de nube

Alex Ross weighs in on getting your music from the Cloud.

I had this conversation at the concert the other day, picking up an Andy May CD, which I was doing because these things are much harder to come by than they used to be, and you have to seize the opportunities where you find them. The album is Happy Hours (Fellside 224), you can download it from iTunes where it's filed under Singer/Songwriter, even though there's only one song on the album and Andy May himself neither sings it nor wrote it.

You can download it from Amazon, where at least it's filed under the largely meaningless but not un- useful catchall of Folk. You can also buy the CD from them, for $22 direct or via third parties new (starting at $11) or used (starting at $20).

You'll find it on Spotify for free. You have to sort through the albums of another guy with the same name, but okay. Once you find it, all the tracks are there in order. (And track order does matter if you're listening to more than one track.)

I'm not going to get all wistful and blather on about the good old days when you could and did spend several  hours browsing bins and shelves in record stores, and one or two of those stores might even have had a section dedicated not just to bagpipes, but to Northumbrian smallpipes. But if you click on the Related Artists button on Spotify, you end up in a pretty big ballpark of vaguely related celtic-y folk records, which might be a highland pipe rock band or a solo singer of muckle sangs or an Irish fiddler from Brooklyn or a band from Belfast. Never mind that the Actually Related Artists are all up on Spotify, too: Jez Lowe, Kathryn Tickell, High Level Ranters, Cut and Dry...

So okay, basically you end up in the old shop circa 1998. Only if it was run by people who had no idea what anything was.

So much for efficiency. Spotify should probably read the liner notes. Or at least look at a map.

Reckoning

So the other day I was on a long lunch buying a new, say, widget and, after a detailed discussion on current trends in widget design, fell to talking about Widget Guy's nefarious past as a Physical Anthropology undergraduate on a Romano-Dacian tomb excavation in Serbia back in probably the 80's. How we got on that subject I have no idea, but it led in turn to a discussion of the now-defunct Classics program at the uni we both attended, and the fact that, although we both work in jobs that -- on paper -- have little to do with what we studied as Humanities undergrads, we still actually value the work we did there. More to the point, and an exponentially more important point it is, neither of us consider our education to have ended just because at some stage we got handed nicely printed sheets of vellum. Then other customers came in, and he had to get back to work and I had to get back to the Borg Cube.

The Borg Cube is an interesting case study in that it is filled with people who are either Accountants by training or they are not. Those who are not fall generally into two categories: those who have college degrees in something interesting and those who have none. Of the three other people in my immediate pod, two are high school graduates and one has degrees in Economics and Public Administration. Over the wall is someone with a degree in Piano Performance. There's a bass player down the aisle, and in the aisle nearest
 the windows is an honest-to-God self-confessed English Major. (Over beyond the atrium is a guy who has the Opera News cover with Ambrogio Maestri pinned up on his wall -- I haven't figured out his deal yet.)

They don't teach Platonic solids in Accounting either.

Then there's my buddy, we'll call him K. He's got an Accounting degree, and he's a news junkie. We spend what our bosses probably think is an inordinate amount of time talking politics, and those conversations are fun and interesting and wide-ranging. So when I got back to the Cube, I told him about this conversation I had with Widget Guy. Interestingly, the thing that I found cool -- the fact that this conversation about archaeological excavations had cropped up in such an unexpected place at an unexpected time -- was what he thought was funny. As in "Hahahaha! a guy who majored in Anthropology is selling widgets! How pathetic! Isn't that hilarious and totally justifies every [lame-assed] notion ever floated in the mainstream press about 'useless degrees'!" Of course, attendant on this is a subtextual "Yay me for being smart enough to choose Accounting! At least I'm not that guy!"

Except, K, you are that guy. Which is to say not Widget Guy, but the Mythical Creature that looms so huge and pale in your imagination, standing in a corner with a sign around its neck that says Widget Guy: Humanities Major. Let's examine:

Widget Guy has two lives: one where he has started, grown, and maintained a successful business for at least the last decade, and one where he's kept up with developments in Physical Anthropology (and there have been a lot since he walked off the podium with a sheepskin, so this isn't just reading the latest outdated Missing Link Discovery! Weekly Report on Yahoo News).

K, on the other hand, has one life, comprised almost entirely of work and family. And much of what he experiences with family he grouses about later at work. We can only hope he grouses about work to family on the flip side, because fair is fair.

Conclusion: K, you don't get out enough.

Widget Guy is naturally gregarious, which is a benefit when working in retail, particularly in an independent business where the owner is doing most of the customer service and all of the business networking.

K is also naturally gregarious, which is not a benefit when you're supposed to be hunkered down in your Borg subcube doing Borg subwork.

Conclusion: K, you are trapped in a tiny cube.

Widget Guy has kids. One is in an Architecture program at a major tech school. The other is looking at Classics programs at the dreaded Expensive Liberal Arts Colleges. Widget Guy doesn't seem worried about them. He says that Classics Department chairs have made a point of asking him, the parent, if he supports his kid's interest in majoring in Classics. Of course he does. Why? Because in his other life he is not Widget Guy but Romano-Dacian Tomb Excavation Guy.

K also has kids. K worries a lot about them. They're out of college, struggling as kids in their twenties usually do. He's not sure they've chosen wisely or well in their college careers, and he wonders how long he will have to support them.

Conclusion: K, not only are you trapped in a cube, but you have convinced yourself you cannot afford to leave. Ever.

So while we allow the public discourse on higher education to make bogus and weirdly manichaean divisions between the Marketable and the Non-marketable, maybe we should also recognize that we are tending to confuse the concept of Education with the concept of Training. Education is about developing habits of mind. Training is about learning how to do a job. K's inherent assumption, the thing that made him laugh, is as common to the Borg Cube as it is elsewhere: that Humanities people are losers who wasted their college education in frivolous pursuit of useless knowledge, while the smart ones had the foresight to dedicate their undergraduate careers to something perceived to be useful, practical, lucrative (maybe), and...finite.

What's the bottom line, then? Consider the examples above, then extrapolate. If the educational agenda you promote results in the collective habit of mind being able to reckon only in terms of Profit and Loss, what more does that create than a culture of impoverishment?

St Jerome sez: Whatever you do, it will surely end in Hell, so smoke 'em if you got 'em.

Nantucket sleighride

scraping

With a number of US orchestras undergoing fairly dire labor-relations processes -- the Atlanta Symphony, the Chicago Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Glimmerglass Festival Orchestra, the Indianapolis Symphony, among others -- there's been a fair amount of grousing among Oberlin Conservatory graduates on fb. Some are wondering whether it's worth it even to bother auditioning these days. Others point to top-heavy management numbers at some of these institutions. If those numbers are accurate, it's reminiscent of the situation in our state university system, where there's plenty of room in the budget to pay the Chief Assistant to the Assistant Chief, but for the actual Educating part of the enterprise they can only afford adjuncts who get paid a dried-peas-and-gravel wage, and one warm body is considered as good as another. Because, you know, money is tight, and the most important thing in a university education is that Management have flexibility.

But as Utah Phillips said about the last baseball strike: "It's the players who create the wealth." Which is to say that in the same way no prospective college student chooses a school because it has a really outstanding Associate Dean of X, nobody buys a ticket to a Yankees game because they love to watch Brian Cashman in action. Neither is anyone drawn to attend a performance of a Beethoven symphony because the back office -- even the Development Office -- has mad administrative skillz. Even though some of those skills are critical to having the event at all, and even though, in this sad privatized system of ours, there is likely no ballgame without the Development Office.

In the end, it's the audiences who get what a given organization pays for. If audiences aren't drawn by what's on offer -- because the top players have of necessity dispersed to other gigs or even professions -- well, the entertainment business (if you'll forgive the term) is a buyer's market. There are plenty of other distractions out there. But more to the point, if there's no way to make a decent living* as an orchestra musician, how many conservatory graduates will even bother to audition?


*in which we include not having to rely on scraping up freelance gigs, which the management of the Minnesota Orchestra, in the spirit of Randian libertarianism and no doubt proudly waving their own 1099's, claim as "one of the benefits of an orchestral career."

preservation versus McMansion

An update from the Wall Street Journal here.

ftƿ!

It is reported by an anonymous source within the campaign that Romney's speech in London will address the "special relationship" between the Geats and the Spear-Danes, and at the planned fundraiser among US bankers in London, there will be a giving out of many rings, and the drinking of muchel mead in the golden hall, with a session of vaunting to follow. After that they will all be eaten by Grendel.

bleeding and leeching

So this is exactly what makes us go all spikey about health care reform, especially when we're talking to people who have lived their entire lives in stable jobs with benefits and can't wrap their heads around the concept of The Working Poor. 

Happy Big Pagan Holiday for All the Workers

shocking!

No not really.  "US Visa Rules Deprive Stages of Performers", says the New York Times. Have they only just noticed this, or is it just a slow news day?

On the other hand, I never hear the bitter complaints about this in the opera world that one has been hearing in the trad/folkie/world world for the last decade, where the iron rules for presenters are a) insure your events and b) never, ever book the first date of a tour. Meanwhile you wonder how anyone can make a US tour pay given the extortion money they have to fork over just for the mere possibility that the damn paperwork might be dealt with in a timely fashion if, I dunno, the moon is in the house of the ram or something. Remember that incident back in the aughts where an INS contractor cleared their backlog by just shredding all the applications? Yeah. So do opera singers get a magical pass, or is it just down to iron-clad international management and big money?

the revolution will be HD-cast

Lucy over at Opera Obsession has a thought-provoking meditation on opera and audience.  Having lived through a few decades of the Imminent Demise of Opera™, it always seemed like mine would be the demographic cohort destined to kill the lights and slam the door on the way out (if there turned out to be enough of us, which was doubtful). Now people who probably weren't born yet when I was hearing my first dire predictions are trading tweets about how much it sucks to be missing the Khovanshchina prima.  That's the prima I'm listening to right now, leisurely on a Monday night, not in some hard-won, barricade-defended Saturday afternoon NPR ghetto.  Kewl :-)

On the other hand, I was just listening to a Met broadcast from 2005, and the degree to which Margaret Juntwait has changed her game is quite striking.  Back then, of course, she was replacing the magisterial Peter Allen, and she was a solo act. I kind of preferred it to the Juntwait & Berger (or Siff) Show.  Yes, I suppose it's a more, uh, user-friendly presentation now.  But, frankly, nothing blows the atmosphere faster than two bright-voiced people brightly chatting about the auto da fe that just happened in Don Carlo or the kid about to go over the cliff in Peter Grimes.  And what will they do with those Carmelite nuns next year? Gives me the willies just thinking about it.

Oh wait, one thing does blow the atmosphere faster, and that's interviewing the singers at intermission.  Remember that absolutely drop dead awesome exposition of Billy Budd John Culshaw did for some intermission back in...Probably not, I think it must still have been the Carter (Trudeau/Thatcher/Schmidt/d'Estaing) Administration(s). Not all intermissions were like that, and I grant that Boris Goldovsky could be kinda freaky.  But you learned a lot, and it wasn't about where Anna Netrebko bought her frock.

Can intermissions be made user-friendly, not to say informative, without being like an interview with ARod? Maybe not. Lucy writes of being an evangelist for opera. I was, once, too. But not long ago I decided it was no longer warranted. Now people can find their own way just fine into some iteration of the opera house without anybody having to Virgil them. Above all, they want no details, smooth or spikey, to come between them and the surface experience: they don't want to know how Iago starts that riot just by sliding off the beat or how Isolde, at a mere suggestion, makes the hunting horns morph into the sound of the fountain right there, and suddenly, despite your better judgement, you're in her world, not Brangäne's. 

Which means what they don't want is to know exactly why this stuff really is as amazing as it is.

This is an unstated doctrine of the Gelb revolution, and I know it to be true.

Does it matter?  

I suggested rebranding it "Nano-Classics"...

Two Quotes of the Day, from Mary Beard in the NYRB:

"What I have stressed so far is our engagement with our predecessors through their engagement with the classics. The slightly different spin on that would be to say that it would be impossible now to understand Dante without Virgil, John Stuart Mill without Plato, Donna Tartt without Euripides, Rattigan without Aeschylus. I’m not sure if this amounts to a prediction about the future; but I would say that if we were to amputate the classics from the modern world, it would mean more than closing down some university departments and consigning Latin grammar to the scrap heap. It would mean bleeding wounds in the body of Western culture—and a dark future of misunderstanding."

[Though she says she doesn't think this will happen. I'm not so sure, meself.]

"...The overall strength of the classics is not to be measured by exactly how many young people know Latin and Greek from high school or university. It is better measured by asking how many believe that there should be people in the world who do know Latin and Greek, how many people think that there is an expertise in that worth taking seriously—and ultimately paying for."

Read the full commentary here.

It may be worth noting that the year before SUNY Albany famously axed Classics, it had more than seventy Latin 101 students, up from twelve when I took it in the 90's. Whatev. Curse the gold-giver.

sundry items

From the Noise Ministry: Sumi Jo talks Mozart on The Strand. 

Also, Arte's got a Beethoven 9 with Matthias Goerne, Sally Matthews, Steve Davislim and Karen Cargill, who was pretty excellent in the Mahler 3 rehearsal I caught at Tanglewood summer before last (and here with Runnicles/BBCSSO), and whose Met debut will be the last Waltraute of this year's run of Götterdämmerung, whereupon maybe they will figure out that she can hack it and give her more fun stuff to do.

From the Ministry of Histrionics: sterling yet in England, Donmar Warehouse Richard II reviews here, here, and here.

From the Ministry of Ranting, Office of Buzz-Mumbling, commentary on Amazon's bold new app for market monopolization here and here.  As a former bricks n' mortar record store employee who had at least one former customer apologize to me about my job "but, you know, Amazon just had better prices", my only question is what's taken them so long?  But consider, o Christmas shoppers, what Amazon is doing is not just beating the competition but actively moving to obliterate it, even as they sell their proprietary e-reader and make direct deals to cut out publishers altogether. My job fell to a variety of market forces, but all that means is it's a lot harder to find some stuff Former Customer could once have relied on us to have.  We shrug. We live. She gets to find something else to listen to.  But seriously, not to be paranoid or anything, but all the above taken in the aggregate, do you really want the likes of Jeff Bezos determining what's worth reading and how you read it, and keeping a record of it all the while?  Kinda looks like fascism to me.

Modulate Wall Street

Seth Colter Walls reports in The Awl on Occupy Wall Street's visit to Lincoln Center for the last performance of Satyagraha.  

Alex Ross has the key video of Philip Glass addressing the 99%...via the People's Mic, which is somehow fitting. 

So were two music journos the only members of the "mainstream" fourth estate on the scene? Surely it seems the New York Times knoweth not of these things.

and speaking of punitive: a rhetorical question

So NPR decides to use freelancer host Lisa Simeone's participation as a private citizen in the Occupy movement as an excuse to quit distributing NPR World of Opera?  'Scuse me? Oh but wait, it isn't even called NPR World of Opera anymore, because NPR bailed out on producing it last year, whereupon WDAV took up the slack.  So if Lisa Simeone isn't actually employed by NPR, how is it necessary for her to be bound by NPR's quote unquote journalistic ethics policy?  And if NPR is now willing neither to produce nor distribute the last year-round syndicated opera program on the Americanistanian airwaves, then what is the reason that I as a contributor should not send my public radio contribution to WDAV while inviting NPR to suck this enormous plastic implement?

Okay, maybe the question isn't all that rhetorical.

Update: James Fallows comments in The Atlantic.  Here are Simeone's comments in an article from mid-week in The Baltimore Sun, before WDAV stepped up to the plate. James Poniewozik over @ Time points to subversive anti-capitalism in the Ring and La Bohème, and Erik Wemple warns of dystopian nightmare in The Washington Post.

Street Scene

In the spirit of multilingual direct actions of yesteryear, Translationista has issued a call for translators for the ongoing Wall Street protest in downtown Manhattan.  The NYT has relegated coverage -- including coverage of the NYPD using pepper spray at very close quarters on allegedly threatening protesters -- to its City Blog. (This is what we used to call "buried" in the halcyon days of dead tree media.)  Meanwhile Huffpost reports increasing interest on the part of NYC labor unions, as perhaps people begin to wonder if the torch-and-pitchfork march on the castle has been too long postponed.

Sign posted outside NY Stock Exchange, 2008(?). Can't say we disagree with the sentiment. Photo source unknown.

Three Places in New England: a cranky auld sod post

Via Alex Ross, an article in Slate about Charles Ives's house, up for sale if you've got a couple million.  Actually several million, and some field artillery, as you will want to shell a few recently-built architectural obscenities that affect the view. (Seriously, look at that thing they built in the field across the road. I ask you.)  Prospective buyers should be aware that the neighborhood has severely declined since Ives's day, with the influx of tasteless arriviste investment bankers in the late 1980's and throughout the 1990's. Don't get me started. But drop me a line if you want help with the shelling.

Measured, post-knee jerk addendum: On the other hand, Edward Steichen's house is less than a mile away, and last I knew that hadn't been turned into a museum either, but neither had it been torn down in favor of a generic House Beautiful monstrosity.  So maybe there's hope.

Happy Labor Day

Hidden Agenda

They tried to bury it in the In Brief section, but you and I know this is just the leading edge of the AARP's nefarious plan to turn ordinary, freedom-loving Americans into elderly, entitlement-dependent Communists.

so then the question is

what do the parents think whose kids have been involved in this production and will now be disappointed, and how many of those parents, if the opportunity were there, would bring their kids across the line in spite of the school's ruling?

Update:  performance is reinstated, questions remain, lawsuits to follow?

Es war einmal...

As the Humanities are further marginalized in our increasingly market-driven semblance of a culture, and as defenses of what remains continue to be anæmic and dismissable by the Powers That Be, it's heartening to have occasional things like this published where people not in the choir can see them. 

Then there's this, which I find fantastically intriguing after having tangled for six months with the Medical Industrial Complex and its inability to understand that the practice of medicine is fundamentally narrative-driven. Needs no ghost come from the grave to tell us this.  Or, in the common parlance, Duh.

And just look at all the George Eliot on that reading list. What, you mean women actually wrote about domestic violence and substance abuse before 1970? There's a shock. Next week: joblessness, poverty and heroin addiction with Mrs. Gaskell.