Music

by

“Stealing” Music

This little snippet from today’s FiveThirtyEight’s Significant Digits caught my eye and started me wondering.

2-second clip

Kraftwerk, the pioneering German electronic band, has won a 20-year case in the European Court of Justice concerning a 2-second clip of its song “Metal on Metal.” The court ruled that two hip-hop producers could not sample the track without permission. The ruling “could have huge implications for the music industry” and also comes as an American court ruled against Katy Perry, holding that she copied 2013’s “Dark Horse” from a Christian rap song that Perry claims she had never heard. [BBC]

Are all these lawsuits about royalties?  Copyright infringement?

The other night I went to a concert and heard a new piece by the composer Brett Dean.  The piece, Reflections, was written in 2006 and one section contains to quote his own program notes,  “…a quotation from a piano piece by Clara Schumann (Romanza in A Minor)….”  The Dean piece was first on the program and the Schumann was played at the end.  The quote was obvious.  But I guess that Schumann is dead and any copyright has long expired.

But what of jazz?  Musicians often quote from other musicians.  No one sues.  In fact it is almost a game to hear and recognize a quote.  Much of the tunes quoted are recent and many are still under copyright.  Take folk music as another example.  Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind takes it’s tune from an old slave song, No More Auction Block for Me.   Folk music, and I think much of traditional country music, is using the same tunes with new words or maybe the same words with different tunes.

According to the CNN reporting on Katy Perry

Katy Perry’s 2013 song “Dark Horse” was copied in part from “Joyful Noise,” a song by Christian rap artist Flame, a Los Angeles jury decided Monday, according court filings obtained by CNN.

The unanimous decision from a nine-person jury came after a week-long trial, during which Perry testified about the track’s creation. She was not in the courtroom when the verdict was read, Variety reported.
Flame, whose real name is Marcus Gray, argued that “Dark Horse” infringed on his copyright by using an underlying beat from his song without permission, according to court filings. Perry’s attorneys argued, in part, that the portion in question was too common and brief to be protected by copyright, Rolling Stone reported.

 

So I’m still confused and puzzled.  What is the difference between what Perry did and what jazz musicians do every day?  Maybe pop musicians and rappers just need to be more upfront about the fact they are quoting each other.  Think of it as a compliment instead of theft.  I think Clara Schumann would be happy to know that someone like Dean is still remembering her music.

142351-004-F07DAEDB

Picture of Clara Schumann from brittanica.com.

by

New music

These are troubled and troubling times but one distraction for me is music.  Last week I went to three concerts:  two young musicians at the Yellow Barn; the Boston Symphony Orchestra; and our local Windham Orchestra.  Three distinct venues and three kinds of players.

The Windham Orchestra is a community enterprise that has been going for 65 years.  I’ve been attending their concerts for many years and have seen them get better and play more challenging music.  Made up of a mix of music teachers, retired professionals, and talented amateurs they have really made progress under their relatively new director, Hugh Keelan.  (I should note that my sister has been principle flute for a number of years.)  Last Sunday they did a stunning Scheherazade. 

I was privileged to hear two works making their premieres.  There is something magical about knowing that you are listening to a piece of music that no one has ever heard before.  The first was a Yellow Barn residency concert; the second, a BSO commissioned work.

The Yellow Barn in Putney, VT is primarily a summer music festival but in the last few years they have expanded to occasional winter residency concerts.  Musicians come for a week to develop a new work or to polish working as an ensemble.  In this case a pianist and violinist, Lee Dionne and Brigid Coleridge put together a new work consisting of music and recitation.    Based on an interpretation of Homer’s Iliad by poet Christopher Logue titled War Music, Dionne and Coleridge recited excerpts and then matched them to music.  The music included works by Bach, Gyorgy Kurtag, John Cage, Manuel de Falla, and Richard Strauss.  What we saw and heard was a first performance, not without flaws, but fascinating.  They had to play music, do dramatic recitation and sing – quite a stretch for classical musicians!  I had never heard of War Music and immediately ordered a copy.

The BSO work, Express Abstractionism, by Sean Shepherd is a work in four movements.  Each expresses emotions illustrated by an artist or artists.  My husband loved it, but I was taken only with the first and last movements.  That might be because I was familiar with the artists.  Movement I is titled “dense bubbles, or: Calder, or: the origin of life on earth.  Movement IV. the sun, or: the moon, or: Mondrian.

I’d like to hear both of the new works again.  I love hearing music no one has heard before.  Listening intensely takes me away from the troubles for just a little while.

 

by

“We are a gentle, angry people…”

Yesterday was a rather phenomenal day.  The media reports of women’s marches on all seven continents.  Posts by friends from all stages of my life with pictures of themselves, their children, and often, grandchildren at marches and rallies all over the world.  I’m sure I’ll be writing more about the why and certainly will write about what happens next, but today I want to celebrate a song I hadn’t thought about for a long time, but which seems to be the appropriate one for this new movement.

We sang it at the Brattleboro Sister Vigil and, later, a friend posted that she had seen the words on a sign in Boston:  “We are a gentle, angry people.”  She hadn’t realized that those were the words of a song by Holly Near.

Here is a clip of Near singing it in 2015 at a conference on the anniversary of the first national demonstration against the War in Vietnam.

And here are the words.

We are a gentle, angry people
and we are singing, singing for our lives

We are a justice-seeking people
and we are singing, singing for our lives

We are young and old together
and we are singing, singing for our lives

We are a land of many colors
and we are singing, singing for our lives

We are gay and straight together
and we are singing, singing for our lives

We are a gentle, loving people
and we are singing, singing for our lives

Learn the tune.  Make up more verses.  We are singing for our lives.

brattleboro-rally

Taken at Pliny Park, Brattleboro VT on January 21, 2017 about 20 minutes after the formal Sister Vigil had ended.

Photograph by Robert Wyckoff

by

Hitting reset

A few weeks ago, my husband and I both noted an article in the New York Times Week in Review section called “Hit the Reset “Button in Your Brain.”  The authors argued the need for a true vacation from work.  In other words not one like President Obama had where according to a news report I heard he talked to at least 9 foreign leaders and held at least 4 press conferences.  This would be in addition to the normal routine of daily briefings, etc.  Some of the rest of us call work and read email while ostensibly on vacation.  They argue

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, there’s a reason: The processing capacity of the conscious mind is limited. This is a result of how the brain’s attentional system evolved. Our brains have two dominant modes of attention: the task-positive network and the task-negative network (they’re called networks because they comprise distributed networks of neurons, like electrical circuits within the brain). The task-positive network is active when you’re actively engaged in a task, focused on it, and undistracted; neuroscientists have taken to calling it the central executive. The task-negative network is active when your mind is wandering; this is the daydreaming mode. These two attentional networks operate like a seesaw in the brain: when one is active the other is not.

0810BRAIN-master495

 

So what helps us reset and overcome the overload?

Increasing creativity will happen naturally as we tame the multitasking and immerse ourselves in a single task for sustained periods of, say, 30 to 50 minutes. Several studies have shown that a walk in nature or listening to music can trigger the mind-wandering mode. This acts as a neural reset button, and provides much needed perspective on what you’re doing.

Daydreaming leads to creativity, and creative activities teach us agency, the ability to change the world, to mold it to our liking, to have a positive effect on our environment. Music, for example, turns out to be an effective method for improving attention, building up self-confidence, social skills and a sense of engagement.

I suspect that by moving to Vermont with cleaner air, quiet, and lots of space to walk and appreciate nature even within a few blocks of our house, we have hit our reset buttons.  Being able to sit on the screened in porch and watch daylight fade as I did last night or taking a walk to see the stars tonight provides time to think and reflect.  We did try to do this in Boston by walking around Jamaica Pond for example, but even there you could hear traffic.  I used to walk over to Boston Harbor at lunch and look at the water.  These are urban dwellers solutions which people in cities can employ.  But they need to do so without cellphones and other devices.

I know it is a privilege to be able to retire to a place where we can so easily hit reset.

Illustration by Matthieu Bourel

by

Theft of a violin – Updated

On Monday night in Milwaukee a violin was stolen.  OK.  So why are you blogging about this, you maybe wondering.  Because the violin stolen was not just any violin.  The New York Times reports

It should have been one of those nights musicians live for. Frank Almond, the concertmaster of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra for nearly two decades, had just closed a chamber concert in his own “Frankly Music” series with Messiaen’s hushed, eerily intense “Quartet for the End of Time.” Mr. Almond drew the graceful, ringing high notes of the finale from his prized 1715 Stradivarius violin, producing a tone so intensely focused that the audience in the Wisconsin Lutheran College’s 388-seat auditorium sat in awed silence for 20 seconds before applauding.

But the glow of the moment evaporated quickly, once Mr. Almond, 49, stepped into the college art center’s parking lot at 10:20 p.m. Monday, his violin carefully swaddled against the subzero temperatures and minus-25-degree wind chill. And as he neared his car, a figure stepped up to him and shot him with a stun gun.

It happened in a matter of seconds: Mr. Almond dropped the violin, the attacker scooped it up and jumped into a late 1980s or early ’90s maroon or burgundy minivan, where an accomplice was waiting to speed away. Edward A. Flynn, the Milwaukee police chief, said late Thursday afternoon that Mr. Almond had described the thieves as a man and a woman. Chief Flynn has given the value of the violin as “the high seven figures.” The police said earlier that the violin’s empty case had been found several miles from the hall.

Stradivarius violin

Stradivarius violin

We read all the time about musicians and their favored instruments.  They are always transporting them around in cabs, on subways, on trains and planes.  I once saw the cellist, Yo Yo Ma, with his cello on Boston’s Red Line.  Probably the same cello he has left at least once in a cab.  My husband told me when I mentioned I was going to blog about Mr. Almond, that he once left his trumpet on the Orange Line.  Luckily someone had turned it into the MBTA lost and found.  Mr.  Almond can certainly get another high quality violin, but probably not another Strad.

What is shocking about the incident is that it was not stolen from a dressing room left unlocked or lost on some public conveyance, but that he was attacked just as if someone was going to steal his watch or wallet or ring and that it was clearly planned.

A spokeswoman for the orchestra confirmed that the instrument was insured, but said that because of the investigation, she could not provide details about the amount, or what restrictions, if any, applied to the use of the instrument. Given its prominence — high-resolution photographs of Strads are plentiful — it would be virtually impossible to sell the instrument on the open market.

“We’re not engaging in the pretense that this is just any other crime,” Chief Flynn said on Thursday. “This is an extraordinary art theft. It is just as extraordinary as if some master criminal crept into the Milwaukee Art Museum and stole several of its most valuable pieces. It’s an inordinately rare violin of unquestioned provenance, made 300 years ago and worth a lot of money. So obviously we are treating this like much more than just another mugging.”

Like the paintings stolen and never recovered from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum which also can’t be sold.  If they are still around, some wealthy person somewhere is enjoying them or they are lying abandoned in a basement or attic.  I hope it is the former.

…Antonio Stradivari was, by common agreement among violin fanciers, the master builder of violins, a creator of instruments with a sound that subsequent makers have been at a loss to reproduce. Fewer than 650 of Stradivari’s violins survive, and Mr. Almond’s — which was given to him on “permanent loan” by an anonymous patron in 2008 — is regarded as a particularly fine example.

Called the Lipinski Strad, after an early owner, the instrument was built in 1715, when Stradivari was in his prime. The first known owner was the composer and virtuoso violinist Giuseppe Tartini, who flourished in the early 18th century and whose “Devil’s Trill” Sonata remains one of the Baroque repertory’s great showpieces. Karol Lipinski, a Polish player who was friendly with Paganini, Liszt and Schumann, owned it in the early 19th century. It made its way to Milwaukee in 1962, in the possession of Evi Liivak, an Estonian violinist, who died in 1996. Then it dropped out of sight until the current owner offered it to Mr. Almond.

A stolen instrument is very difficult to recover.  According to the FBI, 11 violins (including 6 Strads) have been stolen since 1985; only 3 are known to have been recovered.

…In one recent case, a 1696 Stradivarius was stolen in November 2010 from Min-Jin Kym, a young South Korean violinist who was living in London, while she and a friend ate lunch at Euston Station. The violin was found in July 2013.

A more famous case was the 1713 Strad (called the Gibson) owned by the early 20th-century violinist Bronislaw Huberman. It was stolen from Huberman twice: once from a hotel room in Vienna, in 1916, and then in 1936 from his dressing room at Carnegie Hall while he was onstage playing another instrument. The violin was recovered only in 1985 (Huberman died in 1947) when a jazz violinist who had been playing it in smoky clubs all those years made a deathbed confession. It is currently owned by the violinist Joshua Bell.

We hope that the Milwaukee Strad ends up in the hands of someone who will play it and they will have listeners who will enjoy the music.

UPDATE:

The Strad recovered.

The Strad recovered.

It is reported this morning that the violin has been recovered.  The New York Times reports

A Stradivarius violin stolen last month from the concertmaster of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra has been recovered seemingly unharmed, the authorities in Milwaukee announced on Thursday.

The rare instrument, which dates from 1715 and has been valued at $5 million, was recovered Wednesday night, after the police searched a residence in Milwaukee, led there by one of three suspects recently arrested in the case, Edward A. Flynn, the Milwaukee chief of police, said at a news conference. Officers found the violin in a suitcase in an attic. Chief Flynn described the home as owned by a friend of a suspect, but said that person was believed to have had no knowledge of what he had been asked to store.

And arrests were made.

On Wednesday, the Milwaukee police announced they had arrested two men and a woman this week in connection with the theft. On Thursday, officials identified two of the suspects as Universal Knowledge Allah, 36, a local barber who is being accused of providing the stun gun used against Mr. Almond; and Salah Ibin Jones, 41, whom the police described as their primary suspect. The third suspect, a 32-year-old woman, was not identified but is believed to have been driving the getaway vehicle.

…

The police have confirmed reports that Mr. Jones was previously convicted of possessing a stolen sculpture four years after it disappeared from a Milwaukee art gallery nearly two decades ago.

“This individual has done fairly high-end art theft in the past, and the last time his plan was to keep it in a safe place for a number of years and then bring it out of hiding and do something with it,” Chief Flynn said. “So theoretically it’s plausible that might have been his plan here: to keep it off the market and out of sight for a number of years.”

…

Stefan Hersh, a violin expert who appraised the instrument in 2012, said he had been contacted by the F.B.I. and went to Milwaukee on Thursday to authenticate the instrument. Seeing no damage, he performed a piece by Bach on the 300-year-old Stradivarius, a private concert for the police.

I’m sure we will hear more about how the violin was found in the attic, but at least it is safe and wasn’t there long enough to be damaged.  How could they have thought that wood would survive the heat and cold there and still have value many years from now?  But luckily that didn’t happen and it will be played again.

Photograph of a Stradivarius:  Michael Darnton

Photograph of recovered violin:  Darren Hauck/Reuters