Sunday, February 3, 2019

Soothing Classical Music

This topic is always a slightly uncomfortable one for me as it involves reconciling how I listen to music with how other people listen to music. Or more accurately, how non-musicians listen to music. Still more accurately, how non-classical musicians listen.

A while back a commentator linked to an article in The Guardian about a new classical station in the UK: Young people are turning to classical music to escape ‘noise of modern life'.
To many, the decision announced last week to launch Scala Radio, a major new station founded on the belief that classical music can appeal to younger audiences, will have come as a surprise. But research has shown clear indications of new listening trends, with almost half (45%) of young people saying they see classical music as an escape from the noise of modern life.
I looked through the rest of the article to see if there were any details about the research, but found nothing specific. I generally distrust journalism because they tend to both follow a predetermined narrative and get the facts wrong. More:
The launch of a new classical entertainment station aimed at younger listeners is based on more than a hunch. Research found that a new generation of listeners was switching on to classical music through different sources, with 48% of under-35s exposed to it through classical versions of popular songs, such as the Brooklyn Duo version of Taylor Swift’s Blank. And 74% of people in the same age group had experienced classical music via a live orchestral performance at a film screening, according to analysts at Insight working for Bauer Media, owner of the new station.
"Research found" is such a weak reed that you can hang almost anything on it. OK, I can believe that a lot of young people have heard "classical versions" of popular songs, but the 74% of young people being exposed to a live orchestra at a film screening seems very odd. Is this a big city thing? Does this happen a lot that an orchestra shows up at a film screening and plays a few tunes? Let's have a listen to the one concrete example, the Brooklyn Duo version of "Blank Space" by Taylor Swift:


And now let's hear the original. (Blogger doesn't want to embed, so follow the link.)


That explains a few odd things about the "classical version." As a piece for cello and piano it is awkward and not very successful. The melody is jerky and uninteresting, largely because it was originally intended to be sung with words and the rhythm is that of speech. This can be interesting, of course, and some Russian theorists, Boris Asaf'yev in particular, had a theory on intonazia that suggests that instrumental music can suggest the moods of vocal rhetoric--music can "speak" in other words. But just transcribing a vocal line for cello without the words does not necessarily make the music speak. Usually it just comes out like something is missing, which it is. Looking at the Taylor Swift original we hear the words and therefore the "meaning" of the music. The song, like so many in the genre, seems to be largely about narcissism and wealth porn. I have to say though, that the cello has a much nicer timbre than the thin, edgy sound of Taylor Swift's voice.

Frankly, I would much rather hear the gritty realism of a good pop song than the smoothed out diluted "classical version." Like in the old Zen saying, not seeing the difference is to mistake the map for the territory. A good pop song is an authentic aesthetic expression. The "classical version" is a watered down remembrance; like a faded postcard from the beach it is not much of an aesthetic experience in itself.

But I am not a normal listener: I don't look to music to soothe me at the end of a long day working in a factory or serving meals or berating employees. Instead, I look to music to take me on an aesthetic journey to new places that offer new experiences. Sure, sometimes I listen to music to take a familiar journey, like returning to Paris or Rome to refresh your experience. Or perhaps it can be like participating in a great conversation or some more intimate act. But while there can be soothing moments, if the whole experience is a soothing refuge, then I'm not interested. I also don't respond well to tranquilizers--they tend to make me anxious!

I think I have always had this kind of relationship with music. I didn't develop an interest in music until I was exposed to some rock music in the middle-60s and it is always the challenging music that has caught my interest. It puzzles me why not everyone shares this interest! Once in university I challenged some friends of mine by making them listen to the whole of the Grosse Fuge by Beethoven. This was in answer to some question or other like: what's your favorite piece of music? At the time it was this one:


Here is a thought experiment for you: why don't the Brooklyn Duo or 2Cellos or any of the other "classical version" ensembles do a version of this piece? There are obvious answers, but also less obvious answers.

13 comments:

Wenatchee the Hatchet said...

I was writing earlier this weekend about pop songs that are ballads with loud bridges, using the examples of Lionel Richie's "Say You, Say Me" and Billy Idol's "Eyes without a Face" (based on the old French horror movie, of course). I ended up writing about what I have disliked about a lot of 1990s-onward pop songwriting, best exemplified in Nirvana/Cobain. What was held to be raw and real in Cobain's songwriting is a checklist of the weaknesses of subsequent songwriting. There are a lot of repeating small gestures of melody in which the text and vocal inflection/timbre are essential to understanding the intended affect of the vocal part. The biggest difference between a songwriter like Cobain and a songwriter like Richie or Idol is Cobain used timbrel changes in the voice or the guitar (mutter to screaming, clean to dirty guitar sounds) as a way to delineate structural moments in the song.

Arrangers of pop songs who work in classical who don't find a way to telegraph this element in their arrangements are going to fall short of translating the content of a popular song into a chamber music arrangement.

For instance, given how common multi-tracking is in popular music, conveying that effect would be easier to do with a clarinet ensemble in which there's a soloist complimented by a tutti at strategic points to outline verse/chorus distinctions. These conventions are so well-known it would seem there's no reason to not make use of them. But the Swift arrangement ignores those elements. Introducing the piano in the closing chorus, for instance, wouldn't be as effective as having the cello drop down to accompaniment and letting the piano play the chorus throughout. Since timbrel and textural shifts are so central to structural differentiation in popular song classical arrangers should be more attentive to those elements if they want their arrangements to be more effective at replicating the ambiance of the pop song. The "Blank Space" melody doesn't work well on strings. I might venture to say it could come off better on a woodwind or even a brass instrument. A muted trumpet might go a lot farther toward replicating the sound of Swift's voice.

At the risk of pointing out yet another element in popular song, massed voices also tend to get called on to introduce antiphonal/contrapuntal effects that virtually never seem to get picked up in classical arrangements.

It's obviously not as though classical composers can't pull this off. Takemitsu proved that it was possible to adapt popular song to the idiom of the classical guitar, for instance, in his 12 Songs.

Bryan Townsend said...

Thanks Wenatchee for a very interesting comment. I first twigged to the structural use of timbre in popular music in a talk on, it might have been Metallica, at a musicology conference in Rochester years and years ago. You make very a propos observations on how this works.

But you know, I don't actually think that the transcribing artists are trying to, as you say, translate the contents of popular song into chamber music. If they were, I think we would see more of the things you mention. I think they are doing something bit simpler: using the familiarity of a popular song to win a larger audience. It is kind of a "what-if" thing. What if classical composers wrote nice, easily sale-able tunes for our ensemble (instead of all that weird stuff)? The important element is the marketability, isn't it? Not any obscure aesthetic considerations?

Wenatchee the Hatchet said...

Yes, I think the arrangement of the Swift falls more in the "bid for relevance" side than the "engages with what's going on in the original version of the song".

I don't mind timbrel change as "a" structuring method in music, classical or popular, but it drives me up the wall when it is "the" structuring method for songs that, more often than not, don't make use of other elements. I'm fine with the Billy Idol song, whereas "Smells Like Teen Spirit" still sounds moronic to me. As "it" 1990s bands from the Seattle area go I had a better impression of Soundgarden than I had of Nirvana.

And now in this century the disease of what I call "Millenial Whooping cough" permeates a lot of songs!

Bryan Townsend said...

Is that "millennial whooping cough" the same as the woo-hoo, woo-hoo on a falling minor third that seems to be infecting a lot of songs?

Wenatchee the Hatchet said...

moving back and forth from the fifth factor of the tonic to the third factor. Yep. Usually it goes down but it can also go up.

I hate it ardently.

Some of the worst perpetrators are Katy Perry and The Lumineers, the latter seemingly determined to write an entire song out of the thing. "The Best Day of My Life".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y66j_BUCBMY

I ... don't even have words for how much I hate the song But I can describe it as one of the worst offenders of Millenial Whooping Cough songwriting.

Bryan Townsend said...

I saw a clip that mentioned Katy Perry as an example of this practice in her song California Grllz. Listening to the clip you posted, oh god, yes. Agh. I got almost seventeen seconds into the song before I had to stop. A Nietzschean epigram might say that "what you hate is even more important than what you love..."

Wenatchee the Hatchet said...

That song ... it features the Millenial Whoop AT LEAST 47 times before the song is over. I know because I counted each whoop.

I stand corrected, the band is American Authors, it turns out, but Lumineers are comparably bad. I'm probably going to have to have a post or two about Millenial Whooping Cough at this point. I don't think the usual suspects account for the trope. If anything I'd sooner blame indie rock band darlings R. E. M. than the singer of "Tarzan Boy". Oscillating between the intervals of a perfect fourth as rapidly as happens in "Tarzan Boy" is actually noticeably tougher to do than the minor third version of the Whoop.

Bryan Townsend said...

I thought I had a post on this, and I did, back in 2016:

https://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2016/08/whooping-it-up-millennial-style.html

Steven Watson said...

I recently took my dad, who otherwise has no interest in classical music, to a concert (Ravel Tombeau de Couperin, Rodrigo Aranjuez, Lutoslawski Concerto for Orchesta). I thought he would enjoy the Aranjuez, which he did, but what he really enjoyed was the Lutoslawksi. If you don't know the work, it is among the loudest, noisiest orchestral pieces I know of -- very much in the tradition of the Rite of Spring but even more discordant.

Okay, Dad isn't a young person (!), but his musical tastes are way 'younger' than mine. And 'young' tastes are all about rhythm, noise -- i.e. strongly visceral things. (Contrary to your suggestion, it would rather seem that most people, in our raucous, sensational culture, do not look to music to soothe.) Such people do not focus in on detail, and they have a limited musical memory. The only way to get round this is with a piece that makes them listen. (Which is something, dare I say, many contemporary composers might do well to consider...)

Bryan Townsend said...

That is a fascinating bit of information! The Guardian article suggested that a lot of young people want something soothing and I have had older people say the same to me. But it reminds of an occasion when I was trying to turn someone on to classical music and I was playing some Mozart, some Beethoven, but what really got her interested was Stravinsky, the aforementioned Rite of Spring. So I think you have a real point here. I haven't heard the Lutoslawski Concerto for Orchestra for a while so I just put it on and I can certainly see why it might appeal to people not familiar with classical music. Noisy, yes, but also that opening repeated pulse in the tympani and the striking colors are also ear-catching.

Wenatchee the Hatchet said...

Lutoslawski generally rocks. :)

Will Wilkin said...

Personally, I have been fleeing to early music, say, 17th century and earlier, to get away from the noisy rambunct of classical music, nevermind "modern life." Haydn and especially Beethoven, for examples, can show such a restless striving towards destination, and the Romantics give us melodies so strong and individualistic as to become almost aggressive compared the good old days when melody was mostly arpeggios, when everything fit together naturally and without force. Perhaps the hindsight now is too easy, but music of such force and willfulness could only portend a society on the verge of electrification, with all the consequent alienation from nature, exemplified in the horrors of the electric light.

Bryan Townsend said...

"Restless striving towards destination" is a good description of a lot of Classical and Romantic era harmony!

What was that Dylan line, something about the ghost of electricity howling in the bones of her face?

What I find annoys me the most is mindless cliché which is sometimes found in aggressive music and sometimes found in soothing music.