No genre is the new genre
The next time I'm annoyed with the world, I'm going to try and remember to stop what I'm doing and watch this video. And if I'm still annoyed, I'm going to take a page from John Cage and listen to it again. Just a couple from Iowa (married for 62 years!) having a little fun with music, a little fun with life. The first video is reportedly of an impromptu performance in a waiting area at the Mayo Clinic. This follow-up report is a more formal presentation featuring the same awesome … [Read More...]
I was lucky enough to have some great teachers growing up, but Vi Hart (mathemusician!) takes the cake (again). What is up with Noises? (The Science and Mathematics of Sound, Frequency, and Pitch) Now then, when is recess? [via] … [Read More...]
Colin Holter posed a question in his post this morning on NewMusicBox that I'd like to consider here as well: We can agree that it is thought that the patrons of classical music in the United States are old and getting older. That’s the conventional wisdom. So let me ask you this: Have you ever read a piece of serious writing on the attitudes of the elderly toward classical music? If, as is often assumed, the over-70 crowd exerts a powerful influence over the institutions that deliver … [Read More...]
I was a late convert to the e-reader. Yet once I got going, its 24/7 ready-access to the world of literature at the click of a button made me an easy candidate for seduction. Lately, however, I have been getting lost in the Amazon Kindle Store, the victim of too many choices shelved on a flat virtual table with no personal "you're going to love this one!" identification system yet worked out for myself. (I have never been a kindred spirit of the NYTimes bestseller list readers, and my … [Read More...]
There will be some actual content from me later in the week, but meanwhile I'll let Jan Swafford write the new music jokes and handle the analysis. Plus! Something beautiful I just saw on the internet: [via] … [Read More...]
I think I’ve mentioned this one or twice or a hundred times already, but solitary craftwork has always been where I’ve been most content. There’s just a focus and a safety that I find standing at a counter making something. I had dreams of becoming a luthier once upon a time, and it was a lovely ambition that it doesn’t hurt to daydream about again while watching this:
[via]
Though I almost always miss watching the Tony Awards on television, it’s hardly painful when Neil Patrick Harris so neatly sums the results up for you and they are posted online in time for Monday morning catch up. The 2010 presentation was awesome, but this year’s recap didn’t drop a beat.
While brushing my teeth this morning, I noticed this line on the back of an Old Spice product: “If your grandfather hadn’t worn it, you wouldn’t exist.”
Ha! Cute. Not as cute as Isaiah Mustafa, perhaps, but still.
What caught me about this sly little marketing tag line was that the brand was pushing the cred it already had in spades but that the general public seemed to have simply forgotten about. Rather than trying to reinvent itself as something shiny, new and hip to get attention again (it was fighting the market encroachment of Axe products in particular), it issued people a reminder about what they already knew it was. The marketing team explains their strategy in this article from the NYTimes dated January 8, 2007 (still six months before Mad Men hit the airwaves):
“Our timing was good because this is a moment when everyone appreciates authenticity, when retro is not necessarily a bad word,†Mr. Fitzloff said. “So we can say, ‘You can either be authentic or trendy.’ â€
…
To underscore authenticity for Old Spice, the campaign gives a prominent role to the brand’s original trappings and trade dress, including the cursive script logo, the clipper ship from the fragrance bottles and the vintage whistled commercial jingle. But they are treated playfully rather than reverentially, in a manner Ms. Taylor described as an “inside-the-joke feeling.â€
The article takes a parting shot underlining the mood: “Too bad that it is probably too late for General Motors to bring back Oldsmobile.”
Hmmm, what other products around here are carrying around a decades and decades-old reputation for class and quality but struggle to communicate that message effectively?
Orchestras and opera companies and string quartets can try to invent new branding personalities, but at root they will still be orchestras and opera companies and string quartets. Almost every American knew a grandpa who smelled like Old Spice and new buyers now look to make that experience their own. Is there anything to be gained by polishing the “original trappings” of what attracted people to these art forms in years past? For ensembles presenting art originally created for people living in 1811, not 2011, can we offer a similar experience to concertgoers today? Vintage. Antique. Fascinating things are teased out of the past and made interesting again all the time. If that kind of frame can also be placed around the repertoire and communicated to the community with 2011 sophistication, there might be something compelling there. After arguing about audience alienation via clapping rules and program notes, the discussion almost always comes around again to the concept that the music itself is too great to be ignored and forgotten. If that’s true, then maybe this Old Spice campaign has a spark in it worth applying.
Otherwise, the “just add vampires” line of audience building seems to have some cultural traction. Just sayin’.
I’ve watched Beyonce’s performance at the Billboard Music Awards a few times today. Online chatter is generally gushy about the video effects and the dancing, but the song itself gets the least love among the many moving parts. “What a shame that such a performance was wasted on such a weak song. You’ll never hear that song 10 yrs from now,” one commenter noted.
You won’t get any push back on that appraisal from me. Still, my mind wandered to what other music might make use of such a display with more staying power.
Even more than that, however, after reading David T. Little’s column considering the intersection of the musical and the political, tracks like “Run the World (Girls)” raise questions for me concerning the line between performance as political inspiration vs. the manipulative power of a good beat and a great designer. There is a message about empowerment that I’m seeking inside this music that I don’t cleanly hear or see.
At first I thought it was just the idea that the influence of barely being dressed seemed slightly off message. I’m not usually such a prude, and after catching this fan-made video, I realized it wasn’t just that–well, not entirely. The lingerie was a front on an issue that you don’t encounter when, say, reading about this Saudi woman’s campaign to fight against driving prohibitions in her home country. Sexy is a powerful package, as are network production values, but I was looking for a core that brought a celebration of girls running the world to the table with something more weighty than glitz, windblown hair, and tech tricks, and that’s where this performance gave me nothing but air.
UPDATE: I knew I wasn’t the only one who found something hard to swallow in “Run the World (Girls),” but this video from NineteenPercent lays it out and then some.
I have been completely sucked into the series currently running on Slate investigating the carvings inside Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, and today’s installment asks a musical question:Â “Are the chapel’s mysterious stone symbols a musical score?”
I’ve always associated the whole “amazing things in sand and sonic frequency” bit with the work of Alvin Lucier (and coincidentally, I just got a press release for a performance of his Queen of the South yesterday), but if you scroll through to the end of the Slate post, there’s a diagram laying out how the ornately carved ceiling of the chapel may actually read out as Chladni patterns, and therefore as a piece of music. I expect Dan Brown has already started writing his next installment. Meanwhile, check it out!
And here’s a neat demo of the phenomenon, if you’re unfamiliar:
Barely having had the patience to finish my undergraduate education before busting out to grab hold of my adult life, I’ve missed the exchange of ideas that is (even-higher?) education in general and the academic conference in particular. Through the years, friends have related to me their agonies and triumphs as they prepared, submitted, and delivered lectures in their subject areas among small groups of colleagues on campuses around the globe. In contrast, during this same era I was preparing 400 word recaps of CDs and concert events meant to briefly engage a broad general audience. The content, no matter its quality, generally hit the recycling bin within days. It’s a fate I wouldn’t try to argue was inappropriate.
I’m not quiet sure “Sex, Hope, and Rock n Roll: The Writings of Ellen Willis,” an event I attended last Saturday, was quite your average academic conference of the sort I’ve come to know entirely through third-hand accounts, but it got me thinking. First of all, about the enduring work of Ellen Willis, of course, with whose writing I am sad to say I had only a passing familiarity beforehand. I could tell you more about what I was able to learn about her and the new anthology of her work that’s just been published (a recycling of a more productive sort), but there’s already a much deeper perspective to be found here, so I highly recommend you take in those thoughts instead.
In a broader sense, however, it provided me with a glimpse into a world where people are engaging with information on a different timescale than I do most days. It reflected a balance issue in my own life, or rather an imbalance regarding the information my brain processes every day. Something I had always suspected was true–that the volume of information I was constantly consuming in brief online snippets was eroding my deeper intellectual instincts–turned out not to be quite so, but shot up a warning as I left the conference hall. Friend, conference organizer, and all-round lady-with-the-big-ideas Daphne Carr caught up with me just outside, and I confessed that I loved the event but was more personally struck by the depth of the on-stage conversation among the panelists. If I was going to continue to grow and develop, I had to slow down already, at least some of the time, and make room to think more deeply, more critically. I didn’t feel dumb, exactly, but I did feel depleted and distracted. The instinct wasn’t dulled, but the well was a little dry.
There’s a quote that gets thrown around when arts talk turns to impact: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
The economy and the government budget standing as they do, discussions surrounding the perceived “value” of the arts (in every definition of the word) are getting a lot of air time. I’ve been really impressed by the persuasive power of efforts like this one in support of PBS. Then, this morning, I saw the video below and was really blown away:
I’ve been considering what a similar piece related to the arts covered here on ArtsJournal would look like and what it might accomplish. What facts and figures would you include in such a presentation?
[via]
Flavorwire does some equal-opportunity cheerleading for ten of the lady composers who charted on WQXR’s crowd-sourced 100 Composers Under 40 list. Words like “innovators” and “fascinating” are thrown around and no one utters a peep lamenting the lost composerly skills of Beethoven.
There are sample tracks, videos, and attractive head shots scattered all over the internet related to this story. Could this democratic recommendation list represent the tipping point/spring board to a broader public the industry has been hunting for all this time? In a networked world, was a virtual recommendation from a collection of music fans what it took to demystify contemporary classical music and introduce it around to new and curious ears?
[via my Google reader pal/life co-conspirator brian]
If, like me, you got lucky and were enrolled in a K-12 school system with a music budget, you may have a memory of the day everyone was trotted down to the cafegymnatorium and told to select an instrument. It was so competitive! Kevin Olusola is doing more than his part to recruit kids to the cello section. There are more-than-respectable Justin Bieber covers here, people! But if you’re like me, you’re going to want to skip that for now and catch the beatboxing below at @1:06, I’m thinking.
Find out more about Kevin here.
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Despite the juvenile cartoon approach (shades of Donny the Downloader, anyone?), I felt compelled to watch YouTube’s educational copyright video through to the end even though I hadn’t been required to and it didn’t exactly seem age-appropriate. I was hoping it would provide a clear distillation of the complex world of copyright (at least the basic points), something I could pass along when people asked me if I could help them better understand what they could and could not do with IP online.
I found the “be afraid, be very afraid” vibe to stifle the educational mission of the video, however, especially when you get to the “fair use” portion and the narrator skims through the finer points like it’s a list of pharmaceutical side effects. Before Russell, our little pirate friend, can actually learn anything he’s so confused that he vomits on his shoes (0:59).
Clearly there are numerous facets to this important issue. As a result, whenever a piece of it is brought up for discussion it tends to generate an avalanche of passionate commentary representing all quarters. This seems a very good thing when it comes to developing a rulebook that can handle the rapidly evolving social and technological landscape we find ourselves creating and earning a paycheck in. For Russell’s sake, not to mention anyone without the resources to consult a copyright attorney, I only wish there were better tools to guide us. In an age when you can shoot, edit, and distribute a video with just some free time and your cellphone, we need more than cartoon characters and fear to find a way forward.
UPDATE: Even the people charged with making the rules appear to be somewhat confused.
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