The Big Noise children’s orchestra

Not so unusual, you might say. Children all over the world show musical talent and perform in public. The difference in Amileigh’s case is that, like hundreds of other children in Raploch, she has not had to pay for music tuition or audition for a place in Big Noise. Every child in the community gets the same chance.

Amileigh is a product of Sistema Scotland, an offshoot of the Venezuelan music education scheme known as El Sistema (The System). Pioneered in the 1970s by a visionary economist and musician, José Antonio Abreu, El Sistema found its ultimate expression in the Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra, which has taken many of the world’s musical capitals by storm.

In recognition of the strides the Scottish programme has made since it began in 2008, the Venezuelan orchestra and its conductor Gustavo Dudamel are to visit Raploch in June for an open-air concert that will raise the curtain on the London 2012 Festival, the cultural jamboree tied to the Olympics. They will also give two concerts in London.

Abreu’s original goal was modest. In the mid-1970s there were few, if any, opportunities for young Venezuelans to train in an orchestra. He wanted to rectify that. When the orchestra he had founded won a prize at an international festival in Aberdeen in 1977, the Venezuelan government became interested and began to fund his music education programme. In the intervening 35 years more than 1m children have benefited.

El Sistema is the inverse of the western classical music model. In Europe and North America children develop their expertise with an instrument on their own, and only then do they get together with other musicians. With El Sistema, children start by learning to play together.

As El Sistema expanded, so did its social aims. Abreu’s unwritten credo was that being disadvantaged economically did not mean a child had to be disadvantaged spiritually. In his eyes, the opportunity to make music together was a birthright. The discipline and self-confidence it instilled in young people made them better citizens.

“That’s why the focus tends to be on underprivileged children,” says Marshall Marcus, a violinist who taught in Venezuela in the late 1970s and now heads a research project for an international Sistema Centre at London’s Southbank Centre. “This is the part of El Sistema that carries [to other cultures]. It’s a matter of taking away impediments to opportunity.”

There has been no shortage of such impediments in the UK since the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher’s spending cuts dismantled much of the country’s music education framework. Various privately funded initiatives have tried to make good the loss, but none has offered a Sistema-like model for expansion, which Simon Rattle, a huge fan, has dubbed a “kindly virus”. Sistema-like schemes are now flourishing in Liverpool, Norwich and the London Borough of Lambeth.

Sistema Scotland was first off the mark in 2008 – thanks to the initiative of Richard Holloway, a former chair of the Scottish Arts Council who had visited Venezuela. Before Big Noise arrived, only one child in Raploch was receiving music lessons. The programme now embraces 80 per cent of local children – about 450, including those with learning disabilities.

Based in a new education centre with nursery, primary and faith schools under one roof, it starts with Baby Noise – singing-in-a-circle sessions for mothers and toddlers. When children reach school age, they are given instruments made of card and paper, to help them get acquainted with the feel of a violin. Big Noise provides after-school group tuition three days a week for children up to the age of 12, supervised by 16 teachers – some of them professional orchestral players. The drop-out rate is low and the hope is that when Amileigh and her peers reach their mid-to-late teens they will be mentoring the next intake.

Most of the £3.8m funding for Sistema Scotland has come from private and charitable sources but an independent report, published last year, has transformed the political climate. It said Big Noise had raised self-esteem in children at Raploch, and lifted the community’s hopes for the future. It found “improved social skills, team-working skills and expanded social networks”.

With that endorsement, Stirling Council recently agreed to take over much of the £600,000 annual cost. Community leaders in Aberdeen, Dundee, Fife and Govanhill, Glasgow, are now campaigning for similar schemes.

Not every element of the Venezuelan model can be transposed to the UK. Dudamel and the Bolivars have a natural joy and exuberance that cannot be taught. But Amileigh and other members of Big Noise “love being able to play well and to impress people”, says George Anderson of Sistema Scotland. They may not yet have the prowess of the Bolivars, but if funding can be found to replicate the Raploch pilot scheme, El Sistema’s “kindly virus” could quickly spread across the country.

Andrew Clark (The Financial Times) / February 27, 2012

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Daniel Levitan studies three different slides of the same brain of a person listening to music.

His mission is to demystify classical music and open it up to those who might have felt it was too distant or difficult for them to enjoy.

“I want to empower the listener to realize music is meaningful and interesting without any prior background,” he says in an interview from Vancouver where he was made a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for “bringing science to the public.”

The McGill University professor of psychology and neuroscience is also a musician, playing the clarinet, sax, guitar and electric bass in both jazz and rock bands. It’s been a natural progression to join the two interests in his research, he says.

Levitin is adamant that you don’t have to know a thing about classical music to enjoy — and participate in — the concert Beethoven and Your Brain on Feb. 25.

This is the second time Koerner Hall has hosted the neuroscience-classical music mashup which gives audience members hand-held clickers to register their responses. A number of times during the concert by the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, the audience is asked questions and the responses are demonstrated on a large overhead screen.

Last year’s experiment has ended up in a research paper titled for Memory for Musical Key in a Real Time Symphony Performance currently being written by Levitin and conductor Edwin Outwater.

One of the most startling findings of last year’s concert was the ability of the audience to correctly select the key of a piece of music, he says.

“They knew a lot more about music than they thought they did.”

Outwater, the musical director of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, also has a background in rock both as a performer and conductor, including conducting Cheap Trick at the Hollywood Bowl.

He says Beethoven and Your Brain began “as an explanation of classical music and how your brain reacts,” but has expanded since its inception last year.

It is now a full two hours after the audience asked for more participation, he says, and there will be more interaction with questions and explanations from Outwater and Levitin between musical pieces.

Outwater says, “We realized the audience was experiencing music on a primal level even if they don’t know a lot about it.”

Just as a baby’s cry or an alarm elicits an emotional response, music causes reactions, says Outwater, adding, “It’s beyond emotion, it’s really hormones and chemicals.”

Classical music suffers from the “feeling one is supposed to know something about” and it is incumbent on people in the field to break down barriers between listener and musical styles, he says.

“Everyone wants new audiences and to make them feel welcome.”

Last year’s concert drew an eclectic audience of intellectually curious people who were interested in science or music or just having a stimulating evening’s entertainment, he says. When over 90 per cent of the audience predicted the accurate musical key, Outwater says it was like a light bulb going on.

“They’re saying, wait, I do know something. As a conductor, it is something I see over and over again.”

The orchestra will play Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 and portions of No. 9 and No. 3.

Trish Crawford (Toronto.com) / February 23, 2012

Weblink : http://www.toronto.com/
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The majority of musicians in the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra are women. Provided by the orchestras

According to a survey by the JoongAng Ilbo, Korean orchestras tend to have a very high percentage of female members, compared to famous orchestras in other countries. Of the 105 members of Seoul Philharmonic, women account for 65 members, or 62 percent. The ratio is even higher for the Bucheon Philharmonic Orchestra, where 63 of its 74 members are women, or 85 percent.

In contrast, the Vienna Philharmonic only has seven women, who represent 5 percent of its 136 members. And in the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, women account for 18 of its 128 members, or 14 percent.

The New York Philharmonic has a comparatively balanced gender ratio, with woman representing 45 of its 99 members.

In Japan, the NHK Symphony Orchestra has 17 women, or 16 percent of its 106 members.

Experts say the phenomenon in Korean orchestras where women outnumber men is related to fixed ideas about jobs and wages.

Chang Il-bum, a classical music critic and professor at Anyang University, said that Confucian ideas about gender roles have resulted in a higher number of men in administration, business and politics rather than the arts.

“The number of male students in music colleges is very low in Korea,” Chang said.

Last year, 58 out of 151 freshmen at Seoul National University’s music college were men, accounting for only 38.4 percent of the total. In addition, of the 29 freshmen who chose to major in string instruments, only seven were male. Yonsei University’s College of Music saw a similar trend, with 185 male students among its 598 students as of 2011.

One of the barriers to attracting men could be the low salaries offered by local orchestras.

“My annual salary after taxes is now 30 million won, and it was only 12 million won [$10,650] in my first year with this orchestra,” said a woman, 36, who asked to be identified only by her surname Lee. She has been working with the orchestra for more than 10 years.

“I do part-time jobs such as teach music lessons, but my income is still very low compared to that of my friends who are working at large companies,” she said.

Experts give mixed reviews to the sound of orchestras where women are in the majority.

Music columnist Jake T. Ryu expressed his concern, saying, “The volume of sound made by an orchestra depends on the strength of the string section. A female player will not be that different from a male player. But the sound made by 40 to 50 women in an orchestra could be quite different from that made by a similar number of men.”

Chang, the music critic and Anyang University professor, said that although it may not make a difference if the majority of musicians in an orchestra are women, “female musicians may create a more elaborate, detailed sound than men do.”

And Park Jong-ho, opera critic and chief executive of classic record seller and academy Pungwoldang, said, “It is no problem if women are in the majority. There is no gender in an orchestra.”

Kang Ki-heon, No Jin-ho (Korea JoongAng Daily) / February 20, 2012

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Researchers provide evidence that gender stereotypes shape our reaction to orchestral performances. But they report these effects aren’t consistent, and for female conductors, such as Marin Alsop, they aren’t necessarily negative.
(Grant Leighton/Southbank Centre London)

Researchers Valerie Folkes of the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business and Shashi Matta of The Ohio State University provide evidence that gender stereotypes shape our reaction to orchestral performances. But they report these effects aren’t consistent, and for female conductors, they aren’t necessarily negative.

“People have strong beliefs about how men and women differ, which can influence their judgments about the kinds of product that a source will create,” they write in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. In three experiments, they set out to discover whether listeners would judge a particular performance differently if they believed a man or woman was at the podium.

The first experiment featured 413 undergraduates — business majors who, for the most part, had no strong interest in classical music. They first read a short news story describing the appointment of a new music director of the Baltimore Symphony. Half read an accurate account referring to the female conductor Marin Alsop; the others read a doctored report referring to the male conductor Maron Alsop.

Half the members of each of group read unambiguously positive reports about the conductor. The others read about mixed reactions to the announcement, including dissent among members of the orchestra who were disappointed by the pick.

Participants then listened to an excerpt from Alsop’s recording of Brahms’ First Symphony. Afterward, they were asked to judge its overall quality, and the extent to which it embodied masculine qualities such as “powerful” and “stirring,” and feminine qualities such as “graceful” and “charming.”

Those who read the mixed response, in which some people questioned the conductor’s competence, appeared to be more easily swayed by gender stereotypes. Participants told (accurately) they were listening to a woman judged the performance as less powerful, more delicate, and “of poorer quality” than those who believed they were listening to a man.

However, those who read the universally positive report reacted quite differently. They gave the performance equally high marks for such masculine qualities as “stirring” and “compelling,” regardless of whether they thought the conductor was male or female.

Those who correctly believed Alsop is a woman rated the performance higher in feminine qualities such as elegance and delicacy. Overall, they gave the performance higher grades than those who believed they were listening to a man.

“Participants appear to have made inferences about her superior competence that led to beliefs about her product’s likely superior quality,” the researchers write. In other words, if someone can successfully defy gender stereotypes and earn that much acclaim, we figure she must be amazing, and judge her work accordingly.

This experiment, and a second in which students listened to an Alsop recording of a Brahms overture that featured more “feminine”-sounding passages, were repeated using a group of 112 classical music enthusiasts. The results followed the same pattern.

“They believed that a female conductor is more competent than a male conductor when both were highly praised,” the researchers write. But once again, “her” performance of Brahms was judged more highly on feminine attributes such as delicacy, and “his” received higher marks on such masculine elements as power.

So what did the professional critics think of the recording? A quick survey of major CD-review websites finds one called Alsop’s Brahms First Symphony “lyrical and passionate rather than stoic or grand,” while another used the phrase “nice, light, airy, and lyrical.” Hmmm. On the other hand, a third reviewer called her interpretation “grand and imposing … with genuine thrust and energy.” No gender stereotyping there.

Perhaps the most interesting component of the study was a manipulation given to certain participants in the first two experiments (the ones featuring the undergraduates). Some were given a nine-digit number to remember; others were instructed to listen to the music very carefully, “remembering as much as you can.”

The distracting task and the close listening had the same effect: Greatly dampening the likelihood of lapsing into stereotypical thinking. Intense focus on the string of numbers, or on the performance itself, monopolized the participants “cognitive resources,” the researchers write.

Too preoccupied to pigeonhole people, they simply responded to the music.

Tom Jacobs (Miller-McCune) / February 9, 2012

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Alan Gilbert, son of Japanese and American violinists, conducts the New York Philharmonic. Photograph by Neilson Barnard/
Getty Images for the Swatch Group

For orchestras, at least it’s not their product that’s lethal, though it might as well be. With the median age of concertgoers rising, fewer than one in 10 adults reported attending a classical concert in 2008, according to a periodic survey conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts, a 28 percent drop since 1982. The financial state of orchestras today is roughly comparable to that of Blockbuster Video post-Netflix. Ticket sales are dropping; layoffs and bankruptcies abound. In the past two years, the Honolulu, Syracuse, and New Mexico orchestras closed up shop entirely; the Philadelphia Orchestra, long revered as one of the five best in the country, filed for Chapter 11 protection in April.

But there is one group that still likes classical music and, what’s more, pays to hear it performed: Asians. Of Asian-Americans ages 18-24 responding to the same survey, 14 percent reported attending a classical concert in the past year, more than any other demographic in that age group. Despite classical’s deserved reputation as the whitest of genres, Asian attendance rates match or surpass the national average up through the 45- 54 age range. To put it one way, the younger the classical audience gets, the more Asian it becomes. To put it another, the only population that is disproportionately filling seats being vacated by old people dying off is Asians.

This reflects what can be observed at most American concert halls today: a sea of white hair, broken only by the black, unflattering bowl cut given to all Asian kids by their parents, who have dragged them to the symphony for their cultural enrichment. I know because I was one of those kids. I’m a hapa (mixed-race) Korean-American, with an American father and Korean mother. At age 5, I was given a quarter-size violin. Private lessons followed, with regular trips to the Kennedy Center to see the National Symphony Orchestra. By 12, I was concertmaster of my school orchestra and performing solo recitals. For a time, it was fun. At no point did I feel I had much of a choice in the matter.

“Music is a huge part of life for most Asian families,” says violinist Sarah Chang. “Most Asian children I know start taking violin, piano, or cello lessons from an early age.” If this sets them apart socially from their non-Asian classmates, Asian parents largely do not care. Their determination to raise musical kids can be single-minded and severe. One memorable passage in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother has Amy Chua threatening her daughter during piano practice: “If the next time’s not perfect, I’m going to take all your stuffed animals and burn them!” In Musicians From a Different Shore, University of Hawaii professor and pianist Mari Yoshihara describes her upbringing in postwar Japan. At the time, a confluence of mass production, rising incomes, and shrinking apartment sizes brought millions of upright pianos into urban households, where they became an emblem of middle-class status. Through her years of practice, she writes, “I never asked myself why I was learning music or whether I even liked playing the piano. Such questions never even occurred to me. Music was not something I had the option of liking or not liking; it was just there for me to do.”

“There was a time when practically every major soloist was Jewish,” says violinist Joshua Bell. “Every Jewish kid grew up wanting to play the violin. Now it’s true among Asians.” (Or at least among Asian parents.) This shift became apparent within conservatories and orchestras in the 1970s, when the ranks of Eastern European and Jewish musicians, who had long dominated the field, began to decline, while those of Asians started to swell. Asians make up just over 4 percent of the U.S. population, but 7 percent of U.S. orchestra musicians are Asian, and the figure rises to 20 percent for top orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic. At the elite Julliard School for music, one in five undergraduates—and one in three Ph.D. students—is Asian.

A word of caution: “Asian” in the American context encompasses a broad geography spanning Pakistan to Indonesia and including everyone ranging from fresh-off-the-boat immigrants to third-generation Asian-Americans and adoptees. In reality, the Asian classical phenomenon does not extend much beyond China, Japan, and Korea. Yet for East Asians at least, classical music is a genuine common thread, albeit a relatively young one. Its presence in the region goes back little more than a century, to the military bands brought to Japan by Commodore Perry’s opening. The early association of Western music with military discipline and modernization set a precedent. Classical music became an aspirational totem for both newly industrializing Asian countries, whose governments subsidized music schools and orchestras, and parents, for whom having a musician in the family was marker of success.

But not just any musician. Asian and Asian-American performers gravitate almost exclusively to strings and piano: Those instruments which, within a genre that symbolizes class mobility in Asia, are at the top of the heap. Rarely does one encounter an Asian conservatory student playing the bassoon or trombone, or any instrument that does not afford the possibility of soloist superstardom.

The prestige Asians ascribe to classical music is, it should be noted, completely disproportionate to the actual salaries earned by professional musicians. And the Asian juggernaut has yet to move much beyond the orchestra pit. One area in which Asians do not dominate, Yoshihara notes, is orchestra management, which remains overwhelmingly white. The boards of most performing arts organizations are made up of wealthy corporate donors, who tend to recruit managers and other board members from within their own social circles. And in contrast to celebrity musicians like Yo-Yo Ma and Lang Lang, Asians haven’t made much headway into conducting or composing. Asian music education is not famous for its music theory. The Suzuki method, Asia’s most successful classical music export, is a highly mechanical training regimen based on drills and rote memorization, with no emphasis on “feeling” the music. It lends itself best to the equally mechanical works of the Baroque period, less to the Romantic era and not at all to contemporary classical.

However circumscribed the music may be, Asia is one place where classical artists can be genuine pop stars in ways long forgotten in Europe and North America. “Whenever I play in Korea, I feel like I’m at a rock concert,” says Bell. If there’s any irony to the most quintessentially Western music tradition being kept alive by the East, by now it’s a moot point. Classical music is as Asian as tempura and Spam. Even if it eventually dies in the West, it will have an Asian afterlife, much in the way washed-up American rock bands can still pack stadiums in Manila.

Classical music probably won’t ever disappear completely from our shores. If it survives, it will be thanks in large part to continued Asian immigration and an audience that is increasingly imported. Faced with the unenviable task of trying to make the most hidebound of music traditions hip and relevant to kids, the survival strategy of orchestras has mostly been to throw up their hands and pray that their remaining season ticket-holders cling to life another year. Instead, they might prepare for a future in which their subscribers look a lot different than they do today, and cultivate leadership, outreach and programming which reflect that.

As for me, I eventually grew tired of the violin and stopped playing. But I never lost my love for Mozart and Mahler. It’s said that playing an instrument as a child is the greatest predictor of concert attendance as an adult. So I still go to those same concert halls I went to as a kid. Only now, I no longer have the bowl cut, and I attend by choice.

Michael Ahn Paarlberg (Slate) / February 2, 2012

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Composer and inventor Tod Machover poses with a Beatbug, a percussive instrument,
in a 2003 AP photo.

Events like these would seem to signal a golden age for the adventurous musician. New instruments have come to market at a steady clip in recent years, offering novel and occasionally fanciful ways to perform music. Maybe you’ve heard of the the Eigenharp, the Tenori-on, or the Harpejji?

Or maybe not. Good luck hearing any of these contraptions on the recordings of prominent modern artists. You’re more likely to come across Tibetan singing bowls (Fleet Foxes), 17th-century Indonesian angklung (Okkervil River), or the zither (P.J. Harvey). In other words, established pop and rock musicians seem more inclined to try just about any instrument other than a new one. The turntable might be the last new implement to break into pop music; there’s even debate over whether that qualifies as an instrument, despite having its own form of notation and a course at Berklee College of Music. According to hip-hop lore, Grand Wizzard Theodore invented scratching 36 years ago. Suddenly, the turntable became a device used not just for listening to music, but performing it. And like the guitar, it turned into a focal point in live performances.

Now consider some of the instrumental developments in the 36 years prior: the solid-body electric guitar, the pedal-steel guitar, the steel drum, the electric bass, the synthesizer, and the drum machine.

Music technology in general has charged forward, and computers, digital sampling and MIDI have dramatically shaped music. But no one mimes to music on the “air sampler” and the idea of a “Software Hero” video game, with its own simulated laptop, is a little glum. Will a brand-new instrument ever capture hearts, minds, and speaker systems again?

THE PROBLEM WITH NEWNESS

It’s hard to overstate the importance of new musical instruments in history. The piano’s dynamic range allowed for a subtlety in composition previously unimagined. The modern drum set paved the way for jazz. Rock and roll would not have happened without the electric guitar. As composer Edgard Varese put it in 1936, “It is because new instruments have been constantly added to the old ones that Western music has such a rich and varied patrimony.”

So what happened? Why has there been such a drought of new instruments—especially in rock and pop, which thrive on novelty?

Inventor Aaron Andrew Hunt blames it in part on the “music industrial complex.” He created the Tonal Plexus in 2001 and has since sold, by his count, “not many.” With 1,266 keys, the instrument is designed especially for microtonal composition, so it would be a tough sell at just about any time. But Hunt said the deck is particularly stacked against new instruments now that a standard repertoire has been locked in, as has the popular idea of what a proper instrument is.

“The biggest barrier is the institutionalization of Western music and the mass marketing of all the instruments,” he says. “The problem is that no one can break though this marketing barrier and this education barrier because it’s become this machine.”

In the past, support from the establishment has made a difference in whether new instruments find a market. The research and backing of universities and corporations like RCA helped make the synthesizer happen. In Hector Berlioz, the saxophone got a major boost from a major composer. But many instruments have risen from very humble origins. The steel drum evolved from frying pans and oil cans after the Trinidadian government banned other musical instruments. Folks of limited means also turned household objects into music makers with washboards and turntables.

It might just be a symptom of modern life. We don’t have as much leisure time as we once did to learn a new musical instrument. And why would parents invest years and thousands of dollars into lessons for some newfangled instrument for which no music has been written, when the violin is right there? Even if so inclined, who would they find to teach it?

One of the most successful instruments of the 20th century skirted that problem when Robert Moog outfitted his synthesizer with a piano-style keyboard, giving the radical a touch of the familiar. Donald Buchla also developed his own modular synth at about the same time, but instead used pressure-sensitive touch plates on the principle that a new instrument should sport a new interface. Moog’s synths took off immediately; Buchla’s did not.

I’ve talked to a number of instrument makers, and frankly, it seems like a really hard way to make a living. Bankruptcy and years of strife are recurring themes in their tales. John Lambert, inventor of the Eigenharp—an elaborate device with a grid of keys and a breath controller that he spent eight years and millions of dollars developing—told me he keeps in his home a small museum of others’ failed musical instruments to remind him of the hard road he has chosen. Even successful instruments don’t always pay off for their creators. Bogged down by competitors’ bogus patent infringement claims on the saxophone, the destitute Adolphe Sax declared bankruptcy three times and appealed to the Belgium government for a stipend to live on. He did, however, survive two assassination attempts by rival instrument dealers.

But perhaps such a calling has less to do with making money than, say, propagating the species. Some of the oldest known artifacts are musical instruments, carved from the femurs of bears and woolly mammoth tusks. The oldest known musical instrument, dated to about 35,000 years ago, is a five-holed flute fashioned from a vulture’s wing bone. The archaeologists who discovered it in 2009 cited their find as evidence that instruments contributed to keeping humans in close social networks—and ultimately outlasting the more isolated Neanderthals.

Of course, our distant ancestors didn’t see the conundrum faced by today’s instrument makers. Digital technology gives musicians unprecedented access to a diversity of sounds. But instruments that use it run up against a common complaint that they lack expressiveness. The performer doesn’t get the immediate feedback that comes with a traditional instrument. Granted, a similar complaint was made about the piano—specifically, that its mechanics remove the pianist a few steps from the sound source.

“You can literally make any sound you can imagine, but the means of controlling them in real time have really lagged behind,” says Randy Jones of Madrona Labs, a company that’s rolling out its first instrument, the Soundplane, in the next few months. Jones boasts that the Soundplane, which goes for $1,695, has “a new interface that allows you to play the computer with the responsiveness of an acoustic instrument.”

Roger Linn, who invented the first digital drum machine in the late 1970s, also hopes to have his new creation, the LinnStrument, ready for sale sometime in 2012. Like Jones, he says his instrument bridges the divide between performer and technology. The LinnStrument features “three-dimensional” keys to allow for more nuanced expression.

Linn is one of the best-known instrument makers alive, but he realizes that this hardly guarantees the LinnStrument’s success. Even the violin would have a tough go of it, Linn says, were it invented today. You hold it under your chin (“that’s a horrible idea for an interface!”) and distances between notes get smaller the further up the fingerboard. It’s the perfect set-up for carpal tunnel and deafness in one ear. “It’d be laughed out of the music store,” he says.

REVENGE OF THE OLD, WEIRD INSTRUMENT

But not only are musicians ignoring new instruments, they’re taking up with some very old ones. Feist has used the nyckelharpa, a keyed fiddle that traces back to 14th-century Sweden. The Decemberists use bouzoukis (a sort of Greek lute), and Joanna Newsom has made the harp an unlikely indie music accessory. Its a rare article about Janelle Monae that doesn’t include the word “futuristic,” but the most futuristic instruments on her album are the Theremin (invented 1920) and the Mellotron (1948).

How did old, weird instruments become so popular? For this, I turned to Jeremy Barnes, who’s one half of A Hawk and a Hacksaw and a former member of Neutral Milk Hotel. He’s in New Mexico recording new songs with the help of a homemade hurdy-gurdy, a santoor (related to a cimbalom, which is related to the dulcimer), and an autoharp. Much of independent music’s burgeoning interest in exotic instruments of yore can be traced back to Neutral Milk Hotel’s influential In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, released in 1997. Barnes points out that the album came out around the time when home recording took off. “I think the process of working on recordings at home naturally leads a musician to explore new sounds,” he said in an email. “If you shy away from MIDI and computer-based sounds, then you have to start learning new instruments.”

The tricks of recording-studio auteurs like Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, and George Martin “are now being used by everyone from Dr. Dre to the 15-year-old kid in suburban Wisconsin.” And that, he says, freed people to move beyond “the homogenous Guitar Center-ization of Western music.”

But old instruments don’t make these musicians revivalists. Besides the ukulele, Merill Garbus of the acclaimed avant-rock act tUnE-yArDs is also known for her deft use of looping. Perhaps this is what Pierre Schaeffer, inventor of musique concrete, had envisioned: bold new music freed from the constraints of instruments. An extreme example is found in Matthew Herbert, who has made a career of fashioning a singular kind of dance music from unlikely sound sources: people eating, the chirps of chickens and, most recently, a pig. And maybe all my bellyaching about the lack of new instruments is its own form of nostalgia, a longing for cultural symbols irrelevant to the production of music today.

But new gadgets have their champions. Bjork, for instance. She’s brandished on stage futuristic devices like the Reactable and Tenori-on. For her latest album, Biophilia, she and her team invented instruments like the gameleste, a cross between the gamelan and celesta. This puts her in a small club of musicians, Tom Waits and Paul Simon among them, who have applied the DIY ethic to instruments.

Jordan Rudess, keyboardist for prog rockers Dream Theater, not only seems to have performed with every new musical device on the market, but has developed the impressively sophisticated music-making apps, MorphWiz and SampleWiz, for iPad and mobile phones. These and a handful of other apps suggest that there’s a real future for that kind of thing. The best-known instrument app is the Ocarina, developed by Smule. Whatever its limitations, the Ocarina reminds users that music doesn’t have to be a passive activity.

But it’s an open question whether a mobile device is much of an improvement over a laptop in a performance setting (imagine, for instance, Paul Simonon’s bass guitar replaced by an iPhone 4S on the London Calling cover). Many musicians now rely more on live performances for their revenue than their recordings. And while all those kids at Skrillex shows don’t mind that their idol spends a lot of time behind a MacBook screen, for plenty of other artists putting on concerts, an instrument helps.

At least, that’s what Jones of Madrona Labs is counting on.

“The tide is turning back to people wanting that live connection,” he says.

William Weir (The Atlantic) / February 7, 2012

Weblink : http://www.theatlantic.com/
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It’s a tricky prospect. One song. Three minutes. What on earth would you pick? Would you go into the room with one killer tune (Adamski anyone?) or opt for a boutique approach, tailor-making your playlist to what you can observe? Spot a guy wearing a Tim Hecker t-shirt? Probably don’t play him Michelle McManus. Or a girl with a Karen Millen suit and kitten heels? Pass on the terrorcore.

I’ve had some varied suggestions already: Gertch by Chas & Dave, Pyramid Song by Radiohead, Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division, Eddie & Ernie’s Bullets Don’t Have Eyes, OutKast’s SpottieOttieDopalicious and Sympathy for The Devil by the Rolling Stones. My friend, a classical violinist, would choose Paganini’s Cantabile. James Blunt seems to have suggested his own hit song You’re Beautiful.

Would you play something funny such as Informer’s Snow or Mr Blobby? Or something outwardly sleazy like D’Angelo or Lil’ Kim? And what would you do while they’re listening? Perfect the coolest drumming-on-the-table moves? Mouth the words? Air guitar?

It sounds like fertile ground for the music bore (I’d know, I am one) and intense social anxiety, yet it’s not as ridiculous as you’d think. Darwin believed music played a role in sexual selection, as Daniel Levitin points out in his book Your Brain On Music. Darwin wrote:

I conclude that music notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex. Thus musical tones became firmly associated with some of the strongest passions an animal is capable of feeling and are consequently used instinctively.

Saucy stuff. Anyway, what would you pick to charm?

Lucy Jones (The Telegraph) / February 7, 2012

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It is best to hook children on music
in their early years. credit : Alamy

Expanding our children’s cultural horizons shouldn’t just be a preoccupation for the self-obsessed middle classes. Nor should orchestral music be the preserve of the elite. Studies show that a developing brain benefits hugely from exposure to the music of the great composers. In a school for children with ADHD, Mozart was actually found to cut racing heart rates and boost concentration. Not only that, it improves cognitive function and increases creativity. So why are we isolating our children from its miraculous effects?

The great Hungarian composer and music educationalist Zoltan Kodaly wrote: “If a child is not filled at least once by the life-giving stream of good music during the most susceptible period – between age six and 16 – it will hardly be of any use later on.” And here lies the rub: if you haven’t been inspired by music in your formative years, by going to concerts and learning to express yourself through an instrument, you probably never will be. And thus the door closes.

In 2009, I launched a music festival in Somerset, a sort of Glastonbury meets Glyndebourne experience (orchestrainafield.com) to which all and sundry, oldies, teens, and even younger ones were invited. A huge part of our audience had never heard an orchestra live before and to say they were changed by the experience is an understatement. I still meet people who talk about that live orchestral onslaught with a kind of evangelistic zeal. It was the same when I took an orchestra north, to a rather bleak industrial town. There we played for 500 or so teenagers who had never heard such music, and we touched them in a way they will never forget.

As people today connect with each other by electronic means, such moments of communal musical witness become increasingly rare and ever more important. Inter-generational, classless experiences barely exist. There was a time when music was made across the generations in church or home. But we no longer go to church and there are fewer and fewer focal community points. This is why I want to demolish the restrictive bourgeois conventions that have grown up around classical music.

Charles Hazlewood (The Telegraph) / February 9, 2012

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While the likes of Katherine Jenkins and Russell Watson might have brought opera to the homes of millions, one of Britain’s leading opera singers says the dumbing down of the classical genre is one of the music industry’s cruellest tricks.

Sir Thomas Allen, an acclaimed 67-year-old baritone celebrating four decades of singing at the Royal Opera House in London, said popular classical musicians who “have never sung in an opera” are reflective of a “lowbrow” music industry in decline. He added he could never endorse the “fake popularisation” of the genre he has worked in for so long.

“I refuse to give in to this fake popularisation and lowbrow quality, and people claiming to be opera singers when they’ve never sung in an opera – it’s a deceit. Those singers could never do the real thing, here in the Royal Opera, where the non-bastardised version takes place,” he said in a recent interview.

His remarks come a decade after he told the Royal Philharmonic Society that attractive young musicians posing in wet T-shirts for “mass appeal” were emblematic of a “civilisation in rapid decline”. In his 2002 speech to musicians and recording industry executives, he called the “sugar-coated programming of the recording of choice bits of easy listening” a “plague” and compared promoters of such acts to “well-organised hijackers with no musical sensibilities or taste”.

Durham-born Sir Thomas, who has been cited by the playwright Lee Hall as the inspiration for Billy Elliot, was asked if things had changed since he made his now infamous speech. He responded: “No. It all stands.” He once said: “The idea of a wet T-shirted quartet where once was Amadeus has me reaching for the sea-sick pills, or just retching.”

Last year saw the first tabloid opera in Britain: Anna Nicole at the Royal Opera House told of the life and death of the Playboy model. Before that, Jerry Springer: The Opera featured Jesus, Mary and God as guests on the American TV presenter’s show. The opera included up to 300 swear words.

Sarah Morrison(The Independent) / January 29, 2012

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credit : Dave Yoder for The New York Times

The tradition of challenging the intrinsic musical worth of antique instruments is nearly as venerable as the instruments themselves. Science has advanced, with ever better methods of analysis. Makers have leapt ahead in producing superb instruments, which have gained a foothold among many serious players.

But while the mystique faces ever-greater scrutiny, it remains powerful in our increasingly digitized and disposable world, where 300-year-old wood objects used to express deep emotion seem ever more precious. Prices continue to soar, and musicians still yearn to play old master instruments.

The latest to get one is Stéphane Tétreault, an 18-year-old Montrealer who is being loaned the 1707 Countess of Stainlein Stradivarius cello that belonged to Bernard Greenhouse, a founding member of the Beaux Arts Trio, who died last May. The Greenhouse family sold the instrument two weeks ago to an anonymous patron in Montreal for an undisclosed amount, but one said to surpass the previous record of $6 million.

The Strad wars won’t end soon, and soaring prices for the 2,000 made during the golden age of mid-16th to mid-18th-century northern Italy have intensified the stakes. The pool of talented string players is growing. The number of Strads and Guarnerius del Gesùs and Amatis and Bergonzis is not.

By contrast, mechanical instruments like clarinets and flutes tend to wear out; even pianos, with their complicated action and the tendency of their flat soundboards to warp, have lives usually measured only in decades, not centuries.

Broadly speaking, consider the divide in the string world to be between the True Believers and the Debunkers.

On the true believer side are collectors, dealers and superstar players who perform on the valuable instruments. All have an interest in maintaining the reputation of these instruments, as a source of both wealth and prestige.

Several factors put old Italian instruments on top. Superb wood, perfected design, the highest craftsmanship and special varnish all came together in Cremona and its environs from 1550 to 1750. The sheer number of years being played is a factor. Repeated vibrations have an effect on the wood’s structure, causing cells to break down in a way that produces a more flexible sound, some violin experts say. “By playing an instrument, it opens up its pores,” said the violinist and conductor Pinchas Zukerman, who plays a 1742 Guarnerius del Gesù. “The voice becomes purer and brighter.”

Like many violin experts, Mr. Zukerman cautions that some Strads are better than others. What matters is the connection. “When an instrument suits a player, my God, it’s a match in heaven,” he said. “When I play on Perlman’s violin I sound like garbage,” he said of Itzhak Perlman’s Strad. “He plays it, and it sounds like a million bucks.”

Psychology plays an important role. If musicians think they are playing one of the greatest instruments in the world, one that served virtuosos before them, they may actually play better.

“A great violinist can make almost any violin sound really good,” said Christopher Reuning, the Boston-based dealer who brokered the Greenhouse sale. “When they are playing a great Strad they have an ease.” It allows them to “sculpt the sound” and produce different emotions with the slightest change of bow speed, he added.

The equipment adds to the performer’s luster. Programs sometimes list the name and date of a violinist’s instrument.

The debunkers include scientists, modern luthiers and some younger soloists who can’t afford old master instruments and make a virtue of the new.

“Classifying violins into old and new doesn’t really make any sense, except for the history of design and antique value,” said Claudia Fritz, a flutist and the researcher at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris who conducted the blind performance study that was published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Jan. 2. “I don’t think there is any objective difference,” said Ms. Fritz.

Sam Zygmuntowicz is one of the nation’s most prominent violin makers. He lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and his new fiddles go for $55,000. An older instrument recently sold for $130,000 at auction. “Don’t ask the question ‘What makes a Strad great?’ ” he said. “Ask the question ‘What are the attributes of great violins, and what makes this violin different than another?’ ”

“The thing about believers is they just believe,” he said. “For those who are privileged enough to be selling them or own them or buy them, there’s no incentive to disbelieve it.”

The debunkers make another point. The Strad mystique can put enormous pressure on performers to play on a rare named instrument and devalues musicians who don’t.

“This is all I heard when I was growing up,” said Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, the international soloist. “ ‘You need a great old violin,’ ” she said. “It was drummed into my head.” She felt it so keenly that in her 20s, when she gained the use of a Strad that was too large for her, she kept on playing despite suffering tendinitis.

After two seasons, the wealthy couple who had loaned it to her decided to divorce and recalled the instrument. “In hindsight, it turned out for me to be a blessing because I was ruining my arm,” she said. Ms. Salerno-Sonnenberg now plays a much more comfortable Peter Guarnerius of 1721.

The stratospheric costs of rare instruments mean that many players must rely on loans from wealthy patrons, a situation that can sap an artist’s dignity and cause disruptions in their lives.

Dylana Jenson was a rising star in the late 1970s and early 1980s. After winning a silver medal at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow at 17, she was loaned a Guarnerius del Gesù. Six years later, when she decided to marry, the patron took the instrument back, saying she was not committed to her career, according to Ms. Jenson. Her career fell into a tailspin.

“It was an intimate part of my ability to express myself as an artist,” she said of the violin. “Then I had nothing.” She now plays a Zygmuntowicz instrument.

Leila Josefowicz, another prominent soloist, is also talking to Mr. Zygmuntowicz about a purchase. She lost a Guarnerius del Gesù when the lender decided he wanted to sell it. She replaced it with another precious instrument, but its owner recently died and she now faces uncertainty over whether she can keep that one. She acknowledged the awkwardness of being subject to a patron’s whims. “You have to come play for them when they want,” she said. “That’s a small sacrifice to play a great instrument.”

She said she does not want to be perceived as a victim of donor capriciousness. “The sound comes from the player,” she said, noting that modern makers have come “extremely close” to matching the quality of top Strads. She also plays much modern music, so a newer instrument is more appropriate. But she added, “I don’t know anyone who would say, ‘No, thank you,’ ” to a Strad.

Daniel J. Wakin (The New York Times) / January 28, 2012

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