MEA CULPA! I FORGOT TO POST THIS THIS MORNING!
The artist can mislead the public more easily than can a man of any other profession, for setting aside the affinity of the herd for all that is superficial, a sort of halo surrounds the painter; he profits by a number of institutions very favourable to mediocrity, which give a certain importance to the métier as such, and are readily turned to account by the adroit
--Julius Meier-Graefe (1867 - 1935) This quote is from 1904.
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I've always been fascinated with Leonard Cohen, and not just because he was a fellow Montrealer: Leonard Cohen: Hippie Troubadour and Forgotten Reactionary
IN THE EARLY ’70s, Leonard Cohen was in crisis. His life felt meaningless, although, in theory, it shouldn’t have. He’d spent the past decade doing all the things people were supposed to do in the ’60s. He’d joined shadowy religious orders and dabbled in Eastern mysticism. He’d written a sexy experimental novel that thrilled the young and enraged the establishment. He’d reinvented himself as a singer-songwriter and played to crowds of ecstatic flower children. He’d taken all the drugs, smoked all the cigarettes, slept in all the iconic hotels—the King Edward, the Chelsea, the Chateau Marmont. If the ’60s counterculture were a mountain, he was the rare mountaineer who’d made it to the summit.
Read the whole thing for a thoughtful look at an artist that has a lot of relevance for us today.
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A problem that refuses to go away: TENOR STOPS MID-CONCERT IN BIRMINGHAM TO STOP PHONE SNAPPERS
The tenor Ian Bostridge shocked Symphony Hall Birmingham last night by stopping after the third song in Britten’s Les Illuminations to denounce the CBSO’s new audience rules, which read:
“We are very happy for you to take photographs and short video clips at our concerts, but please refrain from recording the whole performance.”
Bostridge, a thoughtful, courteous man, stepped forward and – clearly fuming – requested that audience members turn off their phone cameras. He said taking photographs was ‘extremely distracting’ for a performer.
For the love of all that's holy...
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This could well be true: An education in music makes you a better employee. Are recruiters in tune?
One of the most powerful traits instilled by a music education is a deep sense of professionalism. 85% of survey participants identified the trait as the skill that most influenced expectations of themselves and others, and the quality of their work.
A common industry saying about rehearsal reflects this attitude of consistency and punctuality – “early is on time, on time is late, and late is left behind.”
Other notable skills included autonomy and self-direction, resilience and perseverance, and creativity.
Learning an instrument fosters disciplined, focused attention, a highly valuable skill in other contexts. ArtBitz/Shutterstock
Participants attributed the development of these strengths to the disciplined and focused attention required to learn music, and the intrinsic motivation needed to practise and perfect an instrument over a long period of time.
You are not likely to learn these sorts of skills in too many other places.
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You get industrialized mass production: What Happens to Songwriters When AI Can Generate Music?
If you think 100,000 songs a day going into the market is a big number, “you have no idea what’s coming next,” says Alex Mitchell, founder/CEO of Boomy, a music creation platform that can compose an instrumental at the click of an icon.
Boomy is one of many so-called “generative artificial intelligence” music companies — others include Soundful, BandLab’s SongStarter and Authentic Artists — founded to democratize songwriting and production even more than the synthesizer did in the 1970s, the drum machine in the ’80s and ’90s, digital audio workstations in the 2000s and sample and beat libraries in the 2010s.
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Our first envoi really has to be Leonard Cohen:
Here is Ian Bostridge with Britten's Les Illuminations, op. 18
Here is a piece you rarely hear, the Septet in E flat major by Beethoven:
And now, if you will excuse me I have to go decolonize my bookshelf.
29 comments:
Wow, the septet is so charming! Never heard it before.
Another obviously terrible idea whose time has come is digital-only programmes, also causing more phone use during the concert. One gets the impression that people doing classical music PR might not actually like classical music...
So many people have a baffling unawareness of how distracting their phone use is. On pretty much every train journey I take there is now at least one person in the carriage scrolling through reels with his or her loudspeaker turned up. Most disconcertingly, it seems almost as likely to be, say, a pleasant-seeming elderly woman as a loutish young man. When a couple of times I've been fool enough to challenge them, they did not apologise or stop and were as baffled by my irritation as I was by their inconsiderateness.
Ah I complain about this too much! There's a Julian Barnes short story about a classical concert-goer who becomes irrepressibly annoyed by audience behaviour and thus increasingly extreme in his reactions, leading eventually to murder. I'm not there yet, but...
Forgive me for not knowing, but what exactly is a "digital-only" programme?
I live in a rather cocooned enclave in Mexico and I don't take public transit, but I imagine the smart phone really has a tendency to corrupt public space. Here I see four or five guys lounging around on a street corner, all buried in their phones. In earlier days they would have been talking to one another.
When I go to Salzburg I do take public busses, but the fellow travelers don't play clips on their phones that I have noticed. Austria must be a bit behind the times.
A programme that only exists online, no physical copies given out.
I don't particularly recall the the phone problem on until until post-lockdown. Something fundamental changed. I certainly remember Vienna, at least, being a better behaved city than London.
If you haven't seen it, Alexandra Wilson wrote a good piece on phones and concert halls, in light of the Bostridge event: https://thecritic.co.uk/there-is-nothing-wrong-with-rules/
In happier news, the BBC Proms schedule has been announced. There are quite a few I'd like to get to: Messiaen Turangalila, Holst Cloud Messenger, Janacek Glagolithic Mass, Williams Zodiac Suite, Britten A Midsummer Night's Dream, and actually I wouldn't mind Mendelssohn Midsummer Night's Dream as well. The Janacek is being performed by the Czech Philharmonic, so particularly exciting. And you almost never get to hear any big Holst works except The Planets, but fortunately it's his 150th anniversary so we're getting something different.
I'm still unsure I know what a digital-only program is. Could you give an example? Thanks for that article by Alexandra Wilson. I hadn't realized things were that bad--rather a slippery slope.
Yes, lots of good stuff on the Proms schedule. I may have to attend one year. I guess now is when you apply for tickets?
The venue will put up a PDF programme to download on their website and sometimes might not give out a physical copy in the hall. Ah, is it that there's a confusion between 'programme' and 'programme notes'? I mean the latter. Maybe it's just a British thing(?) but I mean 'programme' as short-hand for programme notes.
Yes the booking system begins now. You enter everything you want into the Proms Planner (a sort of wishlist) then wait to hear back -- rather like Salzburg from the sounds of it. I tend to wait, though. (And I might request press tickets for some anyway.) Oddly, nothing I want to go to ever seems to sell out..! In fact, when I'm sure the concert will be poorly attended I buy the cheapest ticket, and when I arrive they invariably give a free upgrade to the best seats. One day it will probably backfire though, and I'll be stuck in the gods...
Oh, of course! Sorry to be so dense. For some reason I was thinking of the music. So, the audience has to have their phones out, squinting away at the notes during the concert. So of course, why not pop it up and take a photo or a short video? Agh! The rule here in Mexico at classical concerts is that phones have to be turned off or silenced and I think it is likely the same in Salzburg.
I was looking at the Salzburg program a few days ago and there are a number of concerts that are, like the Bruckner, sold out. But many more with tickets available. Steven, are you a music critic? Is that why you can get press tickets?
Usually a few big ones sell out like the Last Night or the pop concerts, but the Royal Albert Hall is huge so most don't. The behaviour at the Proms is not the best so I usually expect to see some phones out. Seems to particular happen in boxes, where I suspect many are attending for reasons other than the music. When I was in a box for Berlioz Troyens last year, two ladies were actually eating popcorn and scrolling through their phones. Fortunately they left after the first interval.
I write reviews for Musical Opinion, but I wouldn't call myself a music critic really. (That is, I don't get paid, just free tickets...)
Free tickets are a nice plus!
Care to share a link to your reviews?
One gets the impression that people doing classical music PR might not actually like classical music...
Glad you noticed!
As for Bostridge when you spit into the wind the wind spits at you. If I were to make a suggestion to these places it would be to set aside say the first two songs for photos, vids etc and then put the phones down or be evicted. You simply can't enforce this anymore in blanket fashion without police with guns drawn. In addition Bostridge is lucky he wasn't an 18th C opera singer. If entire books can be uploaded to the internet in defiance of copyright I hardly think performers and artists are exempt. Just the world we inhabit. On the bright side the top 12 artists or so will make enough money anyway so that the rampant theft won't matter.
I keep saying that the point of "AI" songwriting is to cut out or at least vastly reduce the royalty payments. On the bright side the top 12 artists will be able to survive anyway.
As for professional musical training I have made the point before that leaving the profession for a better paying job should be encouraged, not discouraged. One can always have a musical avocation. And it is one that often puts you in the homes of affluent people. In addition there are simply too many classical musicians coming out for the current public interest level anyway.
I have been to lots of concerts in Europe: not just Salzburg, but also Bologna and Madrid, and really I have not noticed anyone conspicuously interfering with the concert through use of their cellphone. The standard is, no photos, etc. during the concert. I'll let you know this summer if that has changed. But why would it? The audience in Salzburg is highly respectful of the performers. Plus, I doubt the festival administration would put up with any of that crap.
As for the professional prognosis, Maury, it is both dispiriting and likely accurate. I certainly have eliminated a great deal of frustration in my life by pursuing music as an avocation rather than a profession. Though sometimes I pretend that I am just on strike for better pay and working conditions. 8>)
reactionaries are anyone enthralled with the past? The reductio ad absurdum here would be that you actually think that then you'd have to say Eric Hobsbawm was a reactionary for being a historian. ::)
Wenatchee, what exactly was that a comment on?
the Leonard Cohen piece. The author said a reactionary is someone enthralled with the past. I couldn't resist a joke that one of the more famous Marxist historians would have to be counted a reactionary for simply being a historian if such a glib bromide were taken seriously.
Ah, right! The comments went in so many directions that I forgot about that bit. We live in such a charged political environment that a political observation that is not over-hyped and ridiculously exaggerated is rare! That's one reason I try to never overstate anything.
Bryan,
Regarding concert behavior I was speaking for the US concerts and it may increasingly apply to the UK although Steven is the best judge. I have said before that Continental Europe is the only preserve of serious classical music in the 21st C which is why I am concerned about the continuing lack of new Euro compositions to add to the mainstream repertoire. EU composers should be ashamed. Opera is in a marginally better state but otherwise classical music in the EU is a museum.
I would like to debate those details with you Maury, but I feel short of sufficient information. I regularly attend the Salzburg Festival but it has something of a conservative lean. I think they consistently have the highest quality performers. But that is not where you are going to hear cutting edge composition. But I rather suspect that there is a lot of new music being composed and performed in the countless concert halls and festivals of Europe. I'm just not very aware of them. Steven, however, has attended a lot of new music in the UK and I'm sure he can tell us about it.
The issue is not that there is any lack of composers writing music. The world aka the internet is awash with it. And even limiting to formal music there is no dearth. The problem is the lack of concerted or individual effort to develop a style that can get the public on board or at least arguing about its merits/demerits. And even when something new has come along that evoked interest and discussion it still took decades for it to become established. How long do professional classical composers think they can twiddle their thumbs churning out music few people want to hear twice? It's already been about 50 years or more.
Thanks for stating clearly your point of view, Maury! Now let me disagree with it. History: at every moment in the history of music there has been more music than is easily appreciated--this is probably true even during the days of Franco-Roman chant or the troubadours. So a winnowing process occurs and voila, fifty or more likely, one hundred, years later we can easily see which music has the kind of lasting quality to be still worth hearing and which does not. This process reveals to us what composers from one hundred years ago are great composers. Who are great composers now? No-one knows. We could argue about Thomas Adès or Sofia Gubaidulina, but we would have to check back in fifty to one hundred years. Style: there are musical realms in which styles develop quickly and are quickly evaluated. Hip-hop is one of these and in the book I am currently reading on J Dilla, Dilla Time, the simple claim is made that he "reinvented rhythm" and in the world of hip hop in the early 21st century, that is certainly true and it became evident in just a couple of decades. The American composer Caroline Shaw has written a lot of music and won the Pulitzer Prize: is her style reinventing anything? Is it going to become established and will she be listened to as avidly in one hundred year? Again, no-one knows because no-one can know. As Hegel famously averred, the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk, meaning that we are only wise in retrospect and in the world of serious composition, the mill of aesthetic valuation grinds exceeding slowly. What is the style of serious composition in the year 2024? How many different styles might there be? We could speculate, but we could only have a substantive discussion if we moved the discussion to the musical context of fifty to one hundred years ago. If we are talking about 1974, fifty years ago, we might have a tentative discussion about what composers and what style is salient--though there certainly could be some disagreement. I might say that Steve Reich is obviously hugely important and add the names of Messiaen and Ligeti. But others might suggest different names. Fifty years ago is still a bit too close. But if we go back one hundred years, it is pretty clear. In the context of 1924 we know who really matters: Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, Bartók.
So what you are asking for is, and always is, unavailable: sufficient distance and perspective on music composition to be able to evaluate the music of today.
I think we are talking past each other and maybe a separate thread is warranted. I am not concerned about which composers are deemed great and which are not today, 50 years ago or 100 years ago. I would have added Sibelius. These things change over time anyway. The issue is that the public only accepts the post WW1 compositions of even the composers you mentioned on sufferance i.e. as fringe members of the mainstream repertoire. If musicians refused to play their post 1924 works would the public beat down the doors and fill the internet with outrage or happily go see Rosenkavalier, La Boheme, Rite of Spring, La Mer etc etc.
The key word is style. There clearly needs to be a new style acceptable to the classical music public that would guide compositional practice at least loosely. If Wagner had adopted a new style of music rather than a deepening and elaboration for each opera would they have had as much impact with the public?
Even one stylistic shift is a significant event in a composer's vita as with Monteverdi or Sibelius. And of course pop/rock/hip hop music lives and dies on the genre recognizability of those works. But even formal music requires at least one mainstream style in effect.
Ok, yes I understand your point. I think this involves musical historiography. You are asking why is there not a classical music style today that is generally appreciated by large audiences the way that, what, Mozart was appreciated in Vienna in 1788? Or the way Sibelius was appreciated in Finland or Europe generally in 1900? I think just stating the premiss reveals the answer. Different composers are appreciated in different amounts and different ways in different places at different times. In classical or formal music, the audiences have always been smaller and limited to specific places at specific times. Mozart operas were loved in Prague before they were loved in Vienna. Beethoven's late string quartets, even in Austria, were rarely played until well into the late 19th century. And Bruckner is, as you said, still finding his proper recognition even today.
I think that the interaction of pop music and mass media has created an unrealistic expectation regarding audiences and composers. The frenzy that greeted the Beatles or Elvis Presley or now, Taylor Swift is something that did not happen and could not happen prior to recording technology and even more, radio, television and now the internet. There is a symbiosis between these artists and their audiences that is created by media. Classical composers are not great manipulators of media and not so interested in the replicative forms of popular music, so they are just not on that playing field. And I don't think they should be.
Mozart was not particularly appreciated in his lifetime I think it would be fair to say. The reason that Mozart was accepted at all is that he was composing in the mainstream style of the day which by then had replaced Baroque music style. It was started ironically by Bach's sons and Haydn and others took it over and ran with it.
When even a well known composer has a severe stylistic shift they risk losing their public. Beethoven's late piano sonatas and quartets were viewed negatively until the 20th C. Stravinsky's neoclassical works have been accepted but more people still like his pre 1924 compositions. Monteverdi is the only exception and it must be remembered his "public" was extremely narrow in both wealth and geography. If Beethoven composed one work in Baroque style, one in Mozart style one in early Romantic style one after the other he would have been consigned to the loony bin. And yet that is what modern composers often do, putting on and taking off styles like exercise suits. Even if they stay within a style it is a Past style such as neoclassicism or Baroque forms.
As for pop/rock/hiphop styles again you are citing persons when I am trying to divorce it from particular artists. To be accepted by their public the pop musicians you describe are or were using widely accepted styles of the day which they personalized effectively but did not throw out.
In which period of music for the past 800 years have composers Not adopted at least one mainstream style to use as the framework of the compositions?
You mentioned before that the problem seems to have arisen after WWI and there lies a clue to a possible answer. You also ask "in which period of music ... have composers not adopted at least one mainstream style..." And the answer is, since WWI. That was a cultural paroxysm so vast that it constituted a suicide attempt by Western Civilization--a mostly unsuccessful one, but with profound cultural aftershocks. I could list a number of things that I think can be seen as a consequence of WWI: the philosophy of Wittgenstein, Sartre, Heidegger, the music of Schoenberg, Messiaen, Boulez, Stravinsky, abstract art, surrealism, Dada, James Joyce and a host of other things that followed from these. Culture fragmented and changed radically. There is no mainstream style, not even in pop music. Maybe if our civilization heals itself there will be one again.
Yes that is correct that the century from 1924 to 2024 is the sole century of formal music history where there is no widely accepted mainstream style. While it can be argued that even pop music has become fractured if you take a look at the streaming by genre you will see that hip hop and rock/ pop account for 60% of the total. If you throw in country and Latin as forms of pop music then that accounts for 75%. While pop listeners may listen a bit more widely than before there is no comparison of that with the current classical situation where extremely few compositions post 1924 are fully mainstream, not remotely approaching 75%. Looking at US National Public Radio classical streaming what is apparent is that Baroque music is pretty much equal to Romantic music now. In a bizarre way Baroque may well be our contemporary classical music.
I may be naive but I think what helps a culture to heal is new vital art widely appreciated.
One last thought on this. Yes WW1 and 2 were horrific but so was the Black Death where close to half the population of Europe was killed or the religious wars of the 17th C or the Napoleonic Wars around 1800. What is noteworthy is that if you look at the arts, hardly any of these events much ruffled the mainstream development of the arts which followed their own logic and reasonably orderly change of styles.
We have to add in the amplifying effects of mass media and internet.
Leonard Meyer proposed that what happened in the 20th century was that the ideology of pluralism espoused in Euro-American contexts hit a crisis point because of the introduction to genuinely global arts for which an essentially Eurocentric conception of pluralism proved wildly insufficient. The "West" was fond of pluralism but the crisis was, in a sense, "Hey! Not THIS MUCH PLURALISM! Pick a style!"
Meyer said there would probably not "be" a dominant style and that the characteristic of the 20th century would be the co-existence of all possible and actual styles without any one of them being genuinely dominant. He proposed that the "masters" of this new era would be "formalists", artists and musicians and writers and film-makers and novelists most willing and able to synthesize the gamut of styles and forms in ways that pleased people. Meyer proposed that the formalists who defined the early 20th century were Igor Stravinsky and T. S. Eliot and noted dryly that both of them were conservative/reactionary in their political and social commitments, which was a warning that the artists who triumphed in the new age of formalism were not necessarily going to be particularly politically liberal.
But it wouldn't be hard to propose that Duke Ellington and The Beatles could be regarded as "formalists" in Leonard Meyer's taxonomy, musicians who assimilated and synthesized what previously were comparatively disparate influences and styles (Ken Rattenbury (sic?) has argued Ellington fused ragtime, blues and Tin Pan Alley idioms in ways that few had successfully done before him). Meyer's large point in relation to the Romantic era and "late late Romanticism" of high modernism (Taruskin loved that bit of humor) was that few of them were really revolutionary. Even Beethoven was not a genuine innovator in terms of rules or forms so much as a master strategist.
The 20th century had a lot of the "race to the patent office" approaches to avant garde music.
I would say blues and ragtime were the seminal idioms that influenced all subsequent popular styles and, as I've beaten this drum for a decade, some kind of synthesis of ragtime with the development possibilities of galant is a profitable path to explore. If nothing else I have a lot of fun playing with it and since Haydn and Scott Joplin have been some of my favorite composers it's also for that reason. It's handy, too, if all their work is public domain.
If there is a case to be made on behalf of classical music its long-spanning canon and insulation from contemporary IP restrictions seems like at least one potential argument in favor of teaching it alongside other styles rather than as "the" style music students have to learn.
To anyone who likes the music or words of Leonard Cohen, I highly recommend the recent album "A Day With Suzanne," which is a lovely early music album!
Who are the artists, Will?
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