Welcoem to posts!!
in the future - u will be able to do some more stuff here,,,!! like pat catgirl- i mean um yeah... for now u can only see others's posts :c
I am interested to read your impressions and ideas on why there are so many negative comments on YouTube.
I added an interesting read of Tara-Ida Ackerman and Julia Merrill's paper. I especially like the paragraph about what constitutes "good taste" and sometimes "music".
Rationales and functions of disliked music: An in-depth interview study
Identity expression plays a major role in liking/disliking music. Many participants in the study drew direct parallels between their self-image and the characteristics and attitudes in the music, which they describe as not fitting or belonging to them. Hence, musical dislikes serve the self-presentation in social contexts, but are equally relevant as a psychological process for strengthening oneās own self-image and self-esteem by distancing oneself from the negative self [72].
Two related functions of musical dislikes represent the avoidance of negative emotional and physical states as well as negative or painful memories triggered by the music. Hence, while preferred music is chosen to enhance the mood [43], or trigger mind wandering and reminiscence [17], disliked music is avoided in order to avoid unpleasant feelings. It is of note that music can also be disliked if it does not fulfill the expected functions of preferred music.
The most indirect function of musical dislikes might be the demonstration of musical competence: Calling music ābadā or denying it the status of actually being music or by calling it noise as well as criticizing certain musical aspects, serves emphasizing oneās own knowledge and āgood taste.ā By communicating oneās own musical standard and requirements of āgood music,ā the participants communicate their musical education, and the extent of their musical taste and by this, inform about the cultural capital they possess [2,12,13]. The expression of oneās own musical competence is thus closely linked to the function of creating and strengthening social cohesion and distinction.
Criticism related to authenticity and commerciality is also related to social distinction. If the liked music becomes too successful, it loses its function as a distinguishing feature that creates (group) identity and is rejected. In addition, the dislike of music with contradicting political, moral, or religious stands also serves to position oneself in society (e.g., as anti-fascist or left-wing). Rejecting certain music for these reasons means likewise avoiding places and events with this music, and therefore the risk of socially engaging with people who identify with these opinions.
Read the paper here:
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8846515/
151 - 45
This post is a reaction to the many complaints I get on my channel about commercials interrupting the music. I myself have YouTube Premium and don't see any ads EVER. These days, people think you shouldnāt have to pay for anything thatās freely available online, even if it comes in a degraded form where you get interrupted all the time and canāt use its full functionality.
William C. White, musician says it all:
www.willcwhite.com/2022/12/youtube-premium-the-musā¦
I was at a party a couple nights ago ā like, an actual party, not just a post-concert mixer, which is extremely out of character for me ā and since it was an assemblage of musicians, there was some talk of putting YouTube videos on the home TV system.
At this suggestion, someone chimed in āyeah, but then weāre just gonna have to spend every other minute listening to ads.ā This was met with general agreement, but I found it deeply shocking and troubling. I can not imagine living in a world in which I did not avail myself of the YouTube Premium service, and I think it is literally insane that the rest of the people at that party would subject themselves to a pre-2015 level of internethood.
With YouTube Premium, you get YouTube without the ads, you get the ability to download videos to your device, and you can turn off your screen while you listen to just the audio from a video.
Why do I consider this of paramount importance for musicians? Because YouTube is simply the best place to go for classical music on a number of fronts:
1. Itās the only service that lets you search for composers, compositions, and performers in the way that classical musicians intuitively think about music.
2. Basically every piece of music has been uploaded as a āscrolling scoreā video. I can not overstate what an advance this is over the state of affairs I was in college, when you had to go to the library and take out a score and then find a CD in order to study a work, or even over the situation just a few of years ago, when you could use Spotify + imslp to do the same.
3. The āskimmingā function is far and away the best of any service because of the visual medium. Itās very easy to find a specific spot in a recording, even more so now that YouTube has added a sort of audio map at the bottom of its videos.
4. You can also find multiple live performances of every work, most of them contemporary but many of them classic performances by performers of yesteryear. This is invaluable study material as it allows you to look at fingerings, bowings, performance style, etc. and make comparisons.
5. The discovery mechanism, via the Suggested Videos and Home Page algorithms, is second to none, and an improvement even over the old experience of browsing the shelves at the record store.
6. Plus, for the price of one YouTube family membership ($22 / month) you can share the gift of YouTube Premium with five other people.
7. This is for anything on YouTube. It doesn't matter if they are documentaries, Sports games, TV series, etc. etc. No commercial interruptions EVER.
At a fundamental level, I think itās hard for younger musicians to grock that this is a good deal. But from the ages of 14ā25, I probably spent $50-100 every month on CDs alone. Skip 3 Starbuck's coffee's a month and you have your money. These days, people think you shouldnāt have to pay for anything thatās freely available online, even if it comes in a degraded form where you get interrupted all the time and canāt use its full functionality.
What Iāve always said about streaming services is this: for the price of one CD a month, you can have immediate access to every CD for a month. Iām also a Spotify user, but only barely, as it has been supplanted in every conceivable way by YouTube.
This isnāt a paid commercial; itās just a declaration of love. I sincerely believe that every serious musician and music lover should avail themselves of this resource that is a total game-changer in so many ways for what we do.
DECEMBER 23, 2022
123 - 25
I recently visited the Museum and Gardens of Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC.
It was the residence and gardens of wealthy U.S. diplomat Robert Woods Bliss and his wife Mildred Barnes Bliss. The estate was founded by the Bliss couple, who gave the home and gardens to Harvard University in 1940. In 1944, it was the site of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference to plan for the post-WWII United Nations. The part of the landscaped portion of the estate that was designed as an enhanced "natural" area, was given to the National Park Service and is now Dumbarton Oaks Park.
In 1937, Mildred Bliss commissioned Igor Stravinsky (1882ā1971) to compose a concerto in the tradition of Bach's Brandenburg concertos to celebrate the Blisses' thirtieth wedding anniversary. Nadia Boulanger (1887ā1979) conducted its premiere on May 8, 1938 in the Dumbarton Oaks music room, due to the composer's indisposition from tuberculosis. At Mildred Bliss's request, the Concerto in E-flat was subtitled "Dumbarton Oaks 8-v-1938," and the work is now generally known as The Dumbarton Oaks Concerto. Igor Stravinsky conducted the concerto in the Dumbarton Oaks music room on April 25, 1947 and again for the Bliss's golden wedding anniversary, on May 8, 1958. He also conducted the first performance of his Septet, which is dedicated to the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, in the music room on January 24, 1954.
Read more about this remarkable place here:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumbarton_Oaks
182 - 8
Leroy Anderson (1908-1975) was beyond versatile. Besides being a highly successful composer and conductor he also played many instruments on an advanced professional level:
Piano
" Leroy Anderson started to learn piano at age 5, 'when my feet could reach the pedals', he said. His mother Anna was his first piano teacher. She had learned to play piano in Stockholm where she had been raised. Starting at age 10, Leroy studied piano with Professor Floyd Bigelow Dean of the New England Conservatory of Music."
Organ
" Anna Anderson was the organist at the Swedish Evangelical Mission Church in Cambridge. Anna would invite her son Leroy to sit beside her after the church service so that Leroy could learn to play the organ. Leroy later studied with Henry Gideon, the organist at Temple Beth Israel in Boston. As a 15-year old, Leroy became the church organist and choir director at the Congregational Church in nearby East Milton, Massachusetts."
Double-bass
" In High School Leroy took up the double-bass. He was attracted to it's size he would later say. The orchestra at the Cambridge Latin School where Leroy Anderson was a student, needed someone to play double-bass so Leroy volunteered. This was the instrument he played in dance bands of the 1930's."
Trombone
" As a Freshman at Harvard, Leroy played trombone in the Harvard Band. Leroy's father Bror Anderson wanted his son to play the trombone so that Bror would be able to tell people 'see there in the front row, that's my son Leroy.' "
Tuba
" After taking up the sousaphone and the tuba, Leroy toured Bremen (Germany), Copenhagen (Denmark), and Stockholm (Sweden) in 1929 as part of a brass quintet of Harvard students called "The Harvardians". He also played sousaphone and tuba in 1930 in the orchestra on board the Helig Olav, a trans-Atlantic passenger ship of the Norwegian Skandinavian Line.
Cello
" After making the transition from performing musician to full-time composer and arranger, Leroy took up the cello and played chamber music with a quartet of his friends every Friday night, September to June, for 10 years - 1963 to 1973." As Leroy Anderson told a reporter once, "It is a great advantage to play a string instrument when writing for the orchestra. There is nothing like the feel of the bow. It is also advantageous to know how to play a wind instrument. Then you know how to control the breath."
Voice
" As a high school student Leroy, his brother Russell and their father sang in the chorus of numerous operas presented in Boston They were unpaid amateurs who, like all Scandinavians, loved to sing. Leroy Anderson was described as having a warm, baritone singing voice. Leroy and his family would often break into song while driving on scenic trips. As an adult church-goer, he would read the hymnal during the pastor's sermon and sing hymns in the car on the way home after church."
In 1942, Anderson joined the United States Army, and was assigned in Iceland with the U.S. Counterintelligence Corps as a translator and interpreter, writing as well as monitoring local news media; in 1945 he was reassigned to the Pentagon as Chief of the Scandinavian Desk of Military Intelligence.
Leroy Anderson could read, write, speak and translate:
English, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, German, French, Italian, and Portuguese. Although he studied Dutch at home in the 1960's he did not add that language to the list of languages he could read, write and speak.
204 - 4
Edvard Grieg arranged 4 Piano Sonatas by Mozart for his friend John Paulson in 1877 to be used for fun and in the privacy of his home and piano studio. They were so well liked that the publisher thought it a good idea to publish them and this is how Edition Peters came in the picture. Sales were good, everybody happy, but this was before YouTube times. I actually had to delete two comments which were so offensive I couldn't believe my eyes. Watch some reply to this with the old semantic trick of: "chill bro!" "or why Bartje Bartmans are you so aggressive?" and etc. etc. The fact that one tries to understand a behavior or a certain pattern of commenting often gets met with the old "who cares what they say?". If I didn't care this channel wouldn't exist. If Edvard Grieg didn't care about Mozart his awesome creative arrangements wouldn't exist. If the pianists (including the likes like Sviatoslav Richter, Daniel Barenboim etc. ) Heide Goertz & Margarate Nilssen didn't care, these wonderful recordings wouldn't exist. It is obvious to me Grieg arranged these Sonatas with love and care. Heck, all arrangements I know of the great masters are like that. Elgar/Bach, Schonberg/Bach, Schonberg/Johann Strauss, Schonberg/Funniculi Funnicula, Mahler/Brahms, Webern/Bach, Mahler/Bach, Tchaikovsky/Mozart, Busoni/Bach, and the list goes on and on.
This commenter sums it up pretty nicely.
@loculbruco
For everyone saying that this isnāt Mozartās style or that the piece was ruined, do you think that Grieg wanted it to be any different from how he wrote it? Do you actually think he sat down and said āWell, making this arrangement I want it to sound how Mozart wouldāve done itā and produced this? Of course making a transcription or a different version of an already existing piece from another author is usually not only about making it the exact same, but valorizing it and adding your own style and touch. These people are probably the same bitching about Busoniās transcription of Bach, not realizing that Busoni knew exactly what he was doing by not keeping the piece identical to Bachās masterpiece.
232 - 19
The men/women behind a composer's creativity and inspiration are often forgotten. Franz Lauska is one of them.
Franz Seraphin Lauska (13 January 1764 ā 18 April 1825), was a Moravian pianist, composer, and teacher of Giacomo Meyerbeer. The name "Seraphin" was a later name affix, which Lauska never used. Lauska was considered "one of the most brilliant executants of his time." Carl Maria von Weber dedicated his 2nd Piano Sonata to him. Lauska was also the piano teacher of Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn.
290 - 6
Louis Andriessen, Reinbert de Leeuw, Misha Mengelberg and Peter Schat reliving an iconic moment in music history, including a double parked Volkswagen Beetle for the occasion. Emmastraat, Amsterdam 1994
209 - 14
Today it is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's birthday (Jan. 27, 1756). Too bad the 100.000 subscribers mark will miss his day by one day unless we get 97 subscribers this day Pacific Time. I want to thank each one of you for your ongoing support and interest and hope to continue this endeavor for many more birthdays to come.
466 - 20
The men/women behind composer's creativity and inspiration are often forgotten. Ferdinand Laub is one of them.
While working on Raff's String Quartet No. 4 I noticed he dedicated it to Ferdinand Laub (1832-1875) In 1866, when the Moscow Conservatory was set up under Nikolay Rubinstein, Laub was invited to become its first professor of violin studies. During his time at the Conservatory (1866ā1874) he distinguished himself not just as an excellent teacher, but also appeared regularly as the primarius of the Russian Musical Society's string quartet (the so-called "Moscow Quartet"). Tchaikovsky was so impressed by his violin playing in the great works of the classical chamber music repertoire that it eventually prompted him to write his String Quartet No. 1 (1871) and String Quartet No. 2 (1874), both of which were premiered by the Moscow Quartet with Laub as first violinist.
After Laub's passing in 1875 Tchaikovsky dedicated his String Quartet No. 3 to the memory of his old friend. Raff also dedicated his Violin Sonata No. 1 to Laub.
244 - 1
The first film music in history was premiered on 17th November 1908, a soundtrack for the Film "the Assassination of the Duke of Guiseā. It was composed by Camille Saint-SaĆ«ns.
āMonsieur Camille Saint- SaĆ«ns has composed a symphonic masterpiece for the film āLāAssassinat du Duc de Guiseā, contributing significantly to the success of the premiere,ā
wrote French journalist Adolphe Brisson in his gushing review in Le Temps. He was one of the lucky few selected to attend the premiere of the first silent film to feature an original score. Saint-SaĆ«ns was and remains a criminally overlooked composer, whose legacy is frequently reduced to his popular work Carnival of the Animals. During his impressively long life ā he was born eight years after Beethovenās death, and died eight years after Stravinskyās Sacre ā he witnessed a whole host of musical upheavals. Initially booed for his "chilly modernism", he was later described by Debussy as āantiquatedā and āacademicā. At the age of 73, this alleged fossil of the musical world discovered the enormous potential of the combined power of music and film.
Here is the performance on my channel: https://youtu.be/zolNXVIsHFc?si=mzfu2...
391 - 23
The world is such that we are very familiar with many well-renowned but relatively unimportant figures who have done little with their lives, yet at the same time ignorant of great artists who have enriched us.