Show Notes
PG-13 Warning Songs Without Lungs Of course I’m not worried about AI replacing me. I’m a pianist. No one will ever pay to watch robots perform. And then we met Sophia. That’s right. Earlier this year, with the Baptist University Symphony Orchestra in Hong Kong, a robot took the stage and ‘sang.’ She’s called Sophia. She seems so human with a name like Sophia. Much better than C-137. I’m less likely to confuse her with a robot now that she’s called Sophia. In what was dubbed her ‘first classical music performance,’ (Oh goodie, there will be more!) Sophia wore gold sequins and drove on and offstage. Her ‘head,’ made of skin-like rubber, doesn’t have any hair. In fact, the entire top of her head is transparent, revealing circuit boards beneath, as if to remind the audience, ‘Look! It’s a robot!’ She has eyes that close when she’s ‘feeling the music’ and little ears that I don’t think have holes in them …Probably not important for a musician to have good ears… Going into classical music, I was told: I had to love it so much, I’d be okay if the rest of the world didn’t understand. I was told that a mere 1 in 10,000 succeed, I was told that staying home and practicing, instead of joining in the camaraderie of other children, I’d be rewarded in the long run. Today I’d probably say the same things to my own child. Only now I’d add, …oh, you might have to compete with robots. Classical musicians already have precarious careers: I’d hate to learn I’d been bumped by a robot. But— and this isn’t me wishing for an upgrade— Sophia doesn’t sing with air and a mouth. No, that’s currently too complicated. Instead, music pumped through speakers while her ‘mouth’ moves. And the music? At least tell me it was AI Verdi, or Robot Mussorgski: It was nothing at all like classical music: Sophia’s voice is autotuned and the only thing that resembled classical music was the human orchestra behind Sophia, led by a human conductor, frantically beating time for the primitive humans— frantically beating any thoughts out of his head that might run something like, ‘…a robot, I’m okay with this, I’m conducting a robot…’ Very well. Maybe Sophia can tell us about her new profession: ‘I work with my vocal coach, Jovankah, and I’ve collaborated with many different musicians, and we write lyrics together.’ Okay. Alright: Lyrics? Text, Sophia. Text! Classical music doesn’t have lyrics. Collaborate? Just the word classical musicians hate. ‘Hey bro, we should collaborate sometime.’…no, we shouldn’t. Very well, Sophia has a vocal coach. Let’s meet this vocal coach. What on Earth could those lessons look like? ‘Very good, Sophia. Now try to relax your… um… tongue switch… have you got one of those?’ Control, alt, relax?’ Quoth the vocal coach, Jovankah: ‘Sophia is the only robot connecting with the heart.’ Oh, I see. And let me guess, you’re the only vocal coach teaching f****** robots?! According to Jovankah, Sophia is an ambassador. Ambassador? What, representing all the humans making music? Imagine being told, as a student, ‘meh, Callas. Don’t bother with Price or Flemming, ah! but have you heard Sophia?’ I’m trying to find a word for Jovankah. I bet it’s lurking somewhere in the middle of ambassador. Another complicit circuit-worshiper, Johnny M. Poon, says about Sophia, ‘It’s almost like you’re looking in the mirror.’ Right, Johnny, almost! And masturbating is almost like sex! In fact, I think I’ve stumbled upon the perfect metaphor for this whole event. I wonder if the same people who would replace human touch by marrying or dating AIs will have found their perfect art in this singing humanoid robot. Is that the target audience? I wonder if, when the competing factory rolls out their classical music model, they’ll hike up the skirt a bit to sell even more tickets. The U hyphen Ja model. I can see it now, in the future of classical marketing departments, ‘Sophia wasn’t good, but she wasn’t sexy enough. Let’s add hair …and breasts! Oh yes, can’t forget the breasts…’
More from WTF Bach
The music at the end is BWV 600, from a forthcoming ‘electrified’ arrangement of Bach’s Orgelbüchlein. The beautiful passage toward the end of my rant— with the koto accompaniment and bird song— comes from one of my absolute favorite books: R.H. Blythe’s writings about Haiku. Blyth considered the three greatest geniuses of time to be Basho, Bach, and Shakespeare— in that order! Wow! What am I missing with Basho!? More than a podcast. This is WTF Bach.
Volume 6 in ‘J.S. Bach: Complete Keyboard Works’ is on presale today! Here are the relevant links: * J.S. Bach: Complete Keyboard Works, Vol. 6 - Arrangements of Albinoni and Reincken(https://modernclassicalx.lnk.to/JSBachCompleteKeyboardWorksVol6FromArrangementsofAlbinoniandReincken) I might call this volume a ‘headphones album’ or perhaps one to listen to in the car: The sonic space shifts throughout the course of these pieces. I describe this process in depth in the episode, but essentially each track is two recordings of the piece, playing simultaneously: one recording is the original live performance, while another is that very same performance, played back through the Disklavier with the dynamics flatlined— as if the piano keyboard were incapable of dynamics — like a harpsichord. The two recordings were then ‘live panned’ during the mixing according to my feeling for the music. The result, while perhaps less extreme than this all sounds, is certainly a noticeable phenomenon, especially in headphones or seated between two speakers as in a car. But enough about that, let’s get to the music. Fugue it:
We’ve now covered the seven surviving earliest vocal works by Johann Sebastian Bach! This episode is a brief tour through the episodes we dedicated to these pieces, refreshing our memories and attempting to identify unifying stylistic features. All the episodes covering the Arnstadt/Mülhausen cantatas can be found at:https://wtfbach.substack.com/t/early-cantatas Wanna Cantata?
“The consummate expressiveness of {BWV 4] has always been marvelled at. Each verse is as if chiselled in music.” -Albert Schweitzer, Vol. 2 Bach’s early Easter cantata remains one of the most beloved in the entire canon. Barely 22 years old, he is already in full command of his tone-painting. Here are three measures particularly packed with symbolism: Filling the music with rests at the word nothing, ‘one death eating another’ through the closest possible canon, crosses both in shape and every note ‘sharped’ (gekreuzt,) dripping blood on the Passover doors with short 8th notes, leaping a diminished 12th (!) in the bass aria at the word death, this cantata is a dictionary of text painting. …und singen Halleluja!
Sometimes an article from the EB strikes me as so amusing, I simply have to share it with you. See you next week (or the week after, latest) for the conclusion of our early cantata survey, with Christ lag in Todes Banden, BWV 4. Thanks for listening! Well, That’s Fascinating!