "balanced portrait" or not — instantly suspect as a genuine work of dramatic art.

I've stayed out of the blogospheric controversy over the [New York Theater Workshop's] decision to not mount the play only because I've, of course, not seen the play, nor have I access to the play's book, and therefore can't make informed comment on that decision; a lack of firsthand knowledge that apparently has not given pause to others in the blogosphere making comment on this business. As an uninformed conjecture, however — one I'd be willing to bet my last bippy is spot-on the money — I suspect the play is almost certainly something the NYTW should never have accepted for production in the first place because it's nothing other than an outright leftist hagiography masquerading as a work of dramatic art.

No further comment necessary.

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Update (7:17 PM Eastern on 21 Oct): The full text of Mr. Teachout's savage review of My Name Is Rachel Corrie can now be read here.

Atque In Perpetuum, Anna

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 8:02 AM Eastern on 20 Oct. See below.]

The inimitable Anna Russell, beloved of all Wagnerians, is dead at 94.

Atque in perpetuum, Anna. Ave atque vale.

Obituary can be read here.

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Update (8:02 AM Eastern on 20 Oct): New York Times obituary by Edward Rothstein.

Perfect!

And I really do mean perfect all round (with some reservations concerning the screenplay if it's too much or gratuitously different from the original book for the stage).

Helena Bonham Carter will play the diabolical meat-pie-maker Mrs. Lovett in [the film version of] Sweeney Todd. Director Tim Burton tapped Carter to co-star with Johnny Depp in the DreamWorks Studios and Warner Bros. co-production of the Stephen Sondheim musical. John Logan wrote the screenplay.

RTWT here.

(With thanks to Parterre Box for the link.)

Featured Past Post #17 (Administrative Note)

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More On The iPod Sensibility

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 2:43 PM Eastern on 18 Oct. See below.]

[Note: This post has been edited as of 7:59 AM Eastern on 15 Oct for clarity, and to correct certain infelicities of expression.]

My friend (and friendly foe), urban design professional and blogger David Sucher of City Comforts, writes:

I rarely link to my friend AC Douglas anymore ... because ACD has very wisely taken to eschewing commentary on urban design and is posting almost exclusively on music....

ACD disparages something he calls the "iPod sensibility" but oddly distinguishes it from the physical iPod itself. He says (and I may be misunderstanding him) that the problem is that the iPod is emblematic of "... an entire generation walking about out there that imagines what they're hearing through their iPod headsets is what music — genuine music; classical music — really sounds, and ought to sound, like."

OK. The idea is that if you don't hear music in the physical context for which it was originally written/performed, then you are not getting the correct program. Maybe so. But wouldn't that mean that, for instance, listening to any music on a record or CD also partakes of this horrible "iPod sensibility"?

First, and parenthetically, ACD commented at length and contra David on urban design in but a single post, in which post he (in)famously declared David a "sensible-shoes bourgeois." All other contretemps concerned architecture, not urban design, which latter domain is David's field of expertise but which expertise he perversely imagines extends to the domain of the former.

But to address the principal subject of David's post in response to this post of mine (which at the time of this writing has accumulated four updates, one of them expanding at some length on the content of the original post), he's not quite got the point of my remarks concerning what I've termed the iPod Sensibility. As David correctly understands and quotes me, the iPod Sensibility is one wherein one imagines that "what [one is] hearing through [one's] iPod headse[t] is what music — genuine music; classical music — really sounds, and ought to sound, like." David, however, misunderstands that the physical iPod itself is simply emblematic of that sensibility, as I took care to point out, not its substance.

David also doesn't seem to comprehend why that sensibility is so egregiously pernicious. It has nothing whatsoever to do with purist notions concerning music being performed "in the physical context for which it was originally written / performed" as David apparently thinks it does. It has entirely to do with, first, the inarguable physical (physical as in physics) fact that acoustic instruments — the type of instruments for which all classical music is written (and I here exclude entirely from consideration 20th- and 21st-century "classical music" written in whole or in part for electronic instruments as such music is neither of interest nor concern) — can never, at the present state of the art at least, sound like the live, electronically unprocessed thing no matter how good the electronics. The sound of acoustic instruments electronically processed, even at its very best, can be merely a simulacrum of the real thing, and, as I've described in detail in my post of August 2004, The Classical Music Concert, results in a musical experience markedly different from the musical experience of the sound of those instruments in live concert in a natural acoustic.

In the case of recorded music, that's true even when the electronically processed sound and the reproduction equipment (i.e., the equipment receiving the electronically processed signal, and converting it back into audible sound) are of the very highest accuracy, and the listening environment acoustically designed to best realize that reproduced sound, also as I've described in detail in my above linked August 2004 post. It's doubly true (and I was here tempted to say infinitely more true, but resisted) when the electronically processed sound is passed through reproduction equipment as risibly crude audio-wise as, say, an MP3 player and computer speakers, or worse — much worse — an iPod and its headset which, audio-wise, is the most risibly crude creature of the lot.

So, nothing at all to do with purist notions of "hear[ing] music in the physical context for which it was originally written / performed," or "listening to a string quartet or any chamber music [written to be performed and heard not in concert halls, but in relatively small private rooms] in a large symphony hall," or "watching a movie designed for a theater on a 27[-inch] screen," as David also put it, but rather to do with the physics of sound and of sound reproduction and reception, and our musical experience of heard music.

David concludes by writing,

I don't have any particular opinion about what they are doing at Zellerbach [Hall] but there is a larger issue at hand. It seems to me that it cuts across all media and arts. ACD objects to an "electroacoustic architecture system" not because he has heard the results there but because it will change (as it must, I assume) "the sound" and thus our experience of what the composer wrote. [...] But wouldn't the better test ... be whether it enhances the performance?

To which my answer is: quite impossible, almost by definition.

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Update (6:29 PM Eastern on 16 Oct): Composer Steve Hicken of Listen wrote here concerning the planned electronic enhancement of Zellerbach Hall, and my and Kenneth Woods' posts here and here, respectively, the following:

[On this matter,] Scott Spiegelberg has the authoritative last word [in his post here].

Excuse me? Is that supposed to be some sort of joke? Dr. Spiegelberg almost wholly miscomprehended both my and Kenneth Woods' objections to that planned electronic enhancement, and so his response was almost entirely non sequitur (the objections had nothing to do with HIP-like complaints), and didn't speak to the objections raised. I suggest that Mr. Hicken reread what both I and Mr. Woods wrote, and then reread what Dr. Spiegelberg wrote in reply.

Update 2 (2:43 PM Eastern on 18 Oct): On the Classical Music & Opera Forum, poster "Calvert" writes:

A propos the "Ipod Sensibility:" I heard a funny example of that, as reported by one of the quiz participants on a Met broadcast about a decade ago. The panelist had been at a performance of Elektra when Nilsson sang it in 1979 after her return to the Met. On the way out from the performance, he heard one young audience member say to his companion, "I was a bit disappointed in Nilsson. She sounds so much louder on my stereo at home." There's the Ipod Sensibility in a nutshell.

Indeed.

Perfect!

The iPod Sensibility Enters The Concert Hall

[Note: This post has been updated (4) as of 10:45 PM Eastern on 14 Oct. See below.]

It was bound to happen.

Berkeley's Cal Performances, one of the busiest arts presenters in the country, thinks it may have an answer [to the problem of concert hall acoustics]: It has endorsed the new world of sound enhancement, at least for the coming season, by installing an "electroacoustic architecture system" in Zellerbach Hall, its main venue. It involves lots of microphones and speakers, a supersonic mixing board, computers, and all sorts of digital equipment.

[...]

Robert Cole, the director of Cal Performances (and a widely admired conductor and musician), has decided that the 2,000-seat Zellerbach needs help if it is to offer a uniformly excellent acoustic environment for its wide range of recitals, chamber music, symphonic music, opera, theater, dance, world music and the rest.

Score another victory for pop culture.

O tempora! O mores!

RTW repulsive T here.

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Update (11:51 PM Eastern on 12 Oct): Galen H. Brown, contributing editor at Sequenza21, thinks "It’s been too long since [he] last debunked" my "painfully elitist postings," and writes:

Cal Performances, an arts presenter in Berleley [sic], CA, is installing and state-of-the-art amplification system in Zellerbach Hall, which is designed to compensate for the hall’s shortcomings and enable “a uniformly excellent acoustic environment for its wide range of recitals, chamber music, symphonic music, opera, theater, dance, world music and the rest.” ACD calls this “another victory for pop culture” and “repulsive.” First, I don’t see what this has to do with “the iPod Sensibility” aside from the fact that both use electricity. Second, pop culture has nothing to do with it – they’re not talking about replacing classical repertoire with Justin Timberlake. They’re not even using it to generate a “pop” sound, but rather to make a wider variety of ensembles sound natural [sic!] in one space to compensate for the fact that concert halls are emphatically one-size-fits-some.

[...]

Why is making halls sound better with electronics any different from making them sound better with architecture [sic!]? [...] If your goal is to make music sound as good as possible in the space available, electronic reinforcement is a very useful tool.

Mr. Brown, who "ha[s] yet to hear a persuasive argument that classical music is inherently superior to popular music," could not have better made my point and my case had I hired and paid him to do so (ditto some of the commenters in the comments section of Mr. Brown's post).

Q.E.D.!

Update 2 (5:32 PM Eastern on 13 Oct): Conductor and blogger Kenneth Woods of Kenneth Woods — A View From The Podium writes:

I’m not sure ... exactly what [Berkeley’s Cal Performances' decision to equip Zellerbach Hall with a sophisticated amplification system for their classical music concerts] has to do with iPods, but I’m very glad to see [A.C. Douglas] challenging the assumption that this is somehow a good idea.

As the title of this post declares, what this repulsive business has to do with is the iPod sensibility, not iPods per se. Astonishing (and depressing) to tell, there's an entire generation walking about out there that imagines what they're hearing through their iPod headsets is what music — genuine music; classical music — really sounds, and ought to sound, like. Is it any wonder that Cal Performances imagines there's not only nothing amiss with the electronic processing of acoustical instruments performing classical music live, but that it's a really nifty way to correct for the acoustic deficiencies of a concert hall? And is it any wonder that CP is absolutely certain the overwhelming majority of its audiences will agree with them? For if they weren't absolutely certain of that audience response, you can bet your last bippy they never would even have contemplated such a grotesquely mindless "solution" to the acoustic shortcomings of Zellerbach Hall.

It's that pop-culture-corrupted musical sensibility — of which sensibility the ubiquitous iPod is centrally emblematic — that I've dubbed The iPod Sensibility; ergo, the title of this post.

Update 3 (9:00 PM Eastern on 14 Oct): More on the iPod sensibility here.

Update 4 (10:45 PM Eastern on 14 Oct): Music theorist and blogger Scott Spiegelberg of Musical Perceptions adds his thoughts on this matter wherein he's guilty of the same misunderstanding as David Sucher in his post on this business which post is addressed in my post linked above in Update #3.

Déjà vu All Over Again

Although written in good fun (be sure to click on the YouTube link), why does this so eerily remind me of any number of "rock critics" (absurd concept!) waxing eloquent in technically detailed, highfalutin "elitist" language over the latest piece of same-as-the-gazillion-pieces-before-it rock crap with the same earnestness as if it were some recently discovered piece by Bach or Mozart or Beethoven or any other of the pantheon of immortals.

Gee, What A Surprise II

From Science magazine:

As stereotypes might suggest, [persons] with the most education were also the main fans of opera, classical music, and jazz. For example, 8.5% of the classical music lovers had Ph.D.s, compared with 1.4% of those who favored disco music. And classical music lovers' incomes averaged $66,000 compared to $44,000 for lovers of popular dance music. Classical music buffs were also inclined toward intellectual fare, such as current-affairs magazines, whereas the rap/pop crowd favored magazines about cars, women, or celebrities.

Duh.