In total, Sheeran's tour sold 4,860,482 tickets for 94 shows across 53 cities. He earned a whopping $432 million, effectively shattering the record for the highest global tour revenue by an artist in a single year.I didn't know much about Ed Sheeran's music, but I said to my friends that his music is rather, well, innocuous. Let's have a look/listen. This is the song that comes up at the top on YouTube (Blogger won't embed):
Not to do any real analysis, but the most salient features are: a brisk, tuneful musical setting, a beautiful and very fit black woman is the love interest, Ed himself is portrayed as an amiable goof who gets seriously in shape and gets in a match with a Sumo wrestler (only to be rescued by the aforementioned black woman), and the underlying values are black is great, fitness is great, eating properly is great and, presumably, don't get in the ring with a Sumo wrestler! All these are the mainstream values of our day. So "innocuous" is probably the right word.
My concept of musical art is contrary to that. For me, what is worth doing, musically, is to go outside the mainstream values, aesthetic or otherwise. A new piece of music needs to be, in some way, new. I tried for quite a while to reconcile traditional music aesthetics with composition today and was not quite successful. At the same time, I reject the more extreme trends of modernism because they seem to me empty of humanity. I was very happy to discover that the solution, for me, was to be something of a synthesist. In other words, there is a great deal of genuinely new music expression to be found in sifting through the trends of the last hundred years and sorting out the potential gems therein. Some of the greatest composers of the past like Mozart and Bach were really synthesists rather than innovators.
One of the musical ideas that was discovered around sixty years ago, was moment form. There are some very interesting examples that I was talking about the other day, but my feeling is that the surface has barely been scratched. For example, the Klavierstücke XI by Stockhausen, one of the earliest examples, can sound a lot like an ordinary piano piece (though in avant-garde style) even though the narrative continuity is shattered. There are, as I recall, nineteen moments that are played in a largely random order. The form of the piece is like that of a mobile by Calder.
Other examples of the form bring out different aspects. In a piece for more than one instrument you can have the possibility of counterpoint, for example. The aspect of the form that has most powerfully attracted me, oddly enough, is the rhythmic element. The one thing you cannot have with a moment form piece, is a score. I suppose you could create a score by transcribing a performance, but every performance will be different so that doesn't really capture the piece. There is no score because there is no vertical integration! The musical score, showing the vertical integration of the parts in an ensemble piece has been the foundation of Western music from the sixteenth century. Prior to then, pieces for ensemble were often or usually written down in parts only. The invention of the barline made integrated scores possible.
As we let go of the vertical integration of the parts of the composition we gain a whole universe of open, freely flowing sound. This is more appropriate for certain kinds of musical moods than the march-like narrative of a traditional score. The whole idea of a unified pulse is banished. This has strong appeal to me because perhaps the core foundational element in most music today is the unifying pulse. Steve Reich has built his whole musical language on it, and very successfully too. But I find that, by letting it go, it frees me from all sorts of hidden Procrustean beds.
A few years ago I wrote a piece for solo guitar titled "Chant" that was based on the idea of no pulse. Here is that guitar piece. I get away from pulse in two ways: first by thinking in terms of Gregorian chant where the music flows, but does not have fixed beats. So I use very large note values in a fluctuating meter, so you hardly feel the meter. Then I insert a lot of grace notes that further dilutes the metrical aspect.
In order to write for an ensemble and have no pulse, you pretty much have to use moment form. Even without pulse, you can have structure and I integrate harmonic structure into my new piece for string quartet in a couple of ways. First of all, there is an overall harmonic structure that consists of four chords of four notes each. The piece begins with the four instruments playing the four notes of the first chord. Then they move through six moments at their own pace. As each instrument reaches the next note of the chord, they will pause until the other instruments also reach their notes. Then everyone proceeds through another six moments to the next chord. As they will reach the chord at slightly or significantly or quite different times, the chord will seem to "bloom" over time. After the four players have reached the end of the music (the moments are spread out over a spiral shape) they then return to the beginning. So the piece is also its own retrograde, which gives us a contrapuntal element as well as a harmonic element.
Here are the violin II and cello parts so you can see how this is written:
So why are these difficult times for music? The prominent musicians of our day are becoming wealthy in ways that previous generations could only dream of. The most successful musician around 1800 was Joseph Haydn and even though he was one of the first free-lance composers (in later life), toured very successfully in Europe and published his works in several countries, compared to what Ed Sheeran and others earn today, he was impoverished! No, the reason these are difficult times for music is that all the incentives push musicians toward the innocuous, the tuneful, the expression of only those things that are mainstream platitudes. Referring to his time as court composer to the Esterházy family, where much time was spend at their country estate, Haydn said:
I was cut off from the world. There was no one to confuse or torment me, and I was forced to become original.
8 comments:
Have been trying to think about this; my first take-away was that it had never occurred to me to think of a piece of music as something marching along in obedience to its Pickelhelmed score. Stumbled into a book notice this morning, and was struck by this:
Sieferle [author of Finis Germania, subject of the review] is equally scathing in his analysis of today’s high culture—or what passes for it. “Where everything is art and everyone can be an artist,” he writes, “the recognition of artistry is a question of charisma.” In the destructive wake of modernisms, avant-gardisms, and postmodernisms, the only surviving object for appreciation is the artist himself. Once an attempt to evoke transcendent standards of beauty and morality, modern art devolves into a species of the will-to-power.
The response in this case might be that, no, the 'surviving object' is the musical artefact itself, because some of us are in fact not mortally injured by modernisms, avant-gardisms, and postmodernisms. Hmm.
Thanks, Marc. Now I'm going to have to think about your comment for a few days! But it is certainly true that I am quite interested in a number of things that modernism, the avant-garde and post-modernism stumbled across and not very interested in personal charisma!
It seems likely that pop artist did not personally "earn" or receive as gross personal income the $432 million, but rather that money divided by the reported 4,860,482 tickets sold comes out to $88.88 each, which is a plausible ticket price for a popular artist. Think of the 94 venue fees, the crew to transport gear thru 53 cities, the ushers and security and bartenders and stage crews and venue administration and ticket sellers, not to mention the insurance and marketing. My guess is the big-name artist (never heard of him myself) probably grossed a few million at most.
My other comment on your review of him (no, I didn't bother clicking youtube) is that I always think of music as something to hear, not to watch as if a song-length "movie." Images are something very different than music. Parallel to why I don't click news videos either, I prefer to read the news rather than watch somebody read it to me with contrived and manipulating images behind them.
Regarding your piece Chant, which I DID click with great interest, I hate to say my computer plays it so quiet as to be practically inaudible. I'm sure the problem is my computer rather than your video, as this has happened before with other music videos I've attempted to hear. So all I have left to think about is I recall reading about some French composers who wrote everything in whole notes but expected the performer to make their own note values and rhythm. Early music I think it was, early baroque if I recall, maybe Couperin was one of them? I can't remember where I read it so can't research who these composers were...maybe in an article from the the Journal of the Viola da Gamba Society?
That $432 million is gross receipts from ticket sales, so the net would be much less. A few million? You know I don't have much to go on to estimate net earnings, but I would be surprised if all the expenses were more than 50%. So let's say he took home around $215 million. Then there are other revenues: t-shirts, souvenirs, CDs and income from streaming. No idea what that would come to, but probably fairly significant. He's doing ok!
Sorry that Chant was unlistenable. The audio track is perfectly ok, so maybe try it on a different machine? Headphones?
Yes, there were a number of Baroque composers that wrote unmeasured preludes, but they weren't necessarily slow, even though notated in whole notes. I did a post on them a while back.
"Yes, there were a number of Baroque composers that wrote unmeasured preludes, but they weren't necessarily slow, even though notated in whole notes. I did a post on them a while back."
Ah! Probably THAT's where I read about it! Maybe it was just a few months ago? Bryan I tell my few music cognoscenti friends you've got the best music blog on the internet.
Aw, shucks!
The success of the serial and moment techniques (and it has to be counted 'success', right? although who knows what the canon looks like in another century) and your own use of moment form has inter alia made me remember your observation in 'Nono the Venetian', last month: "[Malipiero] is one of that whole generation of composers who, as users of the conventional tonal structures, were left rather high and dry by the innovations of the avant-garde." So now a secondary project is to listen to those 'left high and dry'. Malipiero... and who else were you thinking of, I wonder? but I will look in Taruskin, perhaps, not that I'm reading into the 20th c yet.
There were a number of Italian and British composers that would fit into that category, I think. Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco for one, Arnold Bax for another...
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