Tyler Cowen draws attention to this paragraph, from Milan Kundera’s Encounter:

Scarcely 1 percent of the world’s population are childless, but at least 50 percent of the great literary characters exit the book without having reproduced. Neither Pantagruel, nor Panurge, nor Quixote have any progeny. Not Valmont, not the Marquise de Merteuil, nor the virtuous Presidente in Dangerous Liaisons. Not Tom Jones, Fielding’s most famous hero. Not Werther. All of Stendhal’s protagonists are childless, as are many of Balzac’s; and Dostoyevsky’s; and in the century just past, Marcel, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, and of course all of Musil’s major characters.

Then Cowen adds:

Contemporary writers seem more likely to give their protagonists children (Roth, Franzen, Updike, for a start, plus the rise of female authors helps this trend). And that is precisely at a time when more people are having no children at all. The decline of the heroic ideal in literature, and the decline of the journey of adventure, seem to be stronger forces in predicting fictional family size.

When readers are fathering children, writers aren’t. When readers aren’t, writers are. Interesting.

Relevance to music?

Sound artists, it seems, could benefit from the reflexive contrarianism we see across the aisle. It is long-established, if we are to accept the musician’s view, that currency has sheared away our ethical moorings, that civilization is ugly and doomed, that record companies are an uncontainable evil, and that the end of a love affair is the end of the world. To say nothing of the groupthink that plagues music composition itself (against which we have railed again and again here). Is there not one active musician anymore who is lyrically and musically freethinking, unconcerned with polls and trends and herds?

Our interview with Dave Keifer uncovered a wildly independent artist, but the attentive reader will cry foul: he pens only instrumentals, and we are searching for “lyrically and musically freethinking.” Blogger #4 suggests Death Cab For Cutie, but the competition is hot these days, and comparatively Death Cab’s music is quite stale. The Decemberists earn a mention for “The Mariner’s Revenge Song” alone. It’s easily the best yarn ever about a seafaring rastabout who is pursued by his late lover’s son, until a huge whale devoured both of their ships at once. But what have they done for us lately?

Leave bands we’ve inevitably missed in the comments section.

From Tyler Cowen:

In 1984, my marriage to Cindy was in serious trouble. I had started once a week therapy with a McLean Hospital based psychiatrist named Lenore Boling, and I used the sessions really just to give voice to my unhappiness with what my relationship with Cindy had become. Despite the unhappiness, I do not think I ever shed a tear in those sessions over the shambles of the marriage. One day, however, I started talking about my work. I tried to explain to Dr. Boling that in all of my writing, whether it was on Kant’s First Critique or Hume’s Treatise or Das Kapital, my goal always was to plumb the depths of the author’s central idea and recast it in a form so simple, so clear, so transparent that I could hold it before my students or my readers and show them its beauty. As I said these words, tears started to well up in me, and I finally had to stop talking because I could not finish. It was the only time in twenty years of psychotherapy that I cried openly in a session. Ever since that day, twenty-five years ago, I have understood that it is this intellectual intuition of the transparent beauty of an idea, not the desire for status or recognition or money, that has throughout my life been the driving force behind my writing and teaching.

It’s only indirectly related to music, but you certainly get the idea.

by Fred

From Tyler Cowen:

The dirty secret of the Billboard classical charts is that album sales figures are so low, the charts are almost meaningless. Sales of 200 or 300 units are enough to land an album in the top 10. [Hilary] Hahn’s No. 1 recording, after the sales spike resulting from her appearance on Conan, bolstered by blogs and press, sold 1,000 copies.

[...]

In early October, pianist Murray Perahia’s much-praised album of Bach partitas was in its sixth week on the list, holding strong at No. 10. It sold 189 copies. No. 25, the debut of the young violinist Caroline Goulding, in its third week, sold 75 copies.

His conclusion? “I buy a lot of classical CDs, but it’s rare that I end up listening to such chart-toppers, instead preferring more obscure performers.” Tee hee!

Read the whole thing here.

by Fred

That track tops Tyler Cowen’s “Introduction to Haitian Music.” Read the rest, and follow the links, here.

Coincidentally enough, a few years before the second set of three films showed up, I had posed the question to my wife of David Fincher directing a remake of The Empire Strikes Back. Imagine how the mind behind Alien³ and Se7en would handle the story of a gifted resistance warrior who keeps hearing the voice of his fallen master. Just before an assault on their base, he suffers a full vision of his old teacher, then collapses from exposure to the cold. In the hallucination the old man had given instructions, which the warrior remembers hazily: he is to head a remote outpost for further training. The assault comes, lead by the dictator’s second in command, who — unbeknown to all — is the warrior’s father. So the warrior heads into deep space: not in an explorer craft, not with a crew, but in a tiny, short-range fighter, alone. With an android. In deep space.

When he arrives at last, a centuries-old, reptilian creature appears: his new master. His training begins, but the warrior is still plagued with hallucinations and terrible anxieties, and with what may be visions of the near future. This way his father is able to lure him from his training, set an expected trap, then make an unexpected offer: kill the tyrant with me and we will restore peace to the universe.

I’ve taken pains not to alter the details, but nevertheless, is this the film you saw? Are you sure?

And by the way? She hated the idea of David Fincher directing the remake.

It would be hard to think up a film that more whitewashed its own gravity than The Empire Strikes Back. That is to say, hard until George Lucas produced Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. The tyrant, years earlier, to no other ends than the expansion of power, openly sets one army against another in a war that tears a horrible swath across the galaxy and engulfs entire worlds. The first army is underwritten by a deceived separatist movement. Their soldiers are battle droids, true believers, and the occasional Sith assassin. The opposing force is a clone army, so their recruitment goals are no object, either. It is simply a matter of spawn, deploy, spawn, deploy, spawn, deploy. It is the perfect mix for the emperor’s endless war and seizure of power.

Again, are those the films you saw? Maybe David Fincher should direct remakes of episodes II, III and V.

All that said, don’t even pretend for a second that you don’t want to hear this piece of music:

Over at Marginal Revolution, a reader (who identifies himself as Adam Smith, no less) poses an interesting music question:

Why are the typical lengths of albums across different music genres so different? In particular, I was thinking most of my rap albums are at least over the hour mark and many run all the way up to the 80-minute maximum. They’re usually packed with intros, skits, and lots of 5 minute tracks that have extended intro and outro instrumental beat only sequences. My metal albums, on the other hand, have an average run length of no more than 40 mins. Most albums are between 8 and 10 tracks with little in the way of tangential material. These different run-times show up in other places too. For example, my older jazz albums (i.e. Kind of Blue, Time Out, Blue Train) typically run around 45 mins with a half dozen or so tracks yet my newer jazz albums like MMW’s The Dropper run almost the whole 80 mins. Also, prog. rock bands tend to produce much longer albums than garage rock bands. Even adjusting for the fact that prog bands emphasize longer musical passages, they could compensate by just having fewer songs or garage rock bands could just have twice as many (like the White Stripes did on their first album).

Is there a relative price argument for these differences? Or even signaling? Perhaps there is a rat race among rappers to signal they’re capable of coming up with enough material to fill out the maximum length, even if it includes lots of filler. Perhaps the recording costs are lower as instrumentation relies so heavily on sampling. Maybe metal runs into diminishing returns after 30 mins or so where the listener becomes numb to the intensity.

Professor Cowen’s answers will surely run hotter than mine, so let’s review mine first. (And before I start, it bears mention that the reader’s closing sentence — set off in bold font above — is almost certainly true.)

1. First, ceteris paribus (ed. note: when conversing with libertarians it is key to throw out a Latin phrase or two, to establish rapport) a shorter record seems more indicative of record label influence. A longer record seems more indicative of artist influence. Maybe this is the misperception of an outsider, but it seems that a producer will be more inclined to toss even more songs out. The songwriter, by the word’s very definition, will be more inclined to throw even more songs in. Hip hop albums are notorious for their truckloads of filler. Even my favorite releases in that genre (The Score by Fugees, 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days In The Life Of… by Arrested Development, and Speakerboxxx/The Love Below by Outkast) are soaked heavy with throwaway tracks, unfunny spoken word exchanges, and overcooked song elements.

If I’m right — that is to say, if rappers wield disproportionate influence over their record labels — that raises a cottage industry of follow-up questions, not the least of which is, Why? Does the short answer amount to good old-fashioned supply and demand? Does a relatively new art form imply a new industry, and a new industry imply new rules? Are rappers more sophisticated parties to contract? Better negotiators? Some combination thereof? Or are there other dynamics at play that are invisible to the music consumer?

2. Next, and I made a similar point in another response to a Marginal Revolution post: culture creates culture. Meaning sub-sets of culture build up around jazz records, heavy metal records, audience behavior at the opera, Tool concerts. If your last ten jazz record purchases were 45 minutes long, it’s a safe bet that your next ten will be as well. Because that’s what jazz artists do, apparently. They release 45-minute-long records. I called it “cultural momentum” at the time although I didn’t like the term then and still don’t.

3. As a corollary to # 2 above — and maybe this constitutes picking the low fruit — but never underestimate the power of the staff meeting. I was horrified to read that a well-paced Hollywood blockbuster is considered by executive producers to fall somewhere between 26 and 28 scenes long. Meaning the suits will send your film back to the editing room if it weighs in at 29 scenes, and will call the actors back in for a reshoot if you’ve only managed 25. Even if the variance of 16% seems trivial to us common folk. So maybe record labels really are as bad as you’ve all been telling me they are, and contemporary jazz LPs run 80 minutes because, dammit, that’s what our shareholders demand.

Let’s see what Tyler Cowen had to say:

1. The average career of a rapper is short. A long CD increases the chance that something will “stick” and the rapper won’t get too many other chances to try.

2. Some metal bands develop great loyalty among their followers and achieve durable franchises. That gives them a lower discount rate and they are more inclined to save up material for the future. Plus they are marketing an overall sound — rather than clever particular innovations — and if the first forty (five?) minutes don’t convince you nothing will. Rap songs probably have a higher individual variance.

3. Many older albums are short for technological reasons, plus the albums were due in relatively rapid succession for contractual reasons. In the 1960s there was lots of technological advance in music, so if you sat on the sidelines for a few years you could become obsolete.

4. It is relatively easy for a contemporary jazz artist to tack on additional improvisations and he can choose standard compositions if necessary. Other forms of popular music cannot expand quantity so easily without hitting a wall in terms of quality. One prediction here is that “compositional jazz” albums should be shorter in average length than albums of jazz improvisation, contemporary that is.

5. If you wanted a somewhat strained explanation, you could argue that the longer CD is a more bundled product and it will make economic sense as a form of price discrimination, the more varied the valuations of the audience. This would require that rap CD buyers have a higher variance of marginal valuation.

Yeah, I noticed that, too. His explanations ran way hotter than mine did. Ouch!

Monkeys don’t care much for human music, but apparently they will groove to their own beat.

Previous experiments have shown that tamarin monkeys prefer silence to Mozart, and they don’t respond emotionally to human music the way people do. But when a psychologist and a musician collaborated to compose music based on the pitch, tone and tempo of tamarin calls, they discovered that the species-specific music significantly affected monkey behavior and emotional response.

“Different species may have different things that they react to and enjoy differently in music,” said psychologist Charles Snowdon of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who published the paper Tuesday in Biology Letters with composer David Teie of the University of Maryland. “If we play human music, we shouldn’t expect the monkeys to enjoy that, just like when we play the music that David composed, we don’t enjoy it too much.”

Indeed, the monkey music sounds shrill and unpleasant to human ears. Each of the 30-second pieces below were produced with a cello and Teie’s voice, based on specific features from recordings of tamarin monkey calls. The first “song” is based on fear calls from an upset monkey, while the second one contains soothing sounds based on the vocalizations of a relaxed animal.

Find the source article here.

From the original Freakonomics post:

Terry Teachout, meditating on a rare outburst of booing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, wonders if classical music and theater are being diminished by a superabundance of standing ovations and a scarcity of negative feedback. What if theater and orchestra audiences behaved more like blog commenters?

(Before we proceed, I must say that the phrase “diminished by a superabundance of standing ovations” makes me indescribably happy.)

Professor Cowen raises three possible explanations: “older people are less grumpy,” “signaling refined taste” and signaling “magnanimity.” He wisely discounts the first, but gives the latter two their due diligence. My answer, “cultural momentum,” simply says “they don’t boo more at the opera, because that’s not what people go there to do. They go there to give standing ovations, just like they did the time before.”

Indeed, you don’t hear many boos at any kind of live music performance, opera or not (cultural momentum: that’s just not what you intend to do when you head out for a show, just like last time). The one act I saw harassed offstage opened up for Tool in Dallas, late in the Aenima tour. I’m 99% certain it was The Melvins, but memory may not serve. I’ll let the reader decide for himself if it was just:

Find the answer here.

The Beatles producer [George Martin] added a piano chord that included an F note, impossible to play with the other notes on the guitar. The resulting chord was completely different than anything found in songbooks and scores for the song.

Read the rest at the linked article, follow the clicks, and peruse the comments, one of which reads:

I believe G7/9/13 would just be written G13 no? The dropped 11 is implied in dominant chords? It’s been awhile since I took music theory though…

As it has been for the present correspondent. G13 it is.

The Beatles producer [George Martin] added a piano chord that included an F note, impossible to play with the other notes on the guitar. The resulting chord was completely different than anything found in songbooks and scores for the song.

Read the rest at the linked article, follow the clicks, and peruse the comments, one of which reads:

I believe G7/9/13 would just be written G13 no? The dropped 11 is implied in dominant chords? It’s been awhile since I took music theory though…

As it has been for the present correspondent. G13 it is.