On the heels of the New York Times’s survey of Beijing’s musical underground comes a concert of Ge Gan-Ru’s music at the Smithsonian, Washington, previewed here.
Archive for November, 2007
A little more on DG
Steve Smith has been extensively trialling the new Deutsche Grammophon store, and writing about it. He notes a great feature that I wasn’t aware of:
Once you’ve bought something, it remains permanently on account. Want to download your purchased files to multiple machines? Or perhaps you lost some authorized files in a hardware wipeout? No problem. Sign in, go to “My Downloads,” and everything you’ve paid for is waiting for you.
Wow. That is super cool.
Deutsche Grammophon launches new MP3 store
(cross-posted to Bits of News)
Yesterday saw the opening of a new mp3 store, dedicated to recordings on the renowned Deutsche Grammophon label. With one of the most prestigious labels of all now joining the action, is digital the best future for the classics?
Classical music has been one of the surprise success stories of the recent boom in digital music sales. Shortly after launching, Amazon.com’s new mp3 store featured Richard Wagner charting higher than Coldplay, Kanye West and Amy Winehouse – although this may have had something to with Clemens Krauss’s recording of the complete Ring cycle (14 CDs-worth) appearing briefly on sale for a meager $13.98 (it was later repriced to $53.99). Yet even with such anomalies, the evidence emerging from iTunes and other stores is that classical is taking to the web like a surprisingly aquatic cat to water.
One of the genre’s big advantages is that, measured in sheer quantity of bytes to the buck, classical mp3s are often extremely good value for money. In the physical world, a CD is a CD and they’re all priced roughly the same. But in the virtual world, business models that charge 99 cents or pence per track are worked out on the 3-minute pop song standard, with 10–15 tracks to an album. Turn to classical, however, and you could pick up three Mahler Symphonies for the price of one chart LP. Or an entire day’s worth of Morton Feldman.
Despite this, classical may also be the musical niche most poorly served by current retail practices. For one thing, many retailers are beginning to introduce graded pay schemes whereby tracks over a certain length, say, can only be bought as part of the complete album. So those 99 cent Terry Riley and Philip Glass epics may soon be a thing of the past (snap them up while you can). Classical music – jazz, too – also tends to come with much more subsidiary information than your average pop song. Not only is the composer’s name important, but also those of the artists performing on the recording. A year of composition is handy too, as may be a year of issue – for distinguishing one Karajan Beethoven from another. And tracks and albums don’t always come with helpful titles, and neither are they consistently tagged by the record labels – an iTunes window of dozens of ‘First movement’s isn’t much use to anyone. This has knock-on effects when trying to search for recordings to buy, as inconsistent metadata is little better than none at all. Most retailers don’t have an option to browse by label – essential for serious music diggers – but some, such as eMusic and Classicsonline, do.
More seriously, pop music is mostly composed, recorded and produced with tinny radios, headphones and, now, mobile phone speakers in mind. It’s sonically robust enough to survive mp3 compression to the extent employed by most retailers. Classical music, however, is written for live listening – the highest fidelity of all – and doesn’t fare so well at 192kbps or lower.
Deutsche Grammophon’s service immediately stands out, then. Not only do most of their albums come with pdf copies of the sleevenotes – another valuable aspect of the classical music experience – but all tracks are available (DRM-free) at a premium quality 320kbps. Their CD back catalogue is also one of the most desirable in the business, and all of it is available for download. In comparison to other retailers, DG isn’t cheap, but in many other important respects it’s already beating the competition. Classical music lovers will hope that others take note.
Edit (7 Dec): Bernhard Warner in the Times agrees.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that one of the more enlightened online music retail models — one that emphasises music quality, choice and expert advice – emerges in the classical music genre. As evidenced by all the newsgroups and niche sites catering to this market segment, these consumers are fervent followers of the genre. They have long been neglected on the high street, where shrinking shelf space and a slacker sales staff conspire to frustrate even the most straightforward sales query.
For their years of suffering, a high-fidelity, DRM-free, multi-national download store is a just reward.
Radius back at the Wigmore Hall
Time to start filling up that 2008 diary you just bought. Radius, the new new music ensemble I featured earlier in the year, are back at the Wigmore Hall in January. The group will perform a programme of new works by leading composers of the new British generation, including Ian Vine, Paul Newland, Larry Goves, and Radius founder Tim Benjamin, alongside works by internationally acclaimed composers James Tenney, Claude Vivier, Morton Feldman, and Iannis Xenakis. The concert will also feature 50:50, a series of short commissions celebrating the 50th birthday of Simon Holt.
Programme:
Ian Vine: New Work (2007) WP
James Tenney: Spectrum 6 (2001)
Morton Feldman: Durations I (1960)
Tim Benjamin: Three Portraits (2007) WP
Iannis Xenakis: Kottos (1977)
Laurence Crane, Anthony Gilbert, Paul Newland, Larry Goves:
Four commissions to celebrate Simon Holt’s 50th birthday (2007) WP
Claude Vivier: Paramirabo (1978)
Tim Benjamin: In Memoriam Tape Recorder (2007) WP
Details:
Date: Tuesday 8th January 2008
Time: 7.30pm
Venue: Wigmore Hall, London
Ticket Prices: £8-£15, concessions available
Booking/info number: 020 7935 2141
Online booking.
Vienna Vegetable Orchestra at Huddersfield
A video of the VVO preparing for their recent Huddersfield concert is now available at the Guardian.
Fascinating rhythm
The night before last I had the pleasure of catching part of the final leg of Kyle Gann’s European Grand Tour, as he gave a lecture on ‘Phase-Shifting as an American Compositional Paradigm’. One of the most exciting things about hearing Kyle speak on such an occasion is the quantity and range of new music he brings with him as support: if you think that downtown/postclassic/post-minimal music is underperformed in the US, that’s nothing to the tiny profile it generally has over here. And any introduction to new music is always good by me, even if, thanks largely to Kyle’s own efforts, some of that music wasn’t as unfamiliar as it might have been two or three years ago.
Kyle talked a little about the complexities that postclassical rhythmic techniques generate, and although they’re of a completely different type to the complexities of, say, Ferneyhough’s rhythm, they share similar roots in the presentation of simultaneous tempo (a common influence back to Nancarrow, maybe?). In one of those coincidences on which musical investigations are often based, some points Kyle was making about the performability of certain rhythms – 8 against 9 in the time of 6 is the classic – rub up against a Frank Cox essay I’m reading at the moment – ‘Notes Toward a Performance Practice for Complex Music’*. The rhythms that Cox talks about are of an apparently different order of complexity (although I accept that that’s a fraught distinction), but in both realms composers are confronting the matter of performative accuracy and asking whether it matters, and what effect might it have on the way we compose. There may be some interesting comparisons in here which have yet to be made.
Bryn Harrison: être-temps
Michael Gordon: Four Kings Knight Five
We also took the opportunity to wish Kyle a happy astrological birthday (and happy calendar one to you too!). And Kyle – did you-know-who really turn up drunk and start dancing on the tables, or did I imagine that? 
*In: Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Frank Cox and Wolfram Schurig, eds.: Polyphony and Complexity, New Music and Aesthetics in the 21st Century, i (Wolke Verlag, 2002), 70-132
… and don’t spare the horses
The name’s Rutherford-Johnson.
James Rutherford-Johnson. What with this and the New Yorker implicitly knocking three years off my age, soon my identity will be completely immune from HMRC cock-ups. Hurrah!
Gowers Review Bingo
The Gowers Review of Intellectual Property turns One in a couple of weeks. What has happened in the mean time? Well, for a start its commissioner became Prime Minister. For those of us who welcome much of the level-headed and progressive thought contained in the review, this gives hope that some of its recommendations might actually happen. Meanwhile, lots of wealthy pop stars have been making themselves look very silly, complaining that 50 years wasn’t long enough to make a living off their recordings.
More importantly, the renamed UK Intellectual Property Office has been drawing up plans to begin work on some of the Review’s action points. A lot of this involves consultations, scheduled fuzzily for ‘Autumn 2007′, but it is progress of a sort. Hopefully we should start to see results some time next year.
From a music and research point of view, which are the most pressing of those action points? Here’s a guide for you to cut out and keep. Keep it to hand through next year and tick off those copyright issues as they finally get resolved. First one to a full house wins a CD-R of format-shifted new music (for research or archival purposes only).
Recommendation 3:
The European Commission should retain the length of protection on sound recordings and performers’ rights at 50 years.
Recommendation 4:
Policy makers should adopt the principle that the term and scope of protection for IP rights should not be altered retrospectively.
Recommendation 8:
Introduce a limited private copying exception by 2008 for format shifting for works published after the date that the law comes into effect. There should be no accompanying levies for consumers.
Recommendation 9:
Allow private copying for research to cover all forms of content. This relates to the copying, not the distribution, of media.
Recommendation 10a:
Amend s.42 of the CDPA by 2008 to permit libraries to copy the master copy of all classes of work in permanent collection for archival purposes and to allow further copies to be made from thearchived copy to mitigate against subsequent wear and tear.
Recommendation 10b:
Enable libraries to format shift archival copies by 2008 to ensure records do not become obsolete.
Recommendation 11:
Propose that Directive 2001/29/EC be amended to allow for an exception for creative, transformative or derivative works, within the parameters of the Berne Three Step Test.
Recommendation 12:
Create an exception to copyright for the purpose of caricature, parody or pastiche by 2008.
Recommendation 13:
Propose a provision for orphan works to the European Commission, amending Directive 2001/29/EC.
Recommendation 14a:
The Patent Office should issue clear guidance on the parameters of a ‘reasonable search’ for orphan works, in consultation with rights holders, collecting societies, rights owners and archives, when an orphan works exception comes into being.
Recommendation 15:
Make it easier for users to file notice of complaints procedures relating to Digital Rights Management tools by providing an accessible web interface on the Patent Office website by 2008.
Recommendation 16:
DTI should investigate the possibility of providing consumer guidance on DRM systems through a labelling convention without imposing unnecessary regulatory burdens.
All new musicology blogging action
Musicology / Matters (yes it does) is a new blog set-up by Philip Gentry and Kariann Goldschmitt, both UCLA doctoral students, both bloggers elsewhere (here and here). As an opening gambit they discuss the differences between the music we enjoy and the music we study, a topic on which I hope to have more to say in a bit.
Some links
An article in the Financial Times Deutschland argues that most of what we call ‘avant garde’ art is actually behind the times, not leading them: Après-garde, not avant.
An interview with Charles Rosen on his receipt of the Musical America Annual Directory’s “instrumentalist of the year” award: A Reputation in Music Built As Much on Writing as Playing. Kaija Saariaho was selected as “composer of the year“.
November is nanowri month; Daniel Wolf is working on a compositional version – a new piece every day throughout November. The score of each is published on Renewable Music: The score so far.
The Boston Globe interviews Kurtág: The Purist. (Small correction – before heading to Paris in 1957, Kurtág wrote a fair bit of bombastic socialist realism of his own; see Beckles Willson, ‘Culture is a vast weapon, its artistic force is also strong’, Contemporary Music Review, xx/2–3 (2001), 3–37 for a survey of this period of Kurtág’s output.)
And although their hectoring tone is really irritating, I rather like the Howard Stern/Zs clips that Alex posted: Horse of a different color. You see, even as they’re throwing brickbats and insults at the Zs, Stern and crew unwittingly end up exposing some of the compositional steps that the band themselves will have worked through (with, of course, greater intelligence, inspiration, musicality, etc). Witness how long it takes to nail down who’s going to play what; what exactly it means to ‘play whatever you want’; should you be aiming for dissonance or consonance; and what about rhythm?; and who should start anyway? And isn’t playing something (easy) different from recreating it (hard)?
