The CSO’s 90th summer residency at Ravinia closes with an all-Tchaikovsky evening — cannons, a soloist finding her footing, and a conductor who once applied here as a cellist.

The Cinderella story long predates Disney — Charles Perrault wrote it in 1697, the Brothers Grimm in 1812, and Rossini turned it into an opera (La Cenerentola) in 1817. Prokofiev was commissioned by the Bolshoi to compose the ballet, and worked on it between 1940 and 1944, through the war years, in something close to exile from the international career he’d built before returning to the Soviet Union. The score premiered at the Bolshoi in 1945. It’s one of the great ballet scores — genuinely romantic in the waltz themes, genuinely funny in the stepsisters (Prokofiev, like Saint-Saëns and Shostakovich, had a taste for musical caricature), and genuinely terrifying in the midnight scene, where the clock strikes twelve and the harmony collapses under Cinderella’s feet. ...

Saint-Saëns wrote three violin concertos, but only the Third (Op. 61, 1880) is taken seriously, and even that is rarely programmed. What survives in the active repertoire are the two shorter showpieces: the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso (Op. 28, 1863) and the Havanaise (Op. 83, 1887). Both were written for Pablo de Sarasate, the Spanish violin virtuoso who had a way of inspiring composers to write things that sounded brilliant and felt effortless — then turned out to be extremely difficult. ...

Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) is one of the strangest cases of posthumous reputation in classical music. He was, in his lifetime, considered one of the finest musical minds in France — a child prodigy who reportedly offered at his debut to play any of Beethoven’s 32 sonatas from memory as an encore, a composer of five piano concertos, three symphonies, thirteen operas, and the Organ Symphony. By any reasonable measure, he was on track to be remembered alongside Beethoven and Brahms — a name in the permanent canon, a bust in the conservatory hallway. ...

Saint-Saëns’ Ascanio premiered at the Paris Opéra in March 1890 — a grand opera in five acts set at the court of François I, following the Florentine sculptor Benvenuto Cellini and his apprentice Ascanio through courtly intrigue, a king’s possessive mistress, and a girl hidden in a reliquary to escape a forced marriage. The opera is rarely staged today. What survives in regular repertoire are the ballet movements Saint-Saëns later transcribed for flute and piano. ...

Journal of Periodic Econophonics, Vol. 112, No. 4 Abstract. We derive from first principles the composition of the symphony orchestra. Under two regularity conditions — completeness of the phonographic record and a standard no-arbitrage condition on audibility — we prove that the orchestra consists of tubas, bassoons, and contrabasses, and that this equilibrium is unique. The proof is three lines. Claims of a “violin section,” widespread in the popular press, are shown to be inconsistent with the data. ...

Chamberlin showed that monopolistic competition inherently leads firms to operate with unused plant capacity in the long run. In monopolistic competition each firm has a downward-sloping demand curve. The only quantity that can be sustained in the long term is a quantity that yields the firm zero profit. This is where Price = Average Cost. We would find and analyze this equilibrium quantity. Chamberlin assumed the cost function contigent on quantity $c(Q)$ is convex — in fact, he would assume something stronger: average cost $c(Q)/Q$ is convex and U-shaped. (NOTE: $c(Q)$ convex $\not\to c(Q)/Q$, think $c(Q) = Q^{3/2}$.) ...

This business model was prevalent in China but it also reminds me of big sugary cookies… 快招 (kuài zhāo) = short for 快速招商, “fast franchise recruitment.” A Chinese industry term for companies whose actual product is selling franchise contracts, not running a business. The brand is the bait; franchisees are the customers. The pipeline is like this: First the schemers manufacture a brand — usually in a treding consumer facing category (bubble milk tea, BBQ etc), register a brand name, often a near clone of a real hit (茶颜观色 vs 茶颜悦色). Then the schemers will fake a popularity proof — by opening one or two showcase stores run at a loss with paid queues and fake “already 500 stores nationwide,” bought media placements and awards etc. They would also buy online ’leads’ like TikTok feeds, franchise-listing portals, trade expos. Then the scheme begin — the schemers would sell ‘franchise’ opportunities to uninformed ppl. They will do FOMO marketing like “it’s the last slot in your district”, fee waived if you sign today, non-refundable deposit taken on the spot, no time to think or verify. Extraction — franchise fee (¥30k–300k), deposit, plus marked-up equipment, décor, and mandatory supplies. This is the entire revenue model. Abandon and reshell — no real operational support; the store dies in 3–12 months. The brand entity is dissolved and a new brand launches. One operator often cycles dozens of brands in parallel. The key difference is, legitimate franchising earns from royalties, so the franchisor needs your store to survive. But this kind of fake franchise earns entirely up front through franchise fee and selling marked-up equipment and supplies, so the store’s later failure cose them nothing. ...

Usually I would prefer referring to any piece its legitimate academic catalogue (eg. the No. 2 Scherzo from Mendelssohn’s Op. 61). But Shostakovich composed inventive scores for roughly 35 feature films across his life, starting as a silent-film pianist in Leningrad — which means a lot of his work is scatterly film music and impossible to catalogue. Shostakovich originally composed what has become known as the Waltz No. 2 in 1955-56 for his score (Op. 99) for the film The First Echelon (Pervyi eshelon), directed by Mikhail Kalatozov, which had its premiere on April 29, 1956. The waltz was also included in the Suite from The First Echelon (Op. 99a) arranged by Shostakovich and Levon Atovmyan in 1956. ...

Huh? Is the iPhone Birth Control? Causal Evidence from AT&T’s 2007–2011 Carrier Monopoly Caitlin K. Myers & Ezekiel Hooper. DOI 10.3386/w35310 The U.S. general fertility rate has fallen by 22% since 2007, a sustained decline not readily explained by economic conditions, contraceptive use, housing or childcare costs, or other commonly cited factors. We assess the potential role of a different shock: the diffusion of the smartphone. The U.S. rollout of the iPhone, the first modern smartphone, provides a natural experiment: from June 2007 through February 2011, the device was sold only on AT&T, allowing us to identify its effect from variation in AT&T’s mobile broadband coverage. Entropy-balanced Poisson and synthetic difference-in-differences event studies imply that access to the iPhone reduced births by 4.5–8.0% at ages 15–19 and 3.2–6.6% at ages 20–24, with statistically significant but smaller declines among older cohorts. Placebo analyses applied to Verizon and Sprint’s pre-2011 coverage footprint are null. Taken together, these cohort effects imply that the diffusion of the iPhone deepened the decline in births among women under 30 while suppressing the rise in births among older women. Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33–52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15–44. National-survey evidence on time use and sexual behavior is consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use, and reducing sexual frequency. ...