Digital Media and the Decline of Curiosity

Something that has puzzled me for many years is why so many people show so little curiosity about things. I've been thinking that this just sticks out for me because curiosity is a ruling passion of mine. But it has occurred to me that there might be another explanation. My biography is a bit unusual: from birth up until I was twenty years old I lived in an environment that was, from an intellectual and cultural point of view, severely impoverished. I lived on homesteads or in very small towns (pop. circa 800) until I was fifteen, then we moved to a town of fewer than 4000 people. The first time I was in a genuinely rich environment was when I was twenty and went to university where there was a good library boasting around a million volumes. Plus, there was a pretty extensive listening library.

But the point is that up to that time, I lived in an environment where there were no bookstores, just one radio station, one tv station (CBC, and that not until I was nine years old), and one tiny library with, at most, a couple of thousand books. Contrast that with today when virtually every child grows up with the Internet, which is the equivalent of huge numbers of radio and television stations, not to mention an online library of incalculable size. Children now live in a hypercharged information environment.

I suspect that the result of this is a profound lack of curiosity. In fact, what is needed, for simple self-protection, is an active disinterest in most of what you see and hear. You need to protect yourself with cynicism and irony. There is a charming little text symbol for this: tl;dr which means "too long; didn't read". But in my formative years, I was intellectually deprived. Anything I ran across that showed any signs of real intellectual or cultural substance I fell on like a starving man on a tasty meal!

I retain this curiosity to this day. Mind you, I have learned to avoid all forms of broadcast entertainment such as radio and television and only use the Internet because I can control how I encounter the constant flood of information.

I can remember how I cherished the few old, scratchy LPs of classical music I borrowed from a friend in my late teens. They were precious partly because they were few... To this day, whenever I hear the "Unfinished" Symphony of Schubert, I imagine the ghostly ticks and scratchy hiss from the old LP I used to have.

Here is an interesting article that looks at the issue from a different angle: how digital distribution has increased the sheer quantity of scientific error:

Fraud (the principal cause of retractions, which are up roughly tenfold since 1975)  is not a new phenomenon, but digital manipulation and distribution tools have increased the spread and impact of science, both faulty and legitimate, beyond the confines of the ivory tower.

Classical music, like any other manifestation of high culture, needs context, background, exposure to some history. It does not reveal itself on first hearing, like a pop song. Sure, there are pop songs that reveal much more on repeated listenings, but few of them are designed that way--they are meant to make their impact immediately.

To really get into classical music, or Japanese woodcuts, or Russian novels or any other kind of high culture, you need some curiosity. You need to explore a bit, ask some questions.

I've used the phrase "high culture" twice now, which is sure to make some folks squirm. In the name of 'diversity' and 'multiculturalism' all cultures are deemed to be equal so there can't be any such thing as high culture or low culture. It's all just one glorious spectrum of wonderfulness. Ke$ha and Beethoven are on a par aesthetically. Whoops, I used another forbidden word, "aesthetically". As that might lead to implying differences in quality, we really don't want to talk about aesthetics any more.

Sorry for this meandering muttering, but I don't have the energy to do a big analytical post this morning. I just completed 8000 words of program notes for our upcoming chamber music festival. All I really want to do is sit down and listen to a new CD I just got. The complete Beethoven string quartets by the Emerson Quartet. It has just been re-issued in a bargain format for only $24.78 so I couldn't resist.

Well heck, let's listen to the Emerson boys play some Beethoven. Here is the minuet and trio from the Quartet in A major, op. 18 no. 5:

Orchestra on the Dole

Norman Lebrecht has an interesting piece this morning about the Madrid Radio Orchestra:

From Orquesta Sinfónica y Coro de RTVE:
We are an orchestra and choir dependent on the national public radio and television, which proposed, as part of new contract negotiations, that we work for eight months a year and go on unemployment four months of each year. This is an unprecedented measure in Spain and the public opinion and our audience have felt so outraged that since it was announced there were spontaneous chants in our support,”publica” meaning “public”-as in “we want public, state supported culture”.

This reminds me of a couple of things. Back when I lived in Canada, I remember that sometimes artists who were able to get unemployment benefits, known as UIC for Unemployment Insurance Commission (if I recall correctly), now known as EI, would refer to them as a "UIC Cultural Grant". They would use the weekly check to support themselves while pursuing artistic endeavours.

It also reminds me that some Canadian orchestras simply do not pay players during the off season. I walked into a 7-11 (a 24 hour convenience store) once and saw the principal cellist of the orchestra working behind the counter. For him, being able to collect unemployment would be an improvement!

But what is truly odd here, unless there are some important facts being unreported, is that unemployment benefits come out of the same public funds as arts subsidies, do they not? It might be a different department, ministry of culture rather than ministry of labor, but it all comes from the same taxpayers, so economically there is no difference. Chanting that they want public, state-supported culture seems rather redundant when paying unemployment benefits to the orchestra members is certainly supporting them with state funds.

What seems obvious about our current system of support for the arts is that it is coercive in a way that the private patronage systems of the pre-welfare state were not. What am I saying? Now, state-supported culture means that all taxpayers are forced to pay for things they may not like or may be personally opposed to. Under private patronage, such as was practiced in Europe from the Middle Ages to the late 19th century, this never happened. A group of nobles got together to guarantee a stipend to Beethoven. The inhabitants of the city of Vienna were not assessed a tax for this purpose.

The chamber music society that I am part of relies on no government subsidy, but only private patronage. This is preferable here because government support is notoriously unreliable and those arts groups that rely on it tend to disappear as soon as the funding does. Our group has presented concerts for decades with private patronage alone.

Now, let's listen to some music. Here is the Madrid Radio Orchestra with an excerpt from the Verdi Requiem:

"Listening Habits Have Changed"

The BBC just did a little piece on the Cleveland Orchestra's new initiative to build audiences. Here is the link.

Audiences for classical music across the US have declined in recent years because people's listening habits have changed.

It is often easier and cheaper to experience great orchestras online and while older music lovers might shudder at the idea, research shows that most Americans under the age of 30 actually prefer it.

But Cleveland, Ohio, boasts one of the world's top orchestras and rather than accept the empty seats at Severance Hall, the musicians decided to seek out new audiences in an unlikely venue.

The BBC's Jane O'Brien went to a Cleveland neighbourhood and listened to Schubert and Beethoven in a very different environment.

It seems like a nice, happy story. Orchestra takes creative steps to reach out to people who are unused to classical music and gets new subscribers. At the end of the story there is the usual genuflection to the general economy and how the arts, specifically music, can stimulate it.

But all this makes me uneasy. I played my first 'gig' when I was sixteen in a tiny little dance hall. As I recall we made something like $6.75 at the door. I was lucky enough that my career eventually took me to some grand concert halls like the Orpheum in Vancouver, the Wienersaal at the "Mozarteum" in Salzburg and Wigmore Hall in London: some of the most beautiful and famous halls in the world. I really don't have much desire to go back and play in a bar again. The BBC piece presents it in the best possible way and perhaps it was an excellent experience. There is something very stimulating about knowing that the people listening are there just for the music and not because of the social cachet.

But I'm still uneasy because one of two things might be going on here. First, as the BBC avers, a drop in audience subscriptions might be improved by some creative seeking out of new audience members. In other words, it might be temporary. I doubt this is the case. I think the writing has been on the wall for a long time. Popular music in all its various forms has been the dominant force in music since at least the 60s and this is not going to turn around. People are unfamiliar with classical music because there is less and less opportunity to encounter it. For example, music education programs have been trimmed down more and more over the years. Here is a newspaper story from a couple of weeks ago about cuts to music programs in Toronto.

We still have a lot of cultural and physical infrastructure from the middle of the last century and before, but the trend is for this to erode, I believe. A world-class orchestra like the one in Cleveland having to do bar gigs to scare up a few more subscribers is not good news no matter how you spin it. It might seem like a 'cool' idea to get out of that stuffy concert hall, but bars are just not ideal places for classical music: the layout of the room is rarely conducive to good sight lines or good acoustics, people are going to be chatting instead of listening and unless you stop serving, there will be the clinking of glasses. A lot of this can be overcome, and the idea of going to the audience is still appealing, but concert halls are designed the way they are to make them ideal places to hear music. The reasons why audiences are shrinking, why people are avoiding concert halls are more fundamental than just "people's listening habits have changed."

That passive construction, all too similar to "mistakes were made", conceals, I think, what is actually going on. We are experiencing a profound cultural shift at the roots of our civilization. Would I be overstating the case to say that, if you are attuned to it, music is a barometer for civilization? Doesn't this music, in its exuberance and confidence, attest to the idealism and optimism of the Enlightenment?

The leaping, bounding effervescence of the theme when the allegro arrives captures the historical moment. Europe was on the verge of a magnificent century. After centuries of wars over religion, class and nationalism, the next century, from the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 was one of the greatest eras of peace in history. Under the auspices of the Pax Brittanica, there was progress and prosperity for a century. The Banquet Years, an excellent book by Roger Shattuck captures some of the flavor of the end of this era.

Something went horribly wrong in the first half of the 20th century with two World Wars. The finest young men of Britain died in the trenches and this destroyed the Pax Brittanica. Another excellent book, Goodbye To All That  by Robert Graves does a very good job of capturing that moment in history.

While we now enjoy the kind of prosperity and technical advance that previous generations would have marveled at--just take Skype for example!--I am still concerned that some crucial part of the culture has been crushed, shot away, simply disintegrated under the pressures of the events of the 20th century.

If we look at the characteristic music of our time as a barometer of the culture, it is hard to be optimistic. Instead of the glorious exuberance of the late 18th century we have this:

According to Canadian Business this is currently the biggest-selling song on iTunes. Yes, there is a kind of exuberance there, but to my ears it is mechanical, physical, somatic--a kind of barbarism. The never-ending pounding of the beat makes it unlistenable for me.

I could probably work out a theory of musical culture based simply on rhythmic elements, but since this is a blog, not a dissertation, I won't bother. But just compare these two pieces of music and ask yourself what they reveal.

There are those who argue that we are experiencing something like a Bizarro version of the Enlightenment: a Dark Enlightenment. Maybe that is what the music is telling us.

Vanity, It's All Vanity!

Funny how stories seem to come in clumps. I've just run across two stories that do not reflect well on the music business. Here is one, courtesy of Norman Lebrecht:

The composer Nathan Currier has been given a green light by the state supreme court to sue the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra for stopping the premiere of his evening-long oratorio before it finished. Currier, 53, had paid $72,000 for the performance of Gaian Variations, but at 10.45, with overtime looming at 11 pm, the orchestra stopped playing.

The composer wants his money back. The orch says that would cause them financial difficulties. Not the finest hour for either side.

Ok, the thing to note is not the lawsuit, but the fact that the Brooklyn Philharmonic were charging Mr. Currier $72,000 for playing his music. Now for the other story, this time courtesy of the Guardian. There is a bit of a backstory, but the basic facts are that a person with no training or experience in music has a dream in which he hears a whole symphony and becomes so wrapped up in it that he leaves his wife and moves to London to see if he can get it performed. Here is what happened:

One day I sat on a bench outside BBC Television Centre and a man stopped to chat. He was a musician called Anthony Wade and after I told him my story he listened to the very rough recording I'd made using a guitar I'd bought for 50p. He was amazed by it and told me that it could be magnificent if it was orchestrated, but that would take hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Uh-huh. Apart from the pricing, this is a pretty similar story. I could add one of my own. I had made a master recording and was looking for someone to distribute it. A company in Toronto agreed, but said that they needed $5000 up front for production costs. I foolishly agreed and of course, they did not fulfill their contract and there was very little distribution and marketing. Years later they made the mistake of putting some tracks from my album on a compilation CD and I sued them for breach of copyright (which had reverted to me). They settled out of court for $5000.

I think you might be getting the idea? If you are not wise in the ways of the music business, DO NOT agree to pay someone a significant sum of money to perform or record or orchestrate your work. If it is worth while musically, sooner or later someone will want to perform/record/orchestrate it. Though my feeling is that if you can't orchestrate your own music, you should really learn how.

It's that story about sitting on the bench and some musician happening along and saying it would cost "hundreds of thousands of pounds" to orchestrate it that really outraged me. Unless we are talking about Gurre-Lieder or a five-hour opera, that is just ridiculous. First of all, do your own orchestration. If you can't then I have serious doubts about whether you have written anything worth the trouble. Second, for "hundreds of thousands of pounds" you could commission just about any composer to write a whole lot of pieces. Classical composers work pretty cheap these days. As an example, here are the commissioning rates from the Canadian League of Composers:

Schedule of Minimum Commissioning Fees The fees indicated are the CLC's suggested minimum rates, effective January 1, 2013 *Please note that rates were raised on January 1, 2013 from previous rates. I Chamber Ensembles Fee per minute One or two $425 Three or four $475 Five to Eight $535 Nine to Fifteen $615 II Orchestra Fee per minute Chamber orchestra up to 15 parts $615 Orchestra over 15 parts $790 III Chorus Fee per minute A cappella (or with piano) up to seven parts $475 A cappella (or with piano) eight parts or more $535 With instrumental ensemble (up to eight performers) $560 With chamber orchestra (over nine to fifteen performers) $615 With full orchestra (over 15 parts) $790 IV Electroacoustic Music per minute Plus studio rental unless provided $560 For the addition of an electronic part or tape to an ensemble add to the rate $145 to the appropriate rate

Hilariously inexpensive, isn't it? This means that you could commission pretty well any Canadian composer to write a 30 minute piece for large orchestra for-----wait for it----$23,700 Canadian, which is pretty much equal to US dollars these days. That's thirty minutes at $790 a minute. Hundreds of thousands of pounds? Hey, I have a bridge in Brooklyn (oddly enough) I could get for you really cheap!

Well, let's listen to Mr. Sharp's symphony:

Was that what you expected? It was certainly better than I expected. It does tend to sound too much like movie music for my taste, but it shows that some strange things can happen in the music world. Of course what we are really dealing with here is the back story: dead child, leaving everything behind, life on the streets, finally ultimate triumph. It's a book! The symphony is not so much a piece of music as the symbol of a human triumph. How genuine is it? Perhaps as genuine as the unnamed "musical experts" who attest that the symphony is a work of genius. It pretty much has to be to make the story come out right, doesn't it?

UPDATE: Here is a crazy comparison for you. This painting by Jackson Pollock sold for $140 million dollars:

Now sure, it's really nifty, but how would you compare the creativity and craftsmanship involved in creating it with the creativity and craftsmanship involved in creating a large-scale work for orchestra? More? Less? Similar? It just seems very, very peculiar to me that a large piece for orchestra is valued at $23,700 and this painting at $140 million.

Top Ten Myths About Classical Music

1. Classical music is just for stuffy, rich people.

It certainly has that reputation in some circles. I think that the ultimate source of this is found in music history. For a long time the main supporters and consumers of classical music were the church and the aristocracy. This started to break down with the French Revolution when they guillotined the nobles and burned the harpsichords. All through the 19th century it was the middle class that supported and consumed classical music. Nowadays the rich and powerful tend to look to major pop stars for their amusement. If President Obama is having a party, he calls up Beyoncé and Jay-Z, not Yo-Yo Ma.

2. Classical music is complicated and hard to understand.

There is certainly a grain of truth in this. In fact, the avant-garde throughout the 20th century went out of their way to create particularly difficult music. But it would be more accurate to say that some genres of classical music, such as much avant-garde music and serialism in particular, are very complex and difficult to appreciate. Going by the numbers, it is probably safe to say that 90% of classical music is charming and easy to listen to. Here is a good example: a Concerto for Two Violins by Vivaldi:

3. Classical music was all written by old white guys in wigs.

I'm stealing this from a Frank Zappa quote. He said something like all the good music was already written by white guys in wigs. He may or may not have been being ironic--with Frank it is sometimes hard to tell. There was certainly a lot of great music written during the 18th century by, yes, white guys in wigs. Here's one:

But there are a whole lot of composers who don't fit that description. The great medieval woman composer Hildegard von Bingen, for example. Here she is receiving divine inspiration:

And here is some of her music:

At the other end of classical music history is the young American composer Nico Muhly:

No wigs there. Here is a brief excerpt from his piece Gait, performed at the Proms in 2012:

4. You need to know a lot about music to understand classical music.

Again, there is a little grain of truth here. If you are going to be a classical musician you certainly need to know lots of stuff, but not to be a listener. The great majority of classical music was written to be enjoyed by ordinary people. What stands in the way of its appreciation these days is that we live in this peculiar musical environment where wherever we go we hear bad pop music blasted out at us from speakers. This tends to give us a strange baseline. When we hear some actual classical music it sounds "funny" or "boring" in comparison to what we are used to. So we think that we need to know lots of theory or something. Not true. You just need to give it a chance. Just listen to a few pieces and you will get used to it. Don't you think that pretty well everyone is going to be captivated and transported by something like this, the Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven?

5. "Chamber music is just soooo boring!"

This is an actual quote. I was walking through the plaza a few days before the local chamber music festival was about to being and overheard this. Someone was trying to talk their friend into attending a concert and this was the response. It is probably often said of classical music in general. But the image of staid old guys in tails playing a string quartet probably does evoke the idea of "boring music" in the minds of lots of people. Mind you, they have probably never heard the Kronos Quartet play Jimi Hendrix:

Or the Emerson Quartet play Shostakovich:

I rest my case!

6. In order for classical music to appeal to young people it needs to be more accessible.

This is really a bizarre myth! But it is one that is parroted over and over again in classical music circles. Some orchestras, like the Toronto Symphony, opt for a "casual" setting. Others offer free pizza and beer. This seems pretty accessible to me. Not to mention that virtually every piece of classical music is available for free on YouTube. Here is an excellent performance of all the Brandenburg concertos by Bach:

Or perhaps they mean "intellectually" or "aesthetically" accessible. There might be more to that. The juggernaut of pop music has run roughshod over the music world, wiping out everything that isn't pop. Classical music coverage has almost disappeared from the mass media. So most people are unfamiliar with classical music. But if they want to become familiar it is pretty easy. Most places have concert series and the Internet has just about everything you want to know. You can even find scores for a lot of music on the Internet here.

7. Classical music lost its moral authority after the Second World War and its popularity with the Nazis.

This is another bizarre myth, but one that is often heard in cultural circles. Alex Ross of The New Yorker seems fond of it. One odd fact that seems to support the idea is the association of classical music with villains in popular culture. One striking example is Hannibal Lector's love of the Goldberg Variations in Silence of the Lambs:

Or the use of the music of Beethoven in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange:

Why this urge to transgress by putting together sublime examples of classical music--the more sublime the better--with the most vicious acts of violence? Well, it is very transgressive and attention-getting and the sad truth is that many 'progressive' artists for the last hundred years have been doing little more than look for every possible occasion to crap on the best cultural traditions. Who better than Beethoven and Bach!

I also think I answered Alex Ross' argument in this post.

8. Classical musicians are all repressed and hung up and don't know how to groove with the beat.

If by this you mean "disciplined and organized and taking a subtle approach to rhythm and phrasing" then yes! Heh. This kind of critique usually comes from the jazz musicians who tend to resent classical musicians for being "legit", meaning slightly better paid than they are. Now, sure, some classical musicians might seem a tad neurotic, mostly oboists and violinists, but no-one could ever call brass players, especially trumpet players, repressed. There's that old joke, what do trumpet players use for birth control? Their personalities! Here are some classical musicians "grooving with the beat" in Eight Lines by Steve Reich:

9. Classical music is all about getting dressed up--it's just way too formal!

There is a tradition of formal dress for formal concerts. This is one that became standardized during the 19th century and still continues in more traditional contexts. The Vienna Philharmonic perform in white tie and tails:

A conductor friend of mine swears that white tie and tails is actually a lot more comfortable than it looks. But these days you are likely to see classical musicians dressed a lot less formally. Here is John Williams playing the Concierto de Aranjuez at the BBC Proms. As you can see, everyone is in summer garb. John Williams himself hasn't worn anything but a turtleneck to perform in for decades.

10. Classical concerts are awkward and uncomfortable because we never know when to clap!

Heh. There is that famous quartet by Haydn where he does everything he can to trick the audience into clapping early. There are, if I recall correctly, something like four false endings! But it is all in good fun:

Someone must have tipped them off, because nobody clapped too soon! Look, in the 18th and into the 19th century, audiences clapped whenever they wanted. If they really liked an aria at the opera, they clapped until the singer repeated it. As the 19th century wore on, the tradition of keeping very quiet in concerts grew more established. It's a simple idea: be quiet so we can all hear the music really clearly. The trouble is that classical music often comes in movements and it is considered best to wait until the last movement is over. But that means you have to keep track of the movements. Not a problem if there are only three or four, but what if there are seven movements? Well, it is pretty easy, really. It is the job of the performers to signal us when they are really done. I once saw a classical guitarist play a recital in a big hall. He had this little quirk of sort of throwing up his right hand at the end of every movement. The audience took this as a signal to clap--and why wouldn't they? So, just watch the players. If they stay motionless and focussed at the end of a movement, then don't clap. If they all throw up their bows and leap to their feet, then clap your heart out!

Hating Modern Music

I've just run across a cluster of articles about why people hate "contemporary classical music". I scare-quote the phrase because every time someone uses it people point out in the comments how it is a contradiction in terms. Well, the phrase "modern music" has problems too! I'm going to have to wax a bit philosophical and say we need to define some terms. Let's do it with history.

Bach didn't think of himself as writing "classical" music or "baroque" music either. He just thought of writing music for the church, or the cafe (some of his concertos were written to be performed in a cafe), or in a chamber music concert for the nobility or to test out an organ or whatever. Beethoven didn't think of himself as writing "classical" music either, just music.

The whole problem of categorizing or classifying music is really one of marketing, which means that it didn't come along until the 19th century when a huge middle class market for music opened up. As time went on symphonic, chamber and domestic music was joined by other categories: "folk" and "popular". Now we are beset by a host of genres from hip-hop to death metal to dance pop to alt country. So "classical" music, in whatever form, becomes just another genre and a niche genre at that! But in terms of history, "classical" music is central and the others, with the exception of genuine folk music, are spin-offs.

Now with that in mind, let's look at a couple of these articles. Here is one by Alex Ross, author of The Rest is Noise and classical music critic for The New Yorker. Here is the core of his argument:

The core problem is, I suspect, neither physiological nor sociological. Rather, modern composers have fallen victim to a long-smouldering indifference that is intimately linked to classical music's idolatrous relationship with the past. Even before 1900, people were attending concerts in the expectation that they would be massaged by the lovely sounds of bygone days. ("New works do not succeed in Leipzig," a critic said of the premiere of Brahms's First Piano Concerto in 1859.)

The music profession became focused on the manic polishing of a display of masterpieces.

What must fall away is the notion of classical music as a reliable conduit for consoling beauty – a kind of spa treatment for tired souls. Such an attitude undercuts not only 20th-century composers but also the classics it purports to cherish. Imagine Beethoven's rage if he had been told that one day his music would be piped into railway stations to calm commuters and drive away delinquents. Listeners who become accustomed to Berg and Ligeti will find new dimensions in Mozart and Beethoven. So, too, will performers. For too long, we have placed the classical masters in a gilded cage. It is time to let them out.

If Ross is ruling out the possibility of classical music offering a consoling beauty, then I think he is ruling out a very large part of its aesthetic value. Ross also pointed out that contemporary visual artists have been promoted in an completely different way, one that seems to have been very successful as their works sell for astonishingly large sums of money. The blogger A. C. Douglas of Sounds & Fury responded to Alex Ross here. Here is the central part of that response:

That perceived lack may be due a listener's untrained and/or unrefined musical sensibilities, but more often than not — far more often than not — it's due a real lack in the music itself; a music too often obsessed with sound and process per se rather than with musical ideas and their development in which sound and process are simply and properly naught but means to an end and the business of the composer exclusively and not of his music's listeners.

On hearing a new, wildly dissonant piece for the first time, a listener may be shocked initially by that dissonance, but will readily come to not only accept it, but embrace it if it's perceived as an inseparable organic element of a coherent, audibly perceptible musical narrative. That's why so much of, say, Bartók's wildly dissonant music is today part of the classical music canon, and why almost all of, say, Karlheinz Stockhausen's or Pierre Boulez's music will never be...

The third article is a bit different. It is in the form of a dialogue between someone who wants to understand contemporary music and her friend who is knowledgeable. Who is Jaime Green? Well, she is a writer, certainly, but at least half of her articles seem to be about food. Let's call her a "lifestyle" journalist. She goes to a concert of music by Gabriel Kahane, known for a song-cycle using texts from Craigslist, and finds herself not enjoying a lot of the more contemporary sounds in the concert. So she enlists the help of a supposedly knowledgeable friend to help her 'get' contemporary music. Her friend is not identified so we have little idea of his actual expertise. I suggest you go read the whole dialogue.

One of the first things that strikes me is how odd their discussion is. Here is Jaime's first question:

Jaime: There were two big questions I was left with after the performance: dissonance vs. lack of melody, and appreciation vs. enjoyment—or vs. effect. The first is sort of a terminology thing, a where-does-this-fit-in-the-world-of-music. The second is more about purpose.

Well, she calls them questions... Honestly, I hardly know what she is talking about. I'm sure she knows what melody is, so, ok, lack of melody bothered her. But does she know what dissonance is? Because I don't see what opposing these two very different things "dissonance vs. lack of melody" is about. What is the question? The second "question" is even more peculiar. What could she possibly mean by "appreciation vs. enjoyment"? How is it "about purpose"? So, if it were me, about all I could say to this would be "what do you mean exactly?" Her friend just moves on and asks if there were sections she enjoyed more and less. Later on the friend makes sort of an odd comment. After he says that it is perfectly ok for Jaime not to enjoy some kinds of music he says:

I think for several reasons contemporary classical music hasn't allowed listeners, or maybe invited listeners, to have that same sort of context that allows them to approach pieces with some confidence in their personal viewpoint.

Again, there is something rather odd about the way this is put. Is this an "under 35" thing that I couldn't possibly understand? Because it sounds to me that the implication here is that contemporary classical music has to treat its listeners with kid gloves. Hold their hands. Give them a context that somehow flatters their "personal viewpoint". So you grew up listening to Eminem and now you wander into a concert of Stravinsky or Gabriel Kahane and you just don't get it? It must be our fault, we in the classical music world. We didn't give you a context or something.

Look, there are quite a few young composers that are writing very consumable music these days and more power to them. Sometimes it is called "minimal" or "beat-oriented". But there are other composers that are a bit more difficult to "get". What I am missing in this whole discussion is the important concept that some things are easy and others more difficult. In order to get into the more difficult things you have to do some work. It is not necessarily the job of the artist to give you the context. Sometimes you have to give yourself the context. Is it absolutely beyond the pale to say to a young and inexperienced listener that she should pick up a book on music? Learn something and see if that helps? But no, from this discussion that would seem to be unheard of. No, it is all about the delicate sensibilities of the listener. What turns her on or off. OK, but that is the terminal point of the discussion. There is no sense that these sensibilities have been formed by a lifetime of a certain kind of listening and if you want to do a different kind of listening you have to prepare yourself.

How I approached music was first by listening a little bit, then learning to play a little bit, then reading a bit of history, then learning a bit of theory, then listening to more challenging music and so on. If you put very little into music, you might get very little out.

One thing that seems to hang over classical music like a spectre is its origins in music for the European aristocracy. Let me qualify that a bit: some of the older music--Gregorian chant, Medieval dance music--and newer music like virtuoso music of the 19th century, was not intended for the aristocracy in particular. But the core classical repertoire from the Renaissance into the 19th century was written for and enjoyed largely by the aristocracy. Which means that in our time, when cultural analysis based on class, race and gender is all-powerful, the main arbiters of culture are actually opposed to much classical music, or are at least made uneasy by it.

But the truth is that the aristocracy, judging by the music written for them, were a very aware group with highly developed aesthetic sensibilities. Let's listen to a piece written to be performed for one or two or at most several aristocratic listeners. Here is Hopkinson Smith playing music by "Le Vieux Gaultier":

I'm not sure that Jaime would 'get' this music either...

Chatting with Karlheinz

One summer in the late 1980s I spent studying at the "Mozarteum" in Salzburg, Austria. Probably the only music school in the world that is more famous than Julliard. I had a great time in the master class of Pepe Romero. Met a lot of interesting people like a soprano from Montreal, a flute-player from Prague and the most terrifying driver I have ever ridden with, a violinist from Poland.

Another delight was discovering that MacDonald's in Austria serves beer and that you can go up an alp in a gondola lift. I even saw these crazy guys who jump off the top of the mountain with special gliding parachutes.

Getting back to the music, Alfred Brendel was there doing all the Schubert sonatas, the Alban Berg Quartet were there doing all the Beethoven quartets--I had a wonderful opportunity to watch them rehearse. Witold Lutosławski was there conducting his violin concerto (I had actually met him previously on the occasion of a lecture he gave at McGill in the 1970s on aleatory and semi-aleatory music). Also there was Karlheinz Stockhausen who had brought his whole family/ensemble from Köln to do several concerts of his chamber music. All the music was performed from memory and I remember being charmed by the staging of it. One flute solo was rendered by a sylph-like player dressed as Robin Hood with a cute little hunting cap. Particularly noteworthy was her stretchy top, which was quite translucent. I had a very interesting conversation with Stockhausen afterwards about how well his music "travelled". In North America we tended not to get these kinds of performance subtleties. At that time we didn't get much opportunity to hear Stockhausen's music at all. He said that a mere recording of a piece like, say, Stimmung, was no more like an actual performance than a postcard is like an actual trip somewhere. After seeing their performances of his music live, I had to agree.

I think that the solo flute piece I heard in Salzburg was probably Amour, which I cannot find in YouTube. But here is a somewhat similar piece for solo flute, THINKI (1997):

Here is a recording of his piece for six vocalists, Stimmung (1968):

Gilles Trembley and Claude Vivier, both composers from Montréal, studied with Stockhausen. My composition teacher in Montréal used to say that Stockhausen was always five minutes ahead of what was fashionable, which is a neat trick if you can do it. That underlines one aspect of the 20th century avant-garde which is that it does tend to be a bit like the fashion industry. "Hey, this year let's all do electro-acoustic music."

I think that Stockhausen was a master of the business of being a composer in the 20th century. He was intimately involved in the process of publishing and presenting his music--much more than most composers. This is from Wikipedia:

From the mid-1950s onward, Stockhausen designed (and in some cases had had printed) his own musical scores for his publisher, Universal Edition, which often involved unconventional devices. The score for his piece Refrain, for instance, includes a rotatable (refrain) on a transparent plastic strip. Early in the 1970s, he ended his agreement with Universal Edition and began publishing his own scores under the Stockhausen-Verlag imprint (Kurtz 1992, 184). This arrangement allowed him to extend his notational innovations (for example, dynamics in Weltparlament [the first scene of Mittwoch aus Licht] are coded in colour) and resulted in eight German Music Publishers Society Awards between 1992 (Luzifers Tanz) and 2005 (Hoch-Zeiten, from Sonntag aus Licht) (Stockhausen-Verlag 2010, 12–13). The score of Momente, published just before the composer's death in 2007, won this prize for the ninth time (Deutscher Musikeditionspreis 2009)

In the early 1990s, Stockhausen reacquired the licenses to most of the recordings of his music he had made to that point, and started his own record company to make this music permanently available on Compact Disc (Maconie 2005, 477–78).

Stockhausen's huge output obviously will take many decades to come into perspective, but one thing seems clear. His early involvement with electronics predisposed him towards the sounds themselves, including all possible sounds, and away from connections with music history. Whether this makes his music more or less interesting is really not possible to say at this point.

Let's end with a piano piece by Stockhausen, the Klavierstück XI, which is a "moment form" piece, meaning that it consists of nineteen musical "cells" that you play in a random order. The piece ends when you have played the same cell three times. No two performances are alike.