Kanye (noun): anything that is both sublimely visionary and childishly self-absorbed
I doubt that many musicians were named in the flood of secret documents that coursed through WikiLeaks this year, and yet the notion of leakage really resonates with the state of music in 2010.
Hardly any big albums made it to market without some or all of their contents appearing on the Internet. Early in the year, the members of Vampire Weekend told me they wouldn't perform some new songs till their Contra disc came out, because they didn't want to see pre-emptive, fan-shot videos of the tunes on YouTube. We had weeks to mull over supposedly accidental discharges from Kanye West's recent My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, while we wondered where to draw the line between security breach and promotional teaser.
And there were other kinds of leakage. The music of Montreal's Arcade Fire, which most of us thought of as happily remote from the first circle of rock stardom, somehow spilled onto the top of the charts, as the band's album The Suburbs scored No. 1 debuts in Canada, the United States and several other countries.
The Philadelphia Orchestra, accustomed to basking near the top of the U.S. classical music establishment, found its audience dribbling away at a frightening rate and hired a Canadian (incoming music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin) to help reverse the flow.
And lots of musicians - from classicals such as pianist Simone Dinnerstein and soprano Renée Fleming, to pop figures such as Sufjan Stevens and Owen Pallett - acted on a hunch that the membrane separating popular music from the written-out kind was more permeable than it sometimes appeared.
Other events in 2010 advanced narratives that began years before, or stood as self-contained stories that reached a full stop before the year ended. Here's a few that stood out for me:
CANUCKS RULE
This was a good year internationally for Canadians in music, including Drake, Justin Bieber, Nézet-Séguin, Arcade Fire, Robert Lepage (director of a much-anticipated Ring cycle at the Metropolitan Opera), Lance Ryan (who subbed at short notice at the Bayreuth Festival and joined the elite international club of heldentenors), as well as a resurgent Neil Young, who made his first album with Canadian superproducer Daniel Lanois. The concert-hall wizards at Toronto firm Diamond+Schmitt Architects began building a new performance home for the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, and soldiered on with a major opera-house commission for Leningrad's Mariinsky Theatre.
MOST USEFUL NEW ACRONYM
ATBAR, for Auto-Tuned Beyond All Recognition. Okay, I just made it up, but I could have used it dozens of times this year. Auto-Tune, the music industry's favourite pitch-correction software, continued to change the sound of popular music, giving practically everything you hear on non-classical radio the same kind of robotic intonation. Of all technologies applied to music in the past century, this is by far the worst. A whole generation of listeners hardly knows what an unassisted recorded voice sounds like, and pitch deflection as an expressive part of popular music is fading to extinction.
PITCH OF THE YEAR
B-flat, the base note heard throughout the month of June from the throat of the raucous vuvuzelas, the inescapable plastic horns blown through every minute of play during the FIFA World Cup in South Africa.
NEW OPERA REDUX
Vancouver Opera bet heavily on Lillian Ailing, a new opera by John Estacio and John Murrell, and on the first Canadian performances of Nixon in China, John Adams's 1987 treatment of Richard Nixon's adventures in the Middle Kingdom. Toronto's Luminato festival gave the Canadian premiere of Rufus Wainwright's Prima Donna, and Calgary Opera is tuning up for the January premiere of The Inventor, Bramwell Tovey's new opera with libretto by Murrell. We're still waiting, meanwhile, for the country's biggest producer, the Canadian Opera Company, to play even one note of Canadian music, new or otherwise, on the stage of its wonderful four-year-old opera house.
THE OLD LION STILL ROARS
Elliott Carter, one of the most eminent of American composers, sent a bouquet of knotty new pieces to Toronto's New Music Concerts, and every one of them was written as he approached or after he had passed his 100th birthday (he's now 102).
THE BAD WORD STILL HAS SOME KICK
It's hard to believe that anyone could break new ground in what the Times Literary Supplement called the FCUK-ization of everything, but Cee Lo Green seemed to do so with a viral single whose attention-grabbing title (and chorus) were softened in the "clean" version to Forget You. The song was loads of fun, but it, and another year's worth of foul-mouthed hip-hop lyrics, made some of us pine for a creative return to mere innuendo.
KANYE AS A NOUN
He was last year's whipping boy, for the disgraceful Kanye he made of Taylor Swift's award acceptance. He tried to efface that experience by distributing a long string of apologies (including one, bizarrely, to George W. Bush) that should have won him a Kanye prize for self-promoting abasement. Finally he scored a huge Kanye with what I persist in thinking is one of the year's most overrated albums. Kanye is my new word for anything that is both sublimely visionary and childishly self-absorbed.
GETTING ALONG, AS A DIFFICULT VERB
Up-and-coming Calgary indie band Women announced their breakup, onstage and at the brink of fisticuffs, weeks after releasing a good new album called Public Strain. The Cecilia String Quartet changed cellists days after winning the prestigious Banff International String Quartet Competition. k.d. lang won a $1.9-million (U.S.) settlement after a California court found something fishy in the way her former manager handled her money. And a new video portrait of Valery Gergiev showed the great Ossetian conductor listening in his office to the complaints of a prima ballerina without taking his eyes off a televised football match.