“As we listen these days to the cries of music-selling middlemen that those sweet songs of yesteryear will disappear in a world of unbridled file sharing, we need to remember that the interests of music professionals don’t necessarily coincide with the interests of music listeners. Sure, new technologies and ways of doing business have hurt many trades related to the music industry. There are many fewer people making a living as song pluggers, sheet music publishers, and the like. There are probably fewer professional live musicians than there would be if we had never enjoyed radios, jukeboxes, transistorized stereos, or computerized file sharing. Yet with every change, people’s access to better reproduced, more portable, more personalized music grows.”
Tag: 03.04
The End Of Hip-hop?
“For a genre that is 25 years old this year, hip hop has little to show for its maturity. Repetitive images of material excess and recidivism continue to dominate the commercial rap market, and while production techniques have evolved to become the most sophisticated in pop music, rapping itself – the essence of hip hop culture – has not developed in at least a decade. As the ideas have dried up, celebrities and industry investors have been forced to promote the most sensational aspects of the culture. Even loyal fans are now claiming that hip hop’s message to the disenfranchised is one of confusion and self-destruction. For a musical form that once claimed to offer meaning, and even hope, this must spell the end.”
Why You Can’t Understand Sopranos
Why is it so difficult to understand what sopranos are singing when they sing high notes? “Acoustical physicists have carried out an experiment that demonstrates why different vowel sounds are almost impossible to distinguish when sopranos are singing in the highest octave of their range. The experimental subjects were eight professional operatic sopranos.”
Kandinsky – Prisoner Of Schoenberg?
Kandinsky was very interested in music and admired Schoenberg, write Terry Teachout, “but he was also an idea-besotted intellectual manqué who followed many a half-baked notion down a blind alley, most spectacularly when he embraced theosophy, a pseudo-religion popular at the turn of the 20th century whose amorphous tenets played a part in his own turn to abstraction. Just as theosophy preached the unimportance of the material world, inspiring Kandinsky to portray in his paintings an “immaterial” universe of spiritual “thought-forms,” so did Schoenberg’s break with tonality—a break that Schoenberg himself thought to be historically inevitable—seem to Kandinsky a necessary stage in the larger quest for a spiritual art freed from the shackles of materialism. Both men, however, were mistaken.”
The Art Of Art Damage
Flies, mold, pets – artwork gets damaged in many mysterious (or mundane) ways. “Fine-art insurers say that most damage to art occurs during transport. But art is also damaged in other, more unusual ways—by destructive pets, careless storage, and improper cleaning methods.”
Are Competitions Taking Advantage Of Composers?
Composers are anxious to get their music performed. And competitions can provide exposure for young composers. But some competitions charge large entry fees and “sometimes you get the feeling the money involved in these application fees is going to be the prize money, and what that’s doing is creating a prize off the back of the losing composers.”
Debating The Visual Culture
“A disturbing though little publicized movement is afoot in American education to transform the study of art into what is termed Visual Culture Studies. It seeks to broaden the proper sphere of art education–the visual arts–to include every kind of visible artifact. In their rush to embrace Visual Culture Studies, art teachers who have been immersed in postmodern culture, and in the postmodernist work that now passes for art, have lost sight of the salient qualities of works of visual art. As a result, their interpretations are prone to error, blurring major differences not only between painting, sculpture, and other types of imagery but also between works of visual art and artifacts that are not images at all.”
The All-Important Essay Question – Would You Pass?
The SAT’s are making a change. A short essay will be required, and said essay will be graded by readers who will spend about a minute reading and considering its quality. All of which got the Atlantic and the Princeton Review wondering what the graders would have made of writing by several famous writers…