Friday, October 23, 2015

Friday Miscellanea

A major essay on trends in the American conservatory was recently published, written by Andrew Balio, principal trumpet for the Baltimore Symphony. It is in three parts: here, here and here. The remarkable thing about this extended essay is how very thoughtful it is. The writer thinks through the current situation of classical music, examines its history and considers the many proposals for "fixing" it. And he does so with a clear vision. This makes this exercise pretty much unique! Some quotes:
Classical music is identified with elitism, and with some justification. It is no small endeavor to bring together 100 or more highly skilled musicians; it must be financially supported by wealthy patrons, powerful institutions, or a well-heeled middle class. Only a tiny percentage of the population is musically gifted and driven enough to achieve the high artistic competence necessary to be a professional orchestra member, and they must be intensely trained by equally gifted teachers. Even appreciation of classical music does not come as easily as it does with other, more accessible forms. That it requires more from both artist and audience is a great part of its appeal; it “excludes” naturally because it draws only those who strive to go higher and deeper artistically.
But there is a troubling tendency to conflate the “privileged class” with our traditional, musical institutions, such as orchestras—or even with the small group of elite students who will eventually find positions in them. This tendency implies an injustice. Our resentment and our egalitarian ideals convince us that those in the small, privileged group wielding all the influence and power somehow don’t deserve their position, as if they came by it dishonestly or by lucky accident.
But we do a great disservice to high culture when we treat it this way. One isn’t born into an orchestra or a canon. None of the world’s great musicians or history’s great composers were destined to be so by birth. Membership in either is a long-term project and must be earned at every step of the way. In fact, music has remained one of those few pursuits in which success has been possible for the talented in any class throughout the course of European history’s most rigidly hierarchical societies.
 And so, misguided but often well-meaning castigates are left to search for the things which classical music can be and do in order to ameliorate the elitism that they are now convinced has caused all the problems of the world. Classical music—and the schools which perpetuate it—must now be about setting aright the injustices of our troubled age. Our music schools now promise, as one of the nation’s most prominent conservatories does, that their “gifted students will not only be trained as musicians but also as catalysts who will inspire creativity and spark positive change in their communities.”
Please follow the links and read the whole thing as it is difficult to excerpt and it is certainly worth your time. Andrew gives a salutary critique of all those who, under the guise of making needed reforms in the classical music world, are very likely hacking away at its very foundations.

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I've been saying this for years. In "What’s wrong with the classical concert experience in the 21st century?" Philip Clark says,
classical music’s alleged image problem has become the mainstream media narrative – a misinformed opinion continually reported as fact. Classical music is elitist, stuffy, obscure and lacks relevance. But if classical music does indeed have an image problem, what image ought it adopt? What must classical music now pretend to be?
For a moment, I want you to suspend your disbelief as I flip the argument on its head. Try it this way round: there is absolutely nothing wrong with classical music. It cannot pretend to be anything other than it is. And perhaps it’s the wider cultural environment which surrounds classical music that has a problem.
I think I have said exactly this here a dozen times at least. But this is the first time that I have read it anywhere else. Shouldn't every classical musician be saying something like this instead of "we need to turn concerts of classical music into pseudo 'happenings' with light shows." Read the whole thing!

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Bob Dylan is still on that never-ending tour and just played Royal Albert Hall in London where he revived a number of old Frank Sinatra standards. Reuters has the story:
A year ago, fans had greeted the news that Dylan was planning an album of songs made famous by Sinatra with some trepidation. Dylan himself explained when it was released in May that he was not recording a Sinatra tribute.
"I don't see myself as covering these songs in any way. They've been covered enough. Buried, as a matter a fact. What me and my band are basically doing is uncovering them. Lifting them out of the grave and bringing them into the light of day," he said at the time.
This is an excellent example of what I call a racinative strategy. There are two basic ways to approach composition: you can strike out into entirely new territory (if you can find some) or you can uncover connections to the deep roots of music. The first is the avant-garde method of modernism and over the last hundred years it has been claimed to the the only true ideology. The second is actually quite common, but has been propagandized as something bad--only in terms of modernism, however. It is just as Bob says, as a musician it is an entirely valid act to uncover something that has been lost. When the composers associated with the Florentine Camerata invented opera around 1600, what they were trying to do was uncover the traditions of music drama of the ancient Greeks that had been lost. Beethoven, in his late works, was not striking out into the musical future, instead he was tapping into the most fundamental roots of the classical tradition. There are other examples as well. I posted about this here. The term "racinative" as in an artistic strategy in which you return to or uncover a tradition or fundamental that has been lost or neglected is one that I have invented.

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Thanks to Norman Lebrecht, we discover this article about new research into the production of violin virtuosos:
For Izabela Wagner’s study Producing Excellence: The Making of Virtuosos she interviewed nearly 100 prodigies, and what she found is best put by one former soloist, “For every ten students, one will attempt suicide, one will become mentally ill, two will become alcoholics, two will slam doors and jettison the violin out the window, three will work as violinists, and perhaps one will become a soloist.” For aspiring violinists and their parents—including Wagner herself—those are not good chances. Why would anyone choose that kind of life?
I immediately think of Jean Sibelius who wanted more than anything to be a great violinist, but started a bit too late so had to be content with being a great composer instead:
My tragedy was that I wanted to be a celebrated violinist at any price. Since the age of 15 I played my violin practically from morning to night. I hated pen and ink—unfortunately I preferred an elegant violin bow. My love for the violin lasted quite long and it was a very painful awakening when I had to admit that I had begun my training for the exacting career of a virtuoso too late.
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 Have you noticed how there are hoards of people out there ready at the drop of hat to tell us all about what's wrong with classical music? How it is sexist, elitist, stuffy, obsolete, dry, boring and privileges the cis-normative patriarchal hegemony? And often these people make the claim that they are friends of classical music and just want it to become better? Here is one analysis of what's wrong with classical music:
Classical music is dryly cerebral, lacking visceral or emotional appeal. The pieces are often far too long. Rhythmically, the music is weak, with almost no beat, and the tempos can be funereal. The melodies are insipid – and often there’s no real melody at all, just stretches of complicated sounding stuff. The sound of a symphony orchestra is bland and over-refined, and even a big orchestra can’t pack the punch of a four-piece rock group in a stadium. A lot of classical music is purely instrumental, so there’s no text to give the music meaning. And when there are singers, in concerts and opera, their vocal style is contrived and unnatural: so much shrieking and bellowing. The words are unintelligible, even if they’re not in a foreign language.
Culturally speaking, classical music is insignificant, with record sales that would be considered a joke in the pop music industry. Indeed, classical music is so un-popular that it can’t survive in the free market, and requires government subsidy just to exist. Yet even with public support, tickets to classical concerts are prohibitively expensive. The concerts themselves are stuffy and convention-bound – and the small, aging audience that attends them is an uncool mixture of snobs, eggheads and poseurs pretending to appreciate something they don’t. In a word, classical music is “elitist”: originally intended for rich Europeans who thought they were better than everyone else, and composed by a bunch of dead white males. It has nothing to do with the contemporary world – and its oldness appeals only to people who cling to obsolete values. You say there are living composers who still write classical music? Never heard of them.
This is from Colin Eatock at 3 Quarks Daily. This is a summary of the thoughts and attitudes of a group of students in his music appreciation class in Toronto. Now Colin is no dummy and he tries to offer some subtle ideas as to how to reform the image of classical music. But at the end of the day, I'm afraid that he is just giving in to those mistaken attitudes. Look at what the criticisms are: they are all based on placing pop music as the norm. Any deviation from how pop music operates is counted as a wrong thing. This is an Overton window problem, which you have when you allow one side to define all the terms of debate. I like to take a cue from a popular political leader who counsels that, when you run into resistance or criticism, you should "punch back twice as hard." That would be President Barack Obama, of course. The Music Salon tends to follow that advice. We think that it is pop music that is all messed up with its formulaic, industrial thumping, accompanying the most appalling of lyrics and videos. If pop music is your aesthetic standard, then of course you are going to condemn classical music as cerebral, complicated and unnatural. But, dude, that's your problem!

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For our musical envoi today we are going to listen to the very fine, non-pop, Violin Concerto by Jean Sibelius. This is Sarah Chang, solo violin with Jaap van Zweden conducting the Radio Filharmonisch Orkest:


11 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's not just classical music that's dying but music in general: its fraction of the entertainment industry in terms of revenue has been halved in the last two decades (all genres included).

Anonymous said...

I think recording technology has killed classical music. For several decades now, people have gotten their classical music education through recordings and not live concerts. After so many listens of Beethoven and Mozart at home, audiences want to hear the same thing in the concert hall. As a result, most of the music performed in concerts is the work of dead people. Even take this blog: virtually all of the music featured in it was composed by people now dead. This "conservative" turn is a modern phenomenon (in my view, driven by technology). If you went to a concert in Vienna in the late 18th c. virtually all of the music you'd hear was composed by living musicians -- in fact by living Viennese musicians! Good luck finding a Bach cantata in the program!

Now imagine if Lincoln Center performed only music composed by living New Yorkers. They wouldn't last one season!

This has created a feedback loop: since musical talent cannot emerge within the classical realm, it has migrated to other forms: film, jazz, etc. The few living composers I've had the good fortune to hear have impressed me by the competence of their music but not by their greatness. It's pleasing to think of all the starved genius musicians out there... they might be starving but geniuses they are not.

And so today's classical music is mostly conservative (as in "wants to conserve"). In its heyday, it was nothing but. Most people prefer Beethoven to John Cage. Partly because Beethoven is superior, but also because they grew up on the former and not the latter. It's easy to see how this would kill an art form. In a single generation, Viennese could listen to Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert -- while all four of them were alive! The music they heard was composed by people they might bump into in the streets. Talk about a living art form!

Bryan Townsend said...

Wow, a lot of substantial comment here. Yes, I think that video games are probably the biggest share of the entertainment dollar these days. They even dwarf Hollywood.

Anonymous 2, you make some good points. I might quibble with a couple of things. Yes, the residents of Vienna in the late 18th and early 19th centuries had probably the greatest opportunity ever to hear great new music freshly composed: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert!! But the economics and sociology of music composition have changed so radically since then, that now, as you say, the situation is utterly different. In other words, why people write music, and for whom, is different now.

But the history of music reception in the 20th and 21st centuries is still being written and I see some signs of hope. Recording technology has certainly been a mixed blessing, though.

Christine Lacroix said...

Another interesting comment thread. Concerning dying of music anonymous seems to base this idea on revenue. He said: 'it's not just classical music that's dying but music in general: its fraction of the entertainment industry in terms of revenue has been halved in the last two decades (all genres included).' Are you sure that you can conclude that music is dying because the market share is down? There is no profit involved in sunshine and fresh air but they're alive and well. Have ever in the history of the world people had access to so much music in so much variety at all times of the day or night? YouTube, iPods,Spotify.....

Bryan Townsend said...

Very good comment, Christine. If you take a longer historical perspective, you would probably see that the revenues from music were quite modest up until the development of recording. Then, as music in the form of vinyl LPs and later CDs, could be turned into an easily marketable commodity, record companies were able to command considerable revenues because they were gatekeepers to the technology. Now that is changing and they are losing their control. So revenues of recordings are falling. But I read an article recently that points out that revenues from concerts are increasing. So it is complex.

Anonymous said...

Good points. It is complex indeed. Without technology, our knowledge of music wouldn't be a fraction of what it is. One must ask ourselves: How much music would we know if the only access to it was the concert hall? For nonprofessional music lovers, technology has been a blessing. When I referred to classical music as dying, however, I had in mind the music professionals who *need* to make a living. Revenues from classic music sales are essentially zero. Or to put it vividly, each one of America's top-10 golfers makes more money each year than the entire industry!

So here's the thing: every music professional could die tomorrow, and I could still listen to all the music I like for years to come (thanks to technology). So the question is, How will music professionals survive in the classical genre?

Bryan Townsend said...

Yes, the classical music world is the opposite of the high-tech internet world. There we see brilliant entrepreneurs innovating and making billions of dollars. They live in an expanding universe. But classical musicians, it seems, live in a contracting universe. In my career it seemed that every year it got harder and harder to get the engagements and attract the audiences.

One aspect I think you overlook is that music lovers used to engage with music more through playing it. Every middle class home had a piano and lots of them actually played. Nearly everyone also sang a bit. Typical evenings at home might involve playing piano and singing solo and ensemble to piano accompaniment. This meant that a significant part of the audience could play and read music, even if not to professional standards. But now, this has mostly gone away and audiences have less and less comprehension of what they are listening to.

But there is still a core audience of knowledgeable listeners and you just have to find a way to appeal to them. The classical world may shrink some more, but I think it will survive. After all, we have all the best music!

Anonymous said...

I am glad you mentioned this. When the only alternative was the church or the concert hall, the incentive to learn to play an instrument was much higher. That was the only way to hear music at home.

Few people play anything these days. Besides technology I think the way music is taught is partly to blame. Among my friends, I hardly know anyone who has not (i) taken piano lessons as a child and (ii) abandoned the practice to the point they can't even play a C scale on a keyboard...

When I inquired why, I found out that music teaching consisted mostly of making kids memorize classical pieces like monkeys with no understanding of the music. I knew a teenager who could play Chopin's Fantaisie Impromptu like a virtuoso but who was incapable of accompanying someone singing Hey Jude or noodling around a 12 bar blues. These people invariably abandon music sooner or later.

Bryan Townsend said...

Very, very true! But perhaps not the whole story. I think there is another dimension to it. One of the reasons that the middle class wanted to play and listen to classical music in the 19th century was that they aspired to high culture. Music was the 19th century art form par excellence. It enhanced your life with transcendental magic. But everything went sour in the 20th century. The reasons are complex, but in the first half of the century the two World Wars had a profound impact on high culture. Artists lost their optimism and turned to the dissonances of the avant-garde. You can't blame them, but it caused audiences to turn away. And then, after the two wars, pop music exploded and now that's all most people know.

Christine Lacroix said...

By the way thanks for the article by Andrew Balio. I've wondered for years why on earth my grandfather was recruited from Italy to play the slide trombone in the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington at the beginning of the last century. M Balio said 'Whereas the American symphony orchestra, the anchor institution of its city’s cultural life, used to be filled necessarily with imported virtuosi from the old country, we have been, rather impressively, producing our own talent for the last ninety years—and with plenty to spare.' So now I know!

Bryan Townsend said...

You bet. And for the classical guitar, the time span is even shorter. Believe it or not, I was in the first generation of guitarists in Canada and the US who went to Europe to learn the trade and returned to set up the first conservatory and university programs at a professional standard.