Tyler Cowen on Bach, Beethoven, John, and Paul
I’ve listened to Tyler Cowen talk for hundreds of hours about economics, music, history, art, travel, and regional cuisine, so meeting him on Zoom felt a little like stepping through The Purple Rose of Cairo. My composure mostly held, and it was a pleasure to trade favorite recordings, speculate on Bach’s motivations, and wrestle with uneasy feelings while enjoying recordings from wartime Germany. Full transcript follows.Here we are on YouTube.Artists discussed:Leo KottkeThe BeatlesJohn Eliot Gardiner Philippe HerrewegheOtto KlempererMartha ArgerichKarl RichterSviatoslav RichterGlenn GouldAlisa WeilersteinPablo CasalsPeter SchreierJason VieauxEduardo FernandezMogens WöldikeHans-Christoph RademannCarlos KlieberKeith JarrettBenjamin AlardAngela HewittSamuel FeinbergPierre HantaiBerliozArtur RubensteinAndres SegoviaJulian BreamWilhelm FurtwanglerFabio BiondiFrank Peter ZimmermanNathan MilsteinDavid RobinsonPierre BoulezMasaaki SuzukiWilhelm BackhausLeonard BernsteinMsistislav RostropovichYo-Yo MaJean-Guihen QueyrasJanos StarkerHeinrich SchiffKim KashkashianEdgar MeyerSergei RachmaninoffYuja WangTranscript:Evan Goldfine: Welcome to episode three of the podcast of A Year of Bach. My name's Evan Goldfine and today I'm delighted to be talking to Tyler Cowen. Tyler's one of our foremost public intellectuals. He's an economist at Virginia's George Mason University and one of the original internet bloggers whose work continues into its third decade at Marginal Revolution.I think about money a lot, and Tyler has reshaped my thinking about economics, especially around how economic growth leads to human flourishing, the importance of incentives and how every economic decision has trade-offs. Tyler and I share a deep love of Bach and the Beatles, and we're both products of Bergen County, New Jersey, so maybe there was something in the water there.Tyler, welcome.Tyler Cowen: Happy to be here. Thank you, Evan.Evan Goldfine: Your earliest exposure to the music was seeing a Bach performance on public television. Could you talk about that?Tyler Cowen: Well, it wasn't exactly a performance, but I was watching William F. Buckley's Firing Line and uh, on public tv, and they play [00:01:00] the parts of the Brandenburg Concerto number two as the show starts.And it just so happened that we had at home, I think three classical records. And Brandenburg number two was one of the three. So I had it on the record and then I heard it on Buckley and it's like, oh, I know what this is. And so it was one of the two or three first classical pieces that I knew. Maybe the first one, and I liked it.Right. That's important.Evan Goldfine: And how did you start digging more?Tyler Cowen: Uh, it took a little bit longer. So we had a copy of Rimsky Korsakov Scheherazade. And Tchaikovsky, the Pathetique sixth Symphony. But I was so into classic rock, and that was such an incredible time to have that interest. It wasn't until I was 18 or so that I started really becoming interested in classical music.I moved down to be an undergraduate at George Mason, so I started going to the Kennedy Center, and my first love really was Beethoven. I just kept on going to hear all the Beethoven and all the Brahms I could, [00:02:00]Evan Goldfine: but somehow it flipped over to Bach.Tyler Cowen: Well, I don't know. I don't know if I would say it flipped.May, maybe they're on a par. Sure. Uh, Bach, A true love for Bach was two or three years later, but I would say until I was 40, I definitely was more interested in Beethoven than Bach. Right now. It would arguably be the opposite.Evan Goldfine: I'd say the same. Uh, although I probably got the Bach bug a little bit earlier, just by playing classical guitar.Some of those Bach pieces are the cornerstones of that repertoire, and I think especiallyTyler Cowen: I did that too. I played the prelude, uh, the transcribed cello, sonatas, some, you know, parts of the violin, sonatas and partitas, uh, different short bits from Cantatas for guitar. It works pretty well, doesn't it?Evan Goldfine: It works great, and Beethoven does not, so no,Tyler Cowen: nothing, none of it.Evan Goldfine: So there's a. There's a pleasure in being able to get deeper and deeper into it. And I've found, as I've gotten older and listening to these things, you know, of course the Breamadth in which I listened to it last year, but [00:03:00] also going deeper and deeper into it, I find it's, uh, sort of an infinite Well,Tyler Cowen: that's right.Oh, another early exposure I had around the time of Buckley. I had a Leo Kottke album called Mudlark. And he was mostly, you could say, a folk guitarist, and he did Bouree on that album for guitar. And I just thought, well, I wanna play this. And in, you know, in due time I did. It's not that hard to play that piece at all.Evan Goldfine: Correct. And I love Leo Kottke. I've seen him many times in concert inTyler Cowen: Same here.Evan Goldfine: And, um, what a, what an incredible American, uh, weirdo character, but also he performed the, uh, Jesu Joy of Man's desiring on the Six and 12 string guitar album.Tyler Cowen: That's right. Yeah.Evan Goldfine: Which is just a beautiful, beautiful arrangement for steel string, not usually done on the steel string guitar.And I recommend everyone take a listen to that.Tyler Cowen: It's better than most classical guitarists, how he has some sort of feel for Bach, even though it would not count as traditional in any way.Evan Goldfine: Yeah, he, uh, Bach can translate into folk music, uh, if, if it's in the right hands. [00:04:00] You've called Bach the greatest achiever of all time.How did he do it?Tyler Cowen: We don't know. So there's plenty of records about Johann Sebastian Bach. But what he really was like to me is quite a cipher. And I've read the major books on him by Gardiner, Wolff. Others, uh, you can read about the records, different places he worked, tax records. But at the end of the day, he's the least easily graspable major composer.I feel Beethoven in Mozart. If I met them, they wouldn't fundamentally surprise me. Oh, you're Beethoven, you know, Bach. I don't know. It's, uh, that's part of the mystery and challenge, isn't it?Evan Goldfine: It's maddening. And, and also I, I've been left flat by a lot of the biographies also. I just find, I don't, I'm not getting enough out of them to,Tyler Cowen: they're well done,Evan Goldfine: especially for.Tyler Cowen: Yeah, I'm not blaming the authors. They just have nothing to work with and he's so consistent. You don't learn much about the variation. You [00:05:00] said this yourself in your 37 propositions about Bach over time and styles. He's. More or less always the same. And that too makes it harder.Evan Goldfine: Yes, there's theTyler Cowen: opposite of the Beatles, right?Evan Goldfine: The opposite of the Beatles. But you know, I'd say that there is an extra little bit of depth, I think that Bach gets to towards the end of his life. I'm thinking of the Art of Fugue in particular, but you know, I'd say this, his output from his teenage years up until that point, it just remarkably consistent and uh, you know, it doesn't really feel like very much of an early and late style as compared to others.Tyler Cowen: I agree with your general point, but sometimes I wonder if Art of the Fugue and Musical Offering are his greatest depth.Evan Goldfine: Hmm.Tyler Cowen: I'm not convinced that's true. So something like the first partita are parts of Well-Tempered, clavier, uh, they sound less complex, but in a way they're more compelling and the fact that there are so few good recordings of Art of the Fugue or Musical Offering, [00:06:00] it could just mean they're so deep.No human can do them. Uh, but maybe in a sense they're too far out there and in that regard, less deep. I think about this pretty often.Evan Goldfine: I don't listen to them as much as the other pieces that you mentioned.Tyler Cowen: Exactly. Or eventhe brandenburgs, maybe those are his deepest works and his most accessible works.Evan Goldfine: He was a tune,he was a tunesmith as well. And he gets short of, he gets short shrift for his melodic mastery because the harmony and the, and the counterpoint are so intricate.Tyler Cowen: What's also interesting to me, I mean B minor mass, which of course, you know, it might be considered by many his greatest work, but just how much he threw it together.It's a bit like a Paul McCartney song like Uncle Albert, Admiral Halsey, where there are all these pieces and somehow it works. And you just wonder like what really went on with the other works where you don't know how it was built.Evan Goldfine: Right. And we, we'll never know. And we just have it looks that way.Tyler Cowen: Yeah.I don'tthink there's much more about Bach to be [00:07:00] discovered.Evan Goldfine: Yeah.Tyler Cowen: AI or not.Evan Goldfine: Um, to that end, when you think about the B minor bass, can we hear today Bach in the way that he intended it? And I'm not talking about period instruments. I'm thinking the people who are listening to the B minor mass, you know, they're sitting in a church in, uh, the Lutherans, in in Leipzig.They're shivering. Life is much more precarious. They're hearing the loudest sounds that they've heard all year. Is the gap between us and them too large? What do we miss and what do we gain?Tyler Cowen: The gap is quite large. Now what we gain, obviously, is that we're comfortable. We can put the music on pause. If we're in a concert hall, that's different, but that's so stagey.The people there, maybe they're old or they're Asian, few of them really believe in God. There's just so many differences, but I think the biggest difference is all the music we've heard in the meantime, and you cannot erase that from your mind. So yeah, it's a completely different [00:08:00] experience in my opinion.Evan Goldfine: Everyone is downstream from the Romantics. We've all heard Chopin, if you're gonna be playing Bach on piano, you've also played Chopin .i'm wondering how you hear certain performances now because our current composers, I'm sorry, our current performers have been listening to all of this music all of their lives.Tyler Cowen: Well, if I listen to Otto Klemperer conduct B minor mass, which is a favorite of mine, it's sometimes called a bit heavy or elephantine, but it makes perfect sense to me 'cause I know Romantic music and Wagner and Beethoven, Brahms, and it just clicks.In many ways, I prefer the heavier versions of B minor mass. So when I hear Gardiner or Herreweghe or any number of other people who do it, the earlier style, it sounds like a cleansing to me. Now, there's nothing wrong with that, but it's not how it was intended. That was simply how people heard it, but perhaps more radically so.Mm-hmm. [00:09:00]Evan Goldfine: I prefer, uh, some of my favorites are, um, Karl Richter's performances, who, you know, a lot of that is, I guess, not, not of the current day that, uh, in terms of he plays it very Romantically. All of his Cantatas, they're very drawn out. They sound like they could be, they could be coming from, uh, 18th and 19th century.And I, I prefer it. I, I kind of like how it fits in that mold, although I'm glad it's not the only way you can be hear, uh, you can hear those pieces. Um,Tyler Cowen: I don't like Richter as much as you do. You know?Evan Goldfine: Tell me why.Tyler Cowen: I, I admire him for having been the first person to make Bach sound a certain way consistently, and he is very, very important historically, but I just think there's always someone after him who did it better.Evan Goldfine: Hmm.Tyler Cowen: He's a bit like Toscanini for me. Very admirable, important, but I never wanna listen to Toscanini. Really Not any performance.Evan Goldfine: I loved Richter singers. Tell me who you prefer. Post Richter. [00:10:00] In that vein,Tyler Cowen: well name, name a piece, and I'll tell you maybe, oh,Evan Goldfine: maybe for the cantatas or for for the passions.Well, uh, you, you have different particular recordings of each of these, uh, these pieces I'm imagining. So, so what comes to mind of, of as favorites of yours?Tyler Cowen: Well, for St. Matthew's Passion, my, you know, Mogens Wöldike, the old Danish conductor,Evan Goldfine: I don't know that oneTyler Cowen: who didit very full blown. Uh, that's an incredible recording.And then Otto Klemperer. Would be my two favorites. But even Peter Schreier, which is not a top recording, but I think it's a bit better than Richter on St. Matthews. And then you may or might not want to go the original instruments direction, uh, but at least there's three I would take over Richter.Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm.Tyler Cowen: So he's just not that useful to me. Now the Cantatas are interesting. 'Cause I think they're the worst served part of box output in recorded music. And they're the ones that suffer the most from being yanked out of the church.Evan Goldfine: Yes.Tyler Cowen: I think most of them just don't do that well [00:11:00] either in a symphony orchestra hall or recorded.So they're more boring to the listener. I'm not saying they're worse. It's not, not not the point. But it's tougher to come to terms with them and there's so many, and they tend to blur together. Uh, I suppose the cantatas I like the most are the Suzukis, which I think you don't like so much.Evan Goldfine: Yeah,Tyler Cowen: it was just something problematic about the whole exercise.Evan Goldfine: I agree. It took me a little while to get into it and because that was, so much of it was about half of the material that I listened to and I was mostly unfamiliar with it. It was sort of a slog sometimes to, to get through them, but I kind of started to understand the rhythm of them a little bit more about how they paced each of the movements and how he orchestrated each of them.They all have their own. Particular kind of charms and flavors. There's a recording cycle that happened last year live in, um, in Germany by, uh, the conductor's name is Rademann, R-A-D-E-M-A-N-N. Very exciting performances, very live and gripping. And I,Tyler Cowen: I've heard they're verygood. Are they [00:12:00] released on disc now?Evan Goldfine: They are not entirely yet. They're, we're in the middle of 2025 right now. I think they're midway through. The release of those, but I think about half of them have been released. They're all, they're all very strong singing strong. And, uh, it's exciting. Uh, it reminds me a little bit of, uh, Carlos Klieber recordings, that kind of excitement in the, yeah, in the room.That'sTyler Cowen: good.Evan Goldfine: Yeah.Tyler Cowen: Now, maybe it's best with the cantatas just to keep on listening to the one after the other, which is counterintuitive. Normally you'd say, well, pick one aside, or just listen to one movement, but just keep on going.Evan Goldfine: You gotta immerse yourself. It reminds me of another question I wanted to ask you.So you, you've, you famously, when you go see the movies. Sometimes you'll pop in and leave after an hour. And having had the flavor of it,how do you manage that?Tyler Cowen: Well, I never wait an hour. I wait an hour, I'm there.Evan Goldfine: Okay, so, so 15, 20 minutes, you get the geal. 40 minutes maybe? Yeah, 20 minutes of a movie. So, so how does that play into your music listening, especially with serious music?Do you, [00:13:00] do you get a flavor and leave, or do, do repeats make you nuts? What's your, what's your consumption function on, on those pieces?Tyler Cowen: Well, there's a big difference. So I think you more or less know in advance what is good. So one belief I hold is that every composer considered to be great is indeed great, that the critical market for classical music is remarkably efficient.And the people who would be called the best, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, they are the best. And you really just can't argue it that much. So someone like Schoenberg who took me a while to appreciate, I knew he was the most important and best composer of atonal music, so I just kept on listening. I knew I'd get there, I did.And there's no uncertainty. Or as a movie, you can read reviews, but it's like you know more than the reviewers often. And if you don't like it, you don't like it. Don't necess. You don't usually have some historical reason for wanting to know what the movie's about. You would with some films like Citizen [00:14:00] Kane, but say, that's great anyway.You can't go through life not knowing Citizen Kane, so you're rarely investing in like knowledge of history and cinema.Evan Goldfine: So it's really just an an aesthetic feel that you're getting and you're in the world of a particular film for 20 minutes, and that feels like enough.Tyler Cowen: And I go to a lot of movies, so the ones I walk out of, I'm pretty sure about.They're not that marginal. They're typically just bad, and I don't look back and it's not the case. At three years later, someone says, oh, did you see X? I'm like, oh, I walked out of that. Should I rent? You know, watch it on streaming now. You know,Evan Goldfine: probably not.Yeah,Tyler Cowen: that's fine.Evan Goldfine: I don't watch a lot of movies 'cause I, I think I'd walk out of most of them and I don't have your discipline, I think to, to just leave in the middle.Um,Tyler Cowen: the movies, they're a bit like, they're not quite as efficient as classical music, but the critical market for classic movies is reasonably efficient. The classic movies would be in the New York [00:15:00] Times, but if you read serious cinematic criticism and just watched those movies, you'd be on very firm ground, I think.Evan Goldfine: You've written about celebrating societies that allow weirdos to flourish, and I think that one of our great weirdos, uh, in this space is, was Glenn Gould, uh, the, perhaps the, the largest weirdo, uh, to become a celebrity in great music in the 20th century. Is it strange that his recordings have become the most famous ones?Tyler Cowen: The good ones are the best, and they make it impossible to hear other people do the same pieces. So I was just listening to the new Tocattas recording. I think it's by Jonathan Ferrucci, and it's very good. Like on a scale of one to 10, maybe it's like a 9.1, but at the end of the day, is it gonna replace Glenn Gould?I don't know. Now his bad recordings are like the worst Bach ever done. Yeah. Like, well tempered clavier, which Henry Oliver also hates.Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm.Tyler Cowen: Uh, but something like Partita in number [00:16:00] one or Partita number six, all the Partitas is, uh, just untouchable and you don't go anywhere else. So it's weird. And I als the two Goldbergs, uh, English Suite in.A minor would be a peak by Gould. And unlike many people, I like it when he sings. I think that makes it better.Evan Goldfine: I don't mind it. Do you like Keith Jarrett? Do you listen to him at all?Tyler Cowen: I do. Uh, I like his Shostokovich. I don't prefer his Bach. It's in the, I'm surprised how good this is category. Mm-hmm. But I do listen to his Shostokovich, which is jazzier to begin with.Evan Goldfine: His French suites I think are excellent on harpsichord, and he actually came out with an album, well, it was, he recorded in the eighties and it was released a couple years ago, um, of CPE Bach, the Wurtenberg Sonatas, which were new to me. And that recording is extraordinary.Tyler Cowen: I like that too.Evan Goldfine: I really, really like that one.Tyler Cowen: But you know, I actually prefer CPE Bach on Clavichord, and I don't like Clavichord for Dad at [00:17:00] all. Maybe I'm just inconsistent, but when it's a bit clunky and coming out in spurts, I think it makes CPE's music more interesting and he needs that a bit.Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm.Tyler Cowen: Do you know the Benjamin Alard set? It's like, it's the complete keyword keyboard.Works of Bach.Evan Goldfine: I have not listened to that.Tyler Cowen: It's come, been coming out over the last two or three years. I think they're all out now. Uh, he does, you know, keyboards, harpsichord, a lot of clavichord. I think it's the closest you can get to hearing how it ought to sound while the quality of the performance is in the top tier.That said, they are never my favorite versions, which will typically just be with piano. Angela Hewitt being another one.Evan Goldfine: Hmm.Tyler Cowen: Or Richter, or do you know Samuel Feinberg?Evan Goldfine: No, uh,Tyler Cowen: you know, Well-Tempered Clavier, which I'm sure you love. His volume one is better than Richter. It's Soviet and dreamy. It's in the same direction as Richter, but that you should [00:18:00] really listen to.Evan Goldfine: I will.Tyler Cowen: It'squite special.Evan Goldfine: Yeah. Have you listened to, we're just gonna trade names back and forth. Have you listened to Pierre Hantai on Harpsichord?Tyler Cowen: That's my favorite harpsichord version of the Goldbergs. I think he's very good, but I still mostly listen to those on piano.Evan Goldfine: I love his Well-Tempered clavier too.That that was a great, that very, yes. Yeah, that was a great discovery for me during this, uh, during this exercise for me,Tyler Cowen: he's my favorite. Bach on harpsichord, I would say. Definitely.Evan Goldfine: When you were talking about how Benjamin Alard, uh, playing, how it ought to sound. Can I press you on the word ought there?What did you mean?Tyler Cowen: It's the closest to how I think box sounded relative to what we can recreate today. Mm, the same feel kinds of rhythms, motions, energies, instruments in, in many cases, not all. So that makes them quite interesting. And again, the quality is very high, but at the end of the day, you learn that you want something that's not [00:19:00] exactly quality or authenticity.You want something closer to the Glenn Gould or Richter. I do, at leastEvan Goldfine: I, same with me. And I'd put Martha Argerich in the little bit of Bach that she recorded.Tyler Cowen: Absolutely.Evan Goldfine: Um, you know, she, she'sTyler Cowen: sweet by her. Yeah.Evan Goldfine: The, the best. The best.Tyler Cowen: That's right. And she's the best at many things. Not just Bach.. She, she is theEvan Goldfine: best at, she's threatening to come to New York in a couple years, but, um,Tyler Cowen: isn't she 85 now?Someone just sent me a summer recording by her.Evan Goldfine: She rec my friends who flew to Italy to see her, just 'cause they, they wanted to catch her again while she was still playing, but they said she still got it.Tyler Cowen: Yeah. Pretty amazing. So I'll listen to that recording soon.Evan Goldfine: Yeah. So you going back to Bach, the man.You've taught that incentives matter. This is, uh, something that, uh, those two words together have reshaped the, putting that at the forefront of economic thought, uh, for me. So, you know, what were Bach's incentives? You had a lot of a big family, you know, you wrote that a lot of musicians are after some [00:20:00] sort of fame or notoriety also, I'm not sure how much of.Bach, I'm not sure how much Bach actually received that in his lifetime, uh, relative to the amount of fame he might have gotten today. You know, a lot of these pieces were played once and, you know, cast off and never heard again. They're incredibly intricate. They lasted by the skin of their teeth, uh, through the ages.What was Bach's motivation? To do so much or how can you, you know, if, if that was his incent, what were his incentives to putTyler Cowen: it up? At first he was paid and he was quite a tough bargainer, as you can see in the correspondence. And multiple times he would leave one place for another. So he goes, what, from Arnstadt to Muhlhausen?To Cothen to Leipzig. Right. Is that the correct order?Evan Goldfine: That's fromwhat I understand, yeah.Tyler Cowen: And every, you know, every time he's pissed off or he wants to do something different or there's more money, uh, or he didn't like the ruler. So he wanted, I think, the freedom to create and he wanted to be paid. And he had all those kids to look after.And as you know, his first wife [00:21:00] died. Mm. And he's even writing a lot of music with her gone. And presumably to some extent Bach himself is looking after the kids. So it's an incredible story. The free, you know, the freedom and ability to create. But I, you know, a bit like Shakespeare, I think he suspected.He would be more famous than it seemed 'cause think about all the sheet music he got from Italy and France from which come, you know, Italian suites, French suites, English, suites broadly in those styles, uh, I think he knew that trade would develop and that he could become quite well known, and I strongly suspect he thought of himself as the greatest musician ever to that date.I knew he would someday be recognized as such. That's my hypothesis. Zero direct evidence, but it is what I believe.Evan Goldfine: Yeah. He seemed to have distilled the history of music into one point and that was himself and then changed everything afterwards. He's like a fulcrum point.Tyler Cowen: Yeah. And Renaissance [00:22:00] polyphony, everything is in there.Evan Goldfine: Yeah,Tyler Cowen: there's precursors.Evan Goldfine: So I, I, you know, we're talking about music. I'm enjoying our conversation and I've enjoyed writing about my experience, but I find overall talking about great music to be less satisfying than talking about any other art form. So when I go through a museum with a friend, we can have so much to say to each other about what we're seeing.And after a play, I feel like I can, uh, speak about the words that we heard and the performances that we saw with music. I can pretty effectively complain about what I didn't like, but I can't talk about. That was great. If I were sitting next to you in a hall and we saw a great Bach performance together afterwards, I'd say that was wonderful and there wouldn't be so much in it.And I, on my blog, I've been trying to get to this point a little bit and I, I was wondering if you have an I idea about what gives about that phenomenon or if you experience it in that way.Tyler Cowen: I think one can do that more with popular music. That would be one point. Especially studio [00:23:00] popular music.Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm.Tyler Cowen: Uh, but I largely accept your point, and you also argued elsewhere in something you wrote. There's not much good writing about music, and I partly agree with that. But if I had to give an example, I would say something like The Memoirs of Berlioz, which are not mostly about music, right? They're about Berlioz, and they're about that period in history, yet in some funny way that is still writing about music.Evan Goldfine: Hmm.Tyler Cowen: Uh, and maybe that's what writing about music is, is filling in all the blank parts of the surrounding context. Or Arthur Rubenstein, you know, My Early Years. There's a lot of great books like that on the fringes of music, and maybe that's what we're looking for and the best we're gonna get. But with writing, you know, the new Ian Leslie book on John Lennon and Paul McCartney.That's wonderful.Evan Goldfine: Beautiful book.Tyler Cowen: And that book Revolution in their heads about the Beatles, that's an incredible book.Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm.Tyler Cowen: So popular music, there's, it's easier to talk about and there's often [00:24:00] better writing,Evan Goldfine: and that's a function of, uh, the popularity itself and also probably because the lyrics and, uh, are something that we can respond to in a way that is more relevant to our lives.The history is so close to us and maybe the people are actually still around.Tyler Cowen: That's right. Like few people can actually discuss. How Bach's St. John's passion revised the account of Christ relative to some of the other notions at his time. Yet it did, but it completely goes over everyone's head.Evan Goldfine: Right. The addressable market for that one's fairly smallTyler Cowen: for now.Yeah.Evan Goldfine: Right. Uh, I have a couple lightning round questions, so, uh, give me a, your best deep cut from, uh, Lennon and McCartney's solo catalogs.Tyler Cowen: When, when you say Deep cut, what does that mean exactly? Uh,Evan Goldfine: I would say not, uh, one of their singles or hitsTyler Cowen: Well, with Paul, there's so many are hits, but you know, my C Moon is a favorite of mine.Mm-hmm. I think that's 1974, but there's a second version of [00:25:00] C Moon that he redid with tighter orchestration that is only on the B side of a cd. Single, and even to this day is not on Spotify, YouTube, or anywhere else. You cannot hear it unless you own that CD single. So that's the deepest Macca cut. I know.And it's amazing. It's even better than the original C Moon.Evan Goldfine: And what about for John Lennon?Tyler Cowen: I think Mind Games is an underrated album. Mm-hmm. Most of it is very good. The production is imperfect, but maybe it ought to be, I think I'd actually prefer it right now to listen to Mind Games than Imagine, which is a little too polished.Two precious or self-conscious or even pretentious. And then there's the nasty bits about Paul. Hmm. Um, so any, you know, Meat City would be one. I know that, you know, but almost everything on mind games is quite good and it's not that well known other than the mind game song.Evan Goldfine: Right. That mind game song is, is terrific.I'll, I'll play but a veryTyler Cowen: deep cut. This one, I [00:26:00] don't know if it's from Solo Lennon, the Beatles, but John with only acoustic guitar doing Rock Island Line for about two minutes.Evan Goldfine: Was that on one of the anthology albums? It might have been,Tyler Cowen: I don't think so. I own it on an LP that I acquired maybe 40 years ago, and I still have it and it blows me away.Just the Lennon voice killer.Evan Goldfine: I'll try to find it on YouTube and link it to everybody. Try to find it. Yeah, that might take me a little bit. Uh, I would go with, uh, Every Night for Paul McCartney off the first, uh, McCartney album, which I think is just a beautiful little tune.Tyler Cowen: I agree. But is that a deep cut?To me, that's quite famous. You know, the second live version or just the deeper background chorus. In some ways I like that even more. Yeah.Evan Goldfine: I love that first Al. I mean, it's, it's so janky, but it's very lovable that the very first album, it'sTyler Cowen: a fantasticalbum. Yeah. A shame that it was so panned at the time.Evan Goldfine: What was, what is the greatest classical song cycle, [00:27:00]Tyler Cowen: I suppose Die Wintereisse, there's a lot by Brahms, but as a cycle, I'll say. Yeah. Die WintereisseEvan Goldfine: that's fair.Tyler Cowen: Clear first.Evan Goldfine: Yeah. I, I'm more charmed by, uh, Schumann's Frauenliebe und Leben.Tyler Cowen: That's quite good. Yeah.Evan Goldfine: I, I just find myself listening to those. I, I just, I, I love those guys.But, um, yeah, I think in terms of the artistic depth, I would agree with Wintereisse. Uh, question for you, crossword puzzles, waste of time, are they engaging for you?Tyler Cowen: I don't do them. I did them for about nine months in high school. Probably it was good for me. I learned things. If people just keep on doing them throughout their lives, um, I don't know.I guess it makes them happy. Probably they're not that ambitious in some big way or they're super ambitious and that's their relaxation. It's a portfolio question,Evan Goldfine: Ifeel like I wanna be told,Tyler Cowen: take care of it.Evan Goldfine: I feel like I wanna be told to stop [00:28:00] doing them 'cause they're a waste of time. But I'll, I'll take that as a, as an endorsement.Um, okay. So tell me, besides, and you've talked about the risks of, of war, what financial systemic risks are you most concerned about right now?Tyler Cowen: Well, in the very short run, I'm not that worried, but if you mean the next five years, uh, the fact that the banking system in the US in relative terms keeps on shrinking.It means that more and more is outside the deposit insurance umbrealla.Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm.Tyler Cowen: And things like private equity, which in this very moment really does seem well capitalized enough that I'm not worried. But over time there just are so many loose pieces with maturity mismatches and people will game those things off balance sheet or mm-hmm.Just take undue risks and I think it will lead to another financial crisis. I, I have no prediction. WhenEvan Goldfine: is it okay if they're not heavily levered?Tyler Cowen: You know, every institution has implicit leverage, and if you don't understand the implicit leverage in the institution you're thinking [00:29:00] about, I would say you don't understand the institution.Evan Goldfine: Hmm.Tyler Cowen: So, yeah, right now they're not heavily levered. And again, it's fine. It's not gonna happen next week, but at the end of the day, it's a question of how long will it take before people forget the past. And there, I just don't know.Evan Goldfine: Keeps happening.Tyler Cowen: Keeps happening.Evan Goldfine: Let's say you're, I throw you into the seat of the Secretary of the Treasury and you have a very powerful executive branch.What are the two or three things you'd wanna do first?Tyler Cowen: Well, if I don't control Congress, I don't have a lot of power, but I think we need to restructure the trajectories of entitlements. First of all, Medicare, there were just some Medicaid cuts in the so-called big beautiful bill.Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm.Tyler Cowen: I would start with that and apply something Doge like to Medicare Advantage and to the Pentagon and to a lot of unnecessary surgeries that we pay a lot of money for.But that all requires Congress. So if I'm just a treasury, uh, I don't know, I guess I'd, uh, [00:30:00] sell my memoirs.Evan Goldfine: Sounds good. Uh, give me a few other Bach recordings that are, uh, you, you frequently put on, uh, that have stayed with you for the years.Tyler Cowen: Well, you could name a piece like, you know, there's these two new recordings.The guy's last name is Zimmerman of the violin sonatas and partitas, some of Bach's Greatest Works. Mm-hmm. For me and his account is incredible and there's an Italian Fabio Biondi, I think his came out the year before, but quite recent. Again, the solo violin works, those are amazing.Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm.Tyler Cowen: My classic favorite.I bet you'll say the same, but Nathan Milstein.Evan Goldfine: Sure.Tyler Cowen: Then if someone like wants to give you a hard time, they're like, which are the three versions? But actually there's four. Do you know the first mono one? I think it's the second. That's the classic best one, but you'd have to check on that. Mm-hmm. But the famous Deutsche Gramophone, Nathan Milstein is, is where you would go.But these new recordings are just as good, and I like to just keep on buying [00:31:00] recordings of the solo violin works.Evan Goldfine: They're the best. SoTyler Cowen: those would be some picks, but you could try naming something maybe. I just won't know.Evan Goldfine: Tell me about Well, you, you tend to, I'd say like. When I know, I know you like the, the conducting of David Robertson and, uh, Masaki Suzuki, and, um, you know, and Boulez, these are sort of more crystalline and clear, um, conductors and performers and a little less maybe, um, playing with the tempo, stretching things out.They're, they're sort of, uh, on the beat, I would say. Sure. Do you, do you find, do you find that that characterization is true?Tyler Cowen: I agree with the characterization, uh, if there is a beat, uh, in the case of Robertson, but my favorite conductor of all time is Otto Klemperer, and he definitely stretches things out.Evan Goldfine: Yeah.Tyler Cowen: And he understood all music in an amazing way, and he actually lived in some version of the society that produced it, which I suspect is [00:32:00] essential and really cannot be replicated. So his Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, everything. Wagner. Bruckner, just incredible.Evan Goldfine: Yeah.Tyler Cowen: And he must have been such a mind, and unlike some great conductors.There's no soiled spots on his record, so to speak.Evan Goldfine: Yeah. When I was choosing who to feature on my blog, who do I wanna listen to? You know, I have Apple Music open, there's 50 different versions of of each piece. I still. Chose some Nazis. You know, like I will, Wilhelm Backhaus has an amazing Bach album, and he, he dined with the fuhrer and, you know, uh, even though his, there's an asterisk next to his name, we have his record and it's compli.I know Karajan had a real big career for his, you know, for 40 years after the, after World War ii, maybe 50 yearsTyler Cowen: more. Yeah. Yeah. Well, do you know what's the best recording of Beethoven's ninth?Evan Goldfine: I am. Some people would say Leonard [00:33:00] Bernstein after the Berlin Wall fell.Tyler Cowen: No. I mean I wish it were, but Wilhelm Furtwangler Hitler's birthday in 1942.Mm-hmm. Did it live? And that just so crackles and I feel guilty listening to it.Evan Goldfine: Yeah.Tyler Cowen: But I do think it's clearly the best.Evan Goldfine: It's tough.Tyler Cowen: It's tough. I know Klemperer is one of the best. Speaking of Bernstein, obviously you can side with. The recent Minnesota Orchestra, recording of the ninth, oddly enough, is one of the very best, I think.Mm-hmm. But Furtwangler, the atmosphere there was something there.Evan Goldfine: So you're, you're feeling that it's a live recording, so you're feeling the audience, you're, you're along with themTyler Cowen: and look Hitler's watching, so you can bet they rehearsed. A lot.Evan Goldfine: The audience too.Tyler Cowen: Nothing mattered.Incentives matter. You said that before.Evan Goldfine: Yes. What was the thing with Stalin who was gonna, uh, clap? Who was gonna stop clapping first? That there was gonna be no one who was gonna do it? Uh, after the, uh, yeah. [00:34:00] Uh, what else? Tyler?Tyler Cowen: Well, the cello sweets.I don't think you've ever written one of yourEvan Goldfine: I did.Tyler Cowen: I tell me. ThenEvan Goldfine: I featured Rostropovich, uh, who? I, okay. ThatTyler Cowen: might be my top. That's a very, very good one.Evan Goldfine: Yep. I, I think Yo-yo MA's first set as excellent. Uh, I like Alisa Weilerstein, who's a contemporary, uh, player. She's fantastic. What else, uh, comes and, you know, the originals from Casals I think are important to hear, but nothing that I, I will put on very often.How about you?Tyler Cowen: The Casals I find profound but painful. There's just too much scratching and the sound quality is poor. Yo-Yo Ma. I've heard do those live and that was amazing. A plus. But each of his recordings, I feel somehow does not project enough and I don't listen to them. I think I've only heard two, what's he done?Three or whatever.Evan Goldfine: I think he's three now,Tyler Cowen: but I don't love any of them. The Bylsma. I'm glad it was done. It's perfect in its own way, but it's not what I want. The early Janos Starker, [00:35:00] and he has two recordings of the Bach, but the later stereo one, uh, Heinrich Schiff is quite good. But, uh, Queyras, Q-U-E-Y-R-A-S, who now has two recordings.The first one is incredible for me. It's the main rival to Rostropovich. Uh, the second one I don't like at all. But try that one. Do you know it at all?Evan Goldfine: I don't. I'll have to listen to that.Tyler Cowen: I think he's a Basque. He's from Spain. Uh, very, very impressive. But there's a lot of great recordings of the cello suites.Evan Goldfine: I'll pitch two, also adapted one for Viola from Kim Kashkashian on ECM records.Tyler Cowen: Yes, yes.Evan Goldfine: Excellent. And very unusual record. Um, the, the. The timbre of the viola is just shocking when you know those agree pieces really well. Also, one of the thing that's cool about that album is that it starts with the second cello suite.So, you know, you normally get do, do do do do, do, do, do. And that's not how the record starts. You're just thrown in. You're, you're out of order. So [00:36:00] already you're off kilter. So I recommend that one. And also Edgar Meyer, the bass, uh, the Acoustic Bassist, uh, great at Bluegrass also has a really lovely album of the Cello Suites adapted for, uh, acoustic bass.Tyler Cowen: Yes. That's good. There's another good viola version, but I can't remember who did it. Not a very famous person, but Excellent.Evan Goldfine: Yeah,Tyler Cowen: and as we said before, they work well for guitar.Evan Goldfine: Yeah. I just, uh, interviewed, uh, one of my favorite guitars named Jason Vieaux for this, uh, who's just fantastic and great to talk to about adapting, you know, 'cause these weren't arranged.They had, you have to move some of the things, uh, on instruments and you have to make some choices and sacrifices to adapt it to guitar. Um, and some people go overboard. And how mu how much or little do you play certain notes? Uh, it's a real hard form to be able to adapt to the six string.Tyler Cowen: My favorite Bach guitarist is the Uruguayan Eduardo Fernandez.Evan Goldfine: Hmm.I don't know him, and I've listened to a lot of these.Tyler Cowen: He's in his seventies [00:37:00] now. He hardly plays around anymore, but I've seen him live and there are recordings. He did all the lute suites. He's in general also excellent with 20th century music. Neither Segovia and Bream. I think for guitar. It's interesting, the very early recordings like Segovia and Bream, they've held up much better.Then say the very early cello recordings.Evan Goldfine: I agree.Tyler Cowen: Or violin recordings. Uh, I'm not sure why, but I think you, Segovia and Bream are still at the very top.Evan Goldfine: I think they were the two greatest instruments, uh, players of those instruments, uh, in, in that era. And they were both pioneers of that instrument. And I think that, you know, in some ways the people who started at the beginning of the recorded music era were thrown there and we don't know what the, the great, um.Violinists and cellist of the 19th century sounded like maybe they were, you know, much better than the people who happened to have started recording in the 1940s.Tyler Cowen: So I think mostly [00:38:00] they were worse. We can talk about this in a moment, but maybe with Segovia and Bream, it's that contact with the earlier world.Realizing, 'cause you're growing up when things like Debussy, Satie are still new. So there's some way in which all guitar music ought to be kind of acoustic, ambient, almost like Brian Eno. And they understood that intuitively. And the fellow you mentioned, you know, V-I-E-A-U-X, how do you pronounce it?Evan Goldfine: Vieaux.Tyler Cowen: He's technically great, but I don't feel he gets that.It's too straight laced for me.Evan Goldfine: Hmm.Tyler Cowen: Uh, and Fernandez is a bit closer to the earlier tradition. Just as Uruguayan culture is still a bit like, you know, in Buenos Aires and early 20th century European culture, but here's why I think the, the early players are mostly worse though, exciting. We do have a lot of recordings from the transitional era.Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm.Tyler Cowen: So there's like Sauer playing the piano Rosenthal, you know, so many people and I love [00:39:00] hearing them once or twice, but I just don't think they're the best even for Liszt.Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm. Rachmaninoff is not my favorite Rachmaninoff player.Tyler Cowen: No, he's quite good, I think, and more even keeled than you might have been expecting, but I agree.Not my favorite.Evan Goldfine: Yeah. Yeah. Well, one of the, one of the questions that came up on your post asking what to ask you today was asking about were there many of these great artists on the level of Bach that we might not know about, uh, in the past, and maybe they just hit an era where they're not known.Maybe not in classical music because that's sort of risen to the top, but in, in other genres, do you think that we may have missed some folks?Tyler Cowen: Well, certainly in wor it's called world Music. So if you look at pygmy vocal music, which is incredible, I don't think you would attribute it to individual composers.But the people who make it, we, you could say, we still dunno who they are.Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm.Tyler Cowen: So in earlier times there must have been many musics like that. [00:40:00] Probably mostly collective mm-hmm. That are simply vanished and were amazing.Evan Goldfine: Yeah.Tyler Cowen: But the instrumentation will be limited. I, I don't know. I, I don't feel there's so much lost in a way.Evan Goldfine: I feel like we're really blessed.Tyler Cowen: Yeah. And this, you know, what little we know of. Very early Medieval Roman, ancient Greek music, it might just not have been that good, is my sense.Evan Goldfine: Hmm.Tyler Cowen: And, uh, they didn't know it wasn't that good.Evan Goldfine: How could they,Tyler Cowen: because they didn't have Bob Dylan or whatever. Uh, just the different pieces you need to produce a Bob Dylan.When you think about it, it places quite a burden on those earlier eras.Evan Goldfine: Could you speak, I, I know you've written about this, about how economic growth and capitalism have led to the innovations that have led to the shifts in music, uh, that we've heard .Tyler Cowen: when I go to concerts today, it just strikes me what a remarkable technological innovation [00:41:00] the acoustic symphony orchestra is. It's so loud. The pieces all fit together. A symphony is amazing. It just all works and it's perfect. And the main what it is, I mean, you can debate exactly when it when it was in place, but arguably middle of the 18th century, certainly by the early 19th century.And it's actually one of mankind's greatest technological achievements. Forget about liking the music. And that all had to gel so many pieces, you know, from these networks coming together. So, uh, without that, I mean, you don't have a Beethoven, Brahms, or whatever people did later. Bach himself was kind of always hoping for better technology and keyboards improved a lot throughout his lifetime.Mm-hmm. He tried to improve orchestra as he had his own Collegium, you know, Music, uh, Beethoven's always frustrated with the quality of his pianos. He wants bigger, better, more resonant sound. So technology really [00:42:00] matters. In the 20th century, it's more obvious like electric guitar. You also can have larger arenas that brings in more money, supports people in other ways.The recording studio in the 1990s, well even eighties, you know, digital music in different ways. So yeah, technology is central to all of this,Evan Goldfine: and even downstream from that, the technology allows us to be able to speak today and become connoisseurs of these uh, artists. And hopefully some of the people listening today will start clicking on.The recordings that we've spoken to, which helps put more money into the system and maybe encourages some people to go and, uh, create more network effects by putting more money into artistic performances.Tyler Cowen: I do feel that right now there's something broken in the money loop. Mm-hmm. I think Ted Gioia is too pessimistic, but he does have a point that what you earn per stream is so low.Evan Goldfine: Yes.Tyler Cowen: So you and I talk about someone, someone goes to YouTube, to Spotify, that click is worth [00:43:00] almost nothing. Now, you might think they're more likely to see that person play live. I'm not sure that's the case. It's clearly the case in popular music.Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm.Tyler Cowen: Uh, I don't think it's the case with performers of classical music.Most people are going to hear pieces, or they're going to venues they know. They're not, the marginal listener is not usually going to hear the performer unless it's someone like a Yuja Wang mm-hmm. Where it's celebrity value. And you and I saying, oh, I loved her four-hand Stravinsky Rite of Spring piano, whatever that she did.That's not what gets people to go. It's the fact that she's a celebrity and she's excellent.Evan Goldfine: Right.Tyler Cowen: So I, I worry that the marginal incentives right now are in a somewhat bad place, but I, I don't know how to fix it?Evan Goldfine: What if we're pitching to the curators of these institutions, you and I, that,Tyler Cowen: that would be wonderful,but I'm not sure we are.Or maybe to the donors. Right?Evan Goldfine: Right.Tyler Cowen: So someone you know, calls up the local symphony orchestra, well, I'll put up $50,000 if you have Volodos [00:44:00] in to play Bach and, Brahms, and Schubert. And then it happens. It's not that big a donation, but someone has to pay the fee. They probably just couldn't afford it flat out, and then the donor gets to have dinner with the guy.Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm. Sounds I. Say it again.Tyler Cowen: Let's hope.Evan Goldfine: Let's hope. That would be great.Tyler Cowen: Yeah.Evan Goldfine: Tyler, uh, I'm gonna wrap it up here and thank you again for your insights. Uh, you can find Tyler all over the internet. Go to Marginal Revolution, go to Emergent Ventures, go to the Free Press. Tyler, thank you again and, uh, we'll be posting this soon.Tyler Cowen: My pleasure, Evan, and I would just repeat, I think Bach is one of the greatest humans and human creators of all time. And whatever you're doing with him, with the podcast and writings, keep it up.It's, in my view, something very, very important.Evan Goldfine: There's so many fan casts of different sorts of pop people. Why not the greatest artist of all time?Tyler Cowen: Exactly.Evan Goldfine: Thank you again.Tyler Cowen: Bye. This is a public episode. 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