The Fredösphere

Watch Alex Ross' appearance on the Colbert Report.  ACD is not entirely approving; Iron Tongue has the discussion.

My public demands ... and I deliver ... more ... airships!

2 Blowhards supply related links on the evil of government subsidies for the arts:  Taki on the decline of music in the last 60 years, and Paul A. Cantor on the market's role in producing some of the greatest art of all time (Shakespeare, Dickens, etc.).  Taki's grumblings are less than completely persuasive, and his commenters are all over the map in terms of quality.  Paul Cantor's lectures at the Mises Institute, however, are wonderful.  His thesis:  a free-market environment, with its competitive pressures and collaborative arrangements, is the best (or more precisely, least-bad) environment for the development of art.  I tend to agree; in the least, modern government arts subsidies will find only a narrow subset of all deserving artists.

At this point, let me make a point very clearly so there is no mistake:  if, by some chance, there happens to be a government bureaucrat out there on the verge of giving me a huge grant, please proceed.  I'll take money any way I can get it!

Cantor identifies a constant complaint made of all new art forms, a complaint that can be seen, for example, in Plato's reaction to Greek tragedy.  The complaint has three parts:

The art contains too much of what my friend Steve would call "sax and violins."
It's addictive.
People caught up in it loose their ability to distinguish reality from fantasy.

("And he's right!" Cantor says with a laugh.)  Cantor makes a prediction, which would seem fairly tame to anyone connected to tech culture, that video games will be the dominant art form of the 21st century, as film was in the 20th.  Cantor makes this prediction in the face of his own antipathy to video games; the strong parallel of current criticism of video games to previous new art forms, such as Elizabethan theater and the serial novel, causes him to doubt his own dislike.  I would go a bit farther; I believe video games will be the dominant art form for the next 40 years maybe; cultural change will accelerate.

Oh, wait; none of this matters because we're all going to die.

Labels: Airship, Culture

Its construction costs are lower, its launch capacity is greater, its per-payload costs are lower, and its feasibility is greater (i.e., non-zero as of now) compared to a space elevator...so why have I never heard of a Launch Loop (or Lofstrom Loop) until today?  I guess I know now how I'll be spending my time this weekend:  I'll be building one of these things in my basement.

I will need to be careful:

A running loop would have a stupendous amount of energy. While the magnetic suspension system would be highly redundant, with failures of small sections having essentially no effect at all; if a major failure did occur the energy in the loop [...] would be approaching the same scale of energy release as a small nuclear bomb explosion (350 kilotons of TNT equivalent).

Labels: sci-fi

Just to reassure you in case you thought I had stopped idolizing James "Apotheosis of the Noösphere" Lileks, I'll give him the Fredösphere Best Quote of the Day Award:

Cold day; got up to about two and a half degrees before it fell down and gave up. I’m used to it. I get up, check the temp – ONE – and shrug. You get used to anything. If it rained flaming hamsters every morning you’d walk to the bus stop with a steel umbrella and a shovel.

Read the whole thing, especially for the part where it veers into UK-PC-gone-wild territory, a territory which seems to have expansionist tendencies lately.

Labels: Culture, fun

A few days ago, my daughter, the Maharincess, determined to launch her composing career.  I sat her down at the computer, gave her a few instructions in how to use Finale, and turned her loose.  The ol' Himebaugh genes kicked in, and like her brother before her, she has produced a bold masterpiece of singular brilliance.

Like all uncompromising geniuses, she cares nothing for the whining criticisms of performers locked in old-fashioned notions of what is "performable" or "practical."  So, as we expect, the Maharincess pushes instrumentalists beyond all bounds.  Unlike other experimentalists, however, she explores new territory in her pronounced bias in favor of treble sounds.  At first, I suspected this was caused by the position of the MIDI keyboard relative to the computer, which makes the low notes hard to reach for a six-year-old's arm.  But no:  upon listening to an early version of this piece, the diminutive maestra insisted on replacing a line of low-lying notes with high ones.  She knows what she wants, and she knows how to get it.

The Maharincess seems to have a special animus for the expectations of trombone players.  I am no Freudian, yet I cannot help but speculate that latent feminist resentments lurk in the mind of the budding young composer, expressed by unprecedented demands on a orchestral section known for its high proportion of male players, players with a reputation for chauvinism.  I will refrain from the more shocking terminology employed by feminist theorists, and simply invite the reader to imagine for himself (or herself!) the psychological effect on a male trombonist as he is subjugated to a passage wherein he must "sound like a girl."

As happened when I revealed my son's genius to an appreciative world, I expect this new work, Flowers in the Wind, to be greeted by embarrassingly effusive critical acclaim.  After all, my little Maharincess deserves no less.

Labels: Composer, fun

Via Sequenza21, Kenneth Woods has tips for composers working with performers:

2- Don’t bring antagonism towards anyone else’s music into gatherings that include anyone but you.
In any “us vs. them” match up, whether it is “new vs. old,” “tonal vs. atonal,” “US vs. Europe,” academic vs. self supporting, you, the composer, lose. More importantly, it creates unbelievable resentment among everyone whose support you need. You may hate Beethoven or Schoenberg in the privacy of your own home, but no matter what you hate, someone in the orchestra or the audience loves it, and if you convince them that you don’t listen to music with open ears, they won’t feel they owe you the same courtesy. More to the point, you may hate Mozart or Ligetti now, but someone in the building knows how much you could learn from them, and you’ll only embarrass yourself by criticizing their music.

By the way, have I mentioned lately how much I adore the music of Mozart?  He's my favorite composer.  And Ligetti.  Definitely Ligetti.

Plus, I love synaesthetes.  Just can't get enough of the little dearies.

Seriously, the tips are valuable and entertaining.  The one piece of advice that seems to be controversial has to do with the use of Italian expression markings.  The argument is, when Czech or Korean musicians sit down to play my music, the lingua franca will save them time.  I should be so lucky to be in a position to waste the time of Czech or Korean musicians.

One commenter reminds you (not me, I already knew) that choirs are not the same as orchestras:

Just some observations from the choir side - choirs are finicky beings, they don’t read well or learn fast (unless they are professional - and even then - the most avant-guard music does not come quickly). Avoid false-relations within a part, and don’t expect singers to be able to sing every interval - stick to one accidental when ever possible, (don’t write an augmented 5th when a minor 6th will do fine) Know the choir you are working for, and write for their ability and make-up. I’ll never forget the year the my chamber choir commissioned a work from a student composer, as a way of supporting the composition program by way of commission “scholarship”. The composer and I met and I explained that our 24 voice choir had only 3 tenors, so divisi should be limited in all parts, and avoided completely in the tenor if possible. We didn't care about the language, but would prefer some kind of suitable “themed” poetry, and it could have atonal elements, but should be listenable for our audience base, so some tonality would be good once in a while. Plus, we only have four rehearsals to learn it, so keep 8-10 minutes would probably be a good length. He came back six months later with a 30 minute work for 32 part choir (up to six divisi within each part) with graphic notation and nonsensical text. Needless to say, we couldn't perform it, and paid for nothing.

...and worth every penny!  Reminds of the time as a graduate student, I was asked, as a favor, to sing in an ad hoc men's vocal quartet.  I found out late in the game that the organizer paid for an "arrangement" by a student "composer" none of us knew, even though the organizer knew I had composing experience myself.  The music was a textbook case of what not to do:  no coherent base line, just dense chords following the melody up and down, centered around the C an octave below middle C.  In other words, a dense, growly, thoughtless mess.  It was completely unusable, so in our brief rehearsal time, I and the other singers rearranged and simplified on the fly, doing what we had to do to avoid disaster.  It still makes me mad.

Labels: Composer, Synaesthetes

My friend Victor sent me this image in an email entitled "why N3tflix recommendations suk."

Labels: CollaborativeFiltering, fun

So, it turns out my idea to write a science fiction story about the Three Wise Men is officially one of the Overused Science Fiction Clichés:

k. A major historical figure (Jesus, Einstein, Lincoln, Elvis) was really a space alien.

Meanwhile....

I was shocked, frankly, to read Jens Laurson's description at Ionarts of an audience's hostile reaction to music by MacMillan and Britten at a concert in Munich.  Let's be perfectly clear--we're not talking here about Munich, North Dakota:

Mad gallops toward the end of the third movement [of James MacMillan's Vigil] sent yet another wave of listeners out of the hall - and during the work's end over faint, silver touches you could hear those patrons just outside, discussing angrily what they had just been made to listen to.

It was a fine day for good new music and a courageous triumph for the Munich Philharmonic (which offered professional, if not great, playing). But it was also a monument to the lack of curiosity of much of its clientele. The Munich audience had proved by virtue of its absence that it will only pretend to be interested in modern music to a certain extent… and that programming a “modern, little known composer” like Britten (that’s sadly his status among many attendees) with a contemporary piece and some obscure renaissance prelude is far too much for them to respond to. As rich as the cultural environment is in Munich, and as much as it prides itself in its diversity, it cannot deny a certain provincial attitude that is often coupled with a plain ignorant and dismissive attitude of all (cultural) things Anglo-Saxon and, indeed, foreign. Give the subscription holders of the Munich Philharmonic their Strauss (either), Mozart, Brahms and they shall be happy. Give them Britten and they won't come - or come and leave mid-concert. A pity.

I'm always interested in these cases of overturned expectations regarding relative cultural sophistication.  I prefer the term "reverse provincialism" (alluded to in my previous post) in cases where a pseudo-sophisticate assumes the worst of supposed rubes, and only exposes his own ignorance in the process.  This is another, different, example of the same trend.  Frankly, I can't imagine such a thing happening in Ann Arbor or Detroit.  Britten?  Unknown???  And what about MacMillan--I thought he was Mr. Accessible Modernism.  I've heard of the locals here in S.E. Michigan walking out on an unusually screechy Kronos Quartet concert, but Britten and MacMillan?  Madness.

Oh, well, what does it matter?  We're all going to die.

Labels: Culture, sci-fi

As a loyal Michigan native, I can't let this go without a reaction.  Over at Fresh Bilge, in a post about the demographics of the NH primary vote, commenter SteveSadlov has exposed some disturbing bigotry.  Whether the bigotry is of the kind he's thinking, however, is something I'll let my readers figure out.  Thus spake SteveSadlov:

Plus in Michigan, most white people are complete racists. Those of us living on the coasts cannot comprehend it, it is borderline psychotic. Even amongst Michigan’s wealthy and upper middle class white liberals, I would imagine Obama would face an uphill climb.

I believe the relevant term is "reverse provincialism."

Labels: Culture

Kyle Gann writes of Karl-Birger Blomdahl's science fiction opera Aniara, a surprisingly early (1959) attempt to merge these two disparate art sensibilities.  Blomdahl employs a wedge-shaped 12-tone row:

[T]ruth be told, there's something about science fiction, this "woo woo we're in outer space" feeling, that makes the discomforting 12-tone idiom ring more plausibly. In addition, the chromatic aura is cut by and blended with two other idioms. One is a kind of Swedish outer-space bebop that attends the "Yurg" cult around Daisi Doody - by which I mean that it doesn't sound like Blomdahl's trying to write bebop, only that he's created a hybrid music indebted to it. The other idiom is the electronic music used for various sequences, such as when the computer-like being Mima is transmitting images of the Earth destroying itself.

(Daisy Doody is a character in the opera, an entertainer aboard a ship adrift among the stars.)

There seems to be a trend:

In fact, one of the first things I did in Europe was to visit the American expatriate composer Wayne Siegel in Aarhus, Denmark, who teaches electronic music at the Royal Conservatory. (My profile of him just appeared in Chamber Music magazine.) And Siegel played for me excerpts of his own science fiction opera, Livstegn, or "Signs of Life" (1993-94), about a scientist plunged into a personal crisis by his unexpected discovery of intelligent life on one of Jupiter's moons.

Folks, we need to band together and smother these infants in their cradles.  We've got to shut down all news, all discussion; let the world forget these works were ever written.  Why?  Because I want to write my own space opera and I want to preserve the illusion that I got there first.  I also want to use the title Space Opera and pretend nobody else ever thought of it.

Indeed, I've been neglecting this blog lately as I give some attention to science fiction.  My latest project is a choral work which I've decided to combine with a science fiction story which will have the same title and theme.  I've progressed enough on the story that I'm sure at least it won't be a train wreck, so I'll start mentioning it now.  I'll still withhold the details (even from the Wifeösphere!) because I think it best to externalize my plans by implementing them, not talking about them.

I'm having fun with the gang over at Starship Sofa, an SF podcast.  Those craving to hear my voice should download this week's episode, wherein I play celebrity guest and explain why Flowers For Algernon left me wanting less.  (The novel is a favorite of host Tony C. Smith.)  I'm also an occasional contributor to the group blog there, and I've served a stint as a reader of stories for the podcast; I may continue if I decide I'm willing to put in the time required to prepare properly (which is a lot).

Finally, have a peek in here:  forget the giant face; scientists have found a secret doorway on Mars!

Labels: Composition, sci-fi

This ... Is ... Science!  You've got to read The Most Hated Holiday Song in the World at Design Observer, about a very intelligent but not very sincere attempt to use the science of opinion polls to design art with likableness maximized and minimized.  The most and least liked music are two utterly brilliant songs.  The satire is subtle; I honestly liked the likable song, at least the first half, which would not been out of place on a Kenny G (Mr. Likable himself) album.  In short, I liked it.  The unlikeable song is a patchwork affair with a rapping operatic soprano, accordion, pipe organ, banjo, tuba, Walmart jingles...aw, heck, just what you expect:

The Most Unwanted Song, however, is mesmerizing: over an accompaniment of bagpipe, tuba and accordian (statistically, America’s least favorite instruments), an operatic soprano (our least favorite type of singer) raps (ditto) about cowboys (ditto). Their research indicated that the most hated lyrical subject is holidays (disliked by 33%), so the song is suitable not only for Christmas, but Easter, Labor Day, Veterans' Day, and Halloween. These interludes are introduced abruptly by a children’s chorus (“Hey everybody, it’s Yom Kippur!”), who couple their refrains with cheerful commercial messages. By the end, the subject has shifted to human slavery and genocide. The whole thing, going on for nearly 22 minutes (the least favorite song length), is as impossible to ignore as a car crash.

Besides the music, there's painting.  You'll get George Washington in a landscape with deer, drinking from a stream--the deer, not the former president.  Plus, some utterly delicious Socialist Realist parodies.  I recommend Stalin and the Muses.

I haven't laughed this hard in ages.  Wow.

Labels: Composition, Creativity, Culture, Design