NYT on IMSLP lacks vital information

Daniel J. Wakin has an article in the Times this morning about IMSLP, whose main point is that music publishers don’t like it because it threatens their livelihood, and also because of “messy copyright issues.”

The article tells a very strange story. In it, this naïve kid named Edward Guo starts a free music-download website with nowhere near enough attention to whether he’s infringing copyright. He gets threatened by Universal-Edition and takes down all the infringing material, and then puts the now-scrubbed site back online. This all happened over two years ago. Now, Wakin of the Times writes an article that’s mostly about how the music publishers still aren’t happy, the poor dears—an article that is remarkably vague about just what kind of publications are available on IMSLP and whether they do, in fact, infringe anyone’s copyright.

(To spoil the surprise: really old things [which of course isn't the same as bad things, hence the problem], and no they don’t.)

The people the article quotes are: (1) Ed Matthew, a representative of Schirmer, putting on a brave face; (2) Jonathan Irons, a representative of Universal, explaining that of course sheet music isn’t free, because you’re paying for the scholarship represented by the edition itself; and (3) Edward Guo, IMSLP’s founder, making what is to be fair a pretty dopey “information just wants to be free, man” argument. It’s Irons and Guo who completely screw Wakin up.

If ever, my friends, an article suffered for failing to consult a musicologist (or indeed any reasonably neutral person with a clue), this is that article.

Irons and Guo both encourage Wakin to elide the crucial fact about IMSLP, which is that the editions of music it offers for download are mostly well in excess of one hundred years old. To read this article, you could easily come away with the impression that the modern, scholarly editions put out in the last 30 or so years, by firms like Henle, Bärenreiter, Wiener Urtext, Peters and the like—which are quite reasonably subject to copyright protection for a certain (though much too lengthy) period—are available for free on IMSLP. Of course they aren’t. What is available on IMSLP, I’ll get to in a minute.

Irons encourages Wakin’s misconception because he works for a company that derives a lot of its profits, particularly under the EU’s even-more-insane-than-American copyright laws, from work that people did for it many decades ago. (Universal was founded in 1901 and published, for example, Schenker’s landmark edition of the Beethoven piano sonatas in 1923.) Guo encourages Wakin’s misconception because he seems to think that meaning well is a media strategy. (It isn’t.)

The fact is that nearly everything available on IMSLP is a nineteenth-century edition, of the kind that publishers like Dover and Kalmus have been reprinting cheaply for decades. If I want Bach, I have two basic choices: I can get a free download from IMSLP (or cheap printed copy from Dover) of the late nineteenth-century (but quite good) Bach-Gesellschaft edition; or I can spend a lot of money on beautifully printed copies of the outstandingly brilliant Neue Bach-Ausgabe from Bärenreiter (or the equally good editions from Henle, etc.). Both of these are very good options. I do them both, depending on my needs. The same situation is true for nearly all the classics of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music. (Universal, the publishing house that has chosen to get so worked up over this, is interestingly enough not a very major player in the editions-of-old-music business, specializing rather in twentieth-century music.)

However, the idea you get from Wakin’s article, mostly because Irons is intentionally misleading him, is that the cheap availability of old editions is somehow the same thing as failure to pay a fair price for new scholarly editions. This is crazy. New scholarly editions are not available on IMSLP. Some decent nineteenth-century ones are, though, which forces an interesting tradeoff for consumers: how much is that beautiful printing and current scholarship worth? Guo and Irons agree: it should be worth nothing. Irons thinks all sheet music, including very old sheet music, should be very expensive; Guo thinks it should all be free. Wakin surely realizes that there is a difference between old editions and new scholarly editions, but it doesn’t make it into his piece.

No article on this topic could possibly have been adequate without making this distinction, a distinction that (given Irons’s mendacity and Guo’s clueless techno-utopianism) it would have taken a musicologist to make. Not impressive.

Swafford on historical instruments

A simply wonderful article appeared in Slate a week ago: Jan Swafford on the use of historically appropriate pianos for favorites of the 18th-, 19th-, and even early 20th-century piano repertoire. Complete with audio-sample comparisons of the excerpts by Beethoven, Brahms, and Debussy, it’s an informative, subtle, and entertaining piece. It’s enormously to Slate‘s credit that they hold their readers in high enough esteem to publish this kind of material—not to mention a reminder that online media offer possibilities that go beyond what newspapers can do. Had this been published in the New York Times, they’d probably have posted the audio material online in a sidebar, but the article could not have been written so as to integrate it so nicely. Well done all around.

Of course, Jan Swafford is a musicologist, composer, and professor of music, not a journalist. Since he’s a fine writer, I don’t suppose this piece needed to be any more heavily edited than a staff journalist’s version would have been. But what if it had? All the evidence suggests that it’s easier to edit an expert’s piece into publishable shape for a popular publication than it is to give a professional journalist a clue. If I ran a general-interest publication of any kind, I know what sort of writers I would try to hire to write about topics like this.

So-so article on Bohlen-Pierce music

In a most welcome gesture, the Boston Globe published an article on Sunday by Carolyn Y. Johnson on Bohlen-Pierce music.

This should sum up the state of journalism relating to new music and/or musicology in general-interest media at the present time: Johnson’s article was approximately a thousand times better than one normally expects from writing on subjects like this in general-interest media, stopping just short of being a minimally adequate treatment of the matter at hand.

To give credit where due, here are some of the good things about the article:

• An entirely correct summary—as far as it goes—of what constitutes the Bohlen-Pierce scale (“The unusual scale she played ended on a high note that was triple, not double, the frequency of the low note, and the interval was divided into 13 equal steps.”)
• Timely mention of the Bohlen-Pierce Symposium, which began in Boston on the day the article appeared
• A fine choice of experts and non-experts to consult and quote in the article: (1) a new music clarinetist and Bohlen-Pierce enthusiast, Amy Advocat; (2) a composer and microtone enthusiast, Julia Werntz; (3) a musicologist and music theorist, Ross Duffin, author of the informative if annoyingly-not-to-mention-inaccurately-named How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (And Why You Should Care); (5) a neuroscientist who does research on brain activity in microtonal contexts, Psyche [!!] Loui; and (6) the composer Georg Hajdu
• Indispensably for an article like this, multimedia: a video of Advocat playing a little bit of Bohlen-Pierce music on her custom-built clarinet

But best of all—and really what makes this article stand out from ordinary newspaper writing on topics like this—Johnson infuses the article with absolutely none of the sneering-at-the-contemporary-music-weirdos that is seemingly the requirement for all journalistic treatments of new music that presents new or challenging sounds. Bohlen-Pierce music is presented as being at least potentially beautiful, interesting, and worthwhile, and the excitement surrounding it therefore justified. For that reason above all, the article clearly has its heart in the right place.

*

But heartless curmudgeon that I am, I have to say a few words about what it would have taken for this article to really inform me. The article contains tons of language—too much, really—that does no more than insist that the Bohlen-Pierce scale is so new and different sounding. Johnson and the people she quotes describe the scale variously as “eerie,” “off-kilter,” “hard to predict,” “surreal,” “mysterious,” “odd,” “otherworldly,” “exotic,” “strange,” “going beyond,” “another musical reality,” and “alien.”

The article comes so close to explaining what accounts for the Bohlen-Pierce scale’s strangeness-yet-familiarity. And it would have taken no high-level music theory whatsoever to do so. Two minutes of web searching led me to The Bohlen-Pierce Site, where I learned the extremely simple fact that, although the interval between consecutive notes in the scale is different from that between consecutive notes of the 12-notes-per-octave scale we usually use, some other intervals between notes of the Bohlen-Pierce scale are the same (or nearly the same) as certain intervals in the 12-notes-per-octave scale. For example, if you move by three chromatic steps in conventional tuning, you get the interval of a minor third; the same interval (or close enough) appears if you move two Bohlen-Pierce chromatic steps. These kinds of similarities with conventional tuning are everywhere in B-P music theory.

Instead we’re told that “Bohlen-Pierce takes advantage of fundamental properties that make our own musical system work,” which sounds very complicated, even though the reality is simple; we’re told that people have maintained enough interest in B-P to write all kinds of music using it for some decades now; and we’re told that neuroscience suggests that people can learn some of the logic behind the system. All this is suggestive but mysterious.

Johnson goes to some length to tell us that the Bohlen-Pierce scale is not random—for example, I couldn’t just create equally viable scale systems by picking any large interval and dividing it into any number of steps. But the one or two sentences’ explanation of why that is was really what this article would have needed in order to do a minimally decent job of explaining Bohlen-Pierce music. That article would have been a pleasure to read.

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As a postscript, it would have been interesting to hear from some critics of Bohlen-Pierce music, of the aesthetic and cognitive positions that underlie the claim for its usefulness and validity. But frankly, I don’t trust any living journalist to write that article without lapsing into pathetic he-said/she-saidism—and indeed, without subtly favoring the conservative position (“these avant-garde freaks are all obviously crazy”). So I by no means wish Johnson had attempted anything like that, since the result surely would have been hideously awful. But it’s nice to imagine a media environment and general climate of public interest in such matters in which the result of some attempted nuance wouldn’t have been automatically horrible.

“20th-century developments in orchestral music killed orchestral music”

Humanities scholars will call me naïve, but I have really been enjoying a couple of terrific blogs on the topic of rationality: Overcoming Bias and its more community-oriented spinoff Less Wrong. These are devoted to finding ways to do a better job of understanding the world as it is, of forming true beliefs, and so on. Needless to say, the kinds of people who post at Less Wrong place a pretty high value on making correct statements, understanding the complicated relationship between “fact” and “opinion,” and so on.

These aren’t the type of people who casually insult entire fields of human endeavor or human learning.

But that’s exactly what, in an otherwise thought-provoking post, a Less Wrong contributor named Phil Goetz does when he claims the following:

There’s not much downside to art. There are some exceptions – romance novels perpetuate destructive views of love; 20th-century developments in orchestral music killed orchestral music; and Ender’s Game has warped the psyches of many intelligent people.

What is this guy talking about? He clarifies in comments:

Orchestral music is dead. Name one great composer since Stravinsky. With the money we spend on music, and the number of composers trained, we could have had a dozen, maybe a hundred, Beethovens since Stravinsky. What do we have? John Williams and Danny Elfman.

There may be great orchestral composers out there somewhere, but the orchestral music scene is too dead to find them.

So let’s see here. We’ve got someone whose concept of what it means to be a “great orchestral composer” is pretty much entirely defined by what’s been marketed to him as a great composer. You can be sure he doesn’t attend actual orchestral performances: he couldn’t do that without encountering the work of the countless successful, engaging orchestral composers who are working today and for the last 50 years. You can be sure he doesn’t browse the offerings of any decent music stores or online outlets like Arkiv Music. You can be sure he doesn’t speak on a regular basis with anyone who is in a position to know anything about current orchestral music. You can be sure he doesn’t so much as scan the music coverage in the newspaper of any major American city.

And yet he feels completely comfortable pronouncing judgment on the combined output of the field of “orchestral music” since, apparently, 1971 at the latest (the year of Stravinsky’s death). What if I said something like: “As everyone knows, the last great computer scientist was Alan Turing.” Well, Phil Goetz and everybody else would jump down my throat for (a) saying something I obviously lacked the requisite knowledge to say anything about, and (b) thereby insulting the literally thousands of great computer scientists since Turing, and, by extension, the entire field of computer science and everybody associated with it. They would accuse me, absolutely correctly, of the informal fallacy known as “the argument from personal ignorance” — “I don’t know about it, so it must not exist.”

In the time it took me to get around to writing this post, a commenter (one Komponisto) has dispatched with this well enough (the comment is longer than this excerpt and worth reading):

Yes, art music has a PR problem…but then, so does science, at least among the general public. I presume people here, including yourself, know better in the case of science, so what gives?

I ask the following not (merely) as a rhetorical question, but out of a genuine desire for insight: what on Earth gave you the impression that you were in a position to judge the state of contemporary orchestral music?

The question is exactly the right one, but I think I have an answer: it’s fine to rag on music this way in public. It’s fine to casually accuse composers for the last 4 decades of … not being great composers, or something (the substance of his critique is astoundingly vague, another thing that surely wouldn’t fly if he were talking about a field other than music). As long as you’re talking about music, it’s fine to present your own reactionary, ill-informed point of view as a widely-agreed-upon fact. It doesn’t matter if you wouldn’t make similarly ignorant claims about virtually any other field in the arts or sciences.

You’re extremely unlikely to suffer even such mild consequences as being publicly disagreed with, let alone publicly shamed for such unhygienic epistemological behavior, because that’s about the level of regard music and musicology are held in, generally speaking. Even on a site devoted to the furtherance of human rationality, statements about music are simply freed from the ordinary requirement that they should correspond to reality in some way.

(Frankly, a decent bit of the rhetorical force of this post is diminished by the fact that Phil Goetz did get called out on being an idiot by a commenter, which really delights me. Maybe it’s just that the violation here was so egregious and pointless, but it’s rare for this kind of thing to receive any pushback whatsoever.)

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