A recurring theme here has been the difference between the European and North American musical scenes. As a young player I studied in Spain and Austria and have returned to debut in London and tour in France, Germany and Italy. In recent years I have attended the Salzburg Festival on three occasions.
Things are very different in Europe: audiences are more numerous, younger, and don't clap between movements. The concert repertoire is also far broader. Heather MacDonald offers a detailed description after a recent visit to Prague and Vienna: Europe’s Music Meritocracy.
Vienna was the cradle of Western classical music from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century; it remains one of the three or four most important musical centers today. Not surprisingly, the soloists are more international than in Prague. A Mongolian bass-baritone, Amartuvshin Enkhbat, was the high point of a Tosca performance at the Staatsoper; I had heard him in 2021 in a preposterously updated Rigoletto (think: a dry-cleaning shop under a subway station) at the Teatro del Maggio Musicale in Florence. The other leading cast members were from Bulgaria, Italy, and Russia. The conductor, Yoel Gamzou, was an Israeli-American. At the Volksoper, I attended a feminist bastardization of Puccini’s La Rondine, ending with a fin-de-siècle version of Thelma and Louise, gleefully targeting the patriarchy. The production featured a German-British conductor, a Dutch director, a Swedish lead soprano, and an Italian-American Juilliard graduate as leading tenor.
The most striking aspect of these Central European orchestras, from an American perspective, is the lack of Asians. Not a single Asian is to be found in the Vienna Philharmonic’s violin, viola, cello, and double bass sections—something almost inconceivable, from an American perspective. In fact, there are no Asians in the entire orchestra. This is neither inherently good nor bad. It is just radically different. In the violin section alone of the New York Philharmonic, there are 20 Asians, including the concertmaster, out of 26 members.
Why the difference? Central European orchestras retain remnants of a guild system: students apprentice in local conservatories and get hired into the orchestras where their teachers play. Reflecting that close bond, performers’ biographies in concert programs often pay charming tribute to teachers, something one rarely sees in American programs.
Yes, Europe has a lot of problems, but the lack of appreciation of cultural traditions is not one of them.
Here is the Brno Philharmonic with La Valse by Ravel.
I was reading Paul Johnson's Art: A New History the other day and was struck by something he mentioned regarding the commissioning of a new set of bronze doors for the baptistry of the cathedral in Florence in 1401. There was a competition for the job and it was won by Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378 - 1455). He eventually did two sets of doors which took him fifty years! You have to understand that these were very large doors displaying scenes from the Bible in low-relief sculpture:
Click to enlarge
To give you an idea of the enormity of the project and the importance to the city-state of Florence, the cost came to 22,000 florins which was equal to the entire Florentine defence budget! [Johnson, op. cit. p. 233]
I mention this to point to the enormous significance the arts had in early modern European society. There is a musical connection, not to the bronze doors, but to the construction of the new cathedral itself, consecrated on March 25, 1436. The music commissioned for this event was Nuper rosarum flores by Guillaume Dufay. I can't track down what he was paid for this work, but I'm pretty sure that it was not anywhere near the cost of the cathedral, or even one of the doors. Dufay did pretty well, but music never paid as well as architecture or sculpture.
Still, it is sobering to realize that our ancestors placed such enormous value on both religion and the arts that ornamented and illustrated religion that they would compare with an item as huge as the budget for defence of the state. The arts in contemporary society are of very tiny significance in comparison. Even if you are Billie Eilish or Adele.
Though I have been a professional musician since my teens and a classical musician for nearly all of that time, and always interested in composition, I never took my own composing seriously until a few years after I moved to Mexico. Musing over this recently I'm wondering if there were not some class issues I was not consciously aware of.
My parents both left school at the Grade 8 level and I was the first in my extended family to attend university--in the 1970s. I think we would be lower-middle-class at best. Of course, as soon as I started considering myself a musician, i.e. artist, I declared myself to be outside the class system. And besides, there are no classes in modern Western democracies, right? Oh how silly of me. Of course there are and I, in all respects other than my expertise as a classical guitarist, was still lower-middle-class. And not just because I was poor (as a classical musician I typically made between $20,000 and $25,000 CDN a year in earnings)--I also had some basic cultural attitudes associated with the lower-middle-class. Both I and my English professor might wear a t-shirt and jeans to class but for him it was inverted snobbery and for me it was just the costume of my class.
All of this got very confused because of the 60s, of course, when the costume and attitudes of the lower-middle-class became universalized. But over the years I succeeded in expunging much of the 60s madness from my mind. And, as I became more thoroughly ensconced in the classical music world, taking positions as chair of the guitar department at the conservatory and sessional lecturer at the university, I became more harmonized with the culture of the international classical music fraternity. Greatly accomplished musicians regarded me as a peer, for example.
But there still was a corner of my consciousness that thought as a member of the lower-middle-class and members of that class might be popular musicians or traditional musicians (like my mother), but they were not composers. Every member of the composing class in Canada that I am aware of comes from an upper-middle-class or higher background. This is possibly true in the US as well, though I haven't done any research.
So, while I composed in small increments throughout my career, I did not regard it as a serious artistic activity. Moving to Mexico seems to have changed my basic attitudes. Here I am a member of the expatriate class and hence truly out of the Mexican class system. This particular enclave is one heavily weighted towards the arts. So these factors together with my inherent interest in composition led me to start composing in a serious way some fifteen years ago. Now I have a substantial body of work and while I am unsure of its real quality I am sure of one thing: I am actually a composer! And, I suspect for the first time in my life, really not in the class system.
This will be another of those posts that eludes categorization and to which I therefore attach my "aesthetics" tag. I was just reading an article in the Globe and Mail about Ellen Degeneres: Ellen DeGeneres returns with a phony-baloney apology and I was struck by this passage:
In March, as the pandemic started, comedian Kevin T. Porter wrote on Twitter, “Right now we all need a little kindness. You know, like Ellen Degeneres always talks about. She’s also notoriously one of the meanest people alive.”
This phenomenon, of a public persona being so different from the reality that it is almost its opposite, seems to have become a pandemic of its own. I can remember a time when what you saw in public and the private reality were not so very different. A somewhat feckless, but well-meaning Canadian politician was somewhat feckless but well-meaning in both his private and public life--and yes, I am talking about Joe Clark for you Canadian political aficionados.
But more and more, as the slow seep of politics invades every aspect of society, we expect, as a matter of course, politicians to be Potemkin fronts of high ideals masking a vicious reality. Government agencies slowly transform into vast, unfeeling bureaucracies whose main priority is to preserve their pay and benefits. Regulatory agencies find it more and more profitable to be "captured" by the industries they purport to regulate. Students and scientists in fields like environmental science discover that certain views are well-rewarded with research grants while other views will cause you to be shunned. And artists lose sight of their real responsibilities in favor of "branding," marketing and personal promotion. Every career trajectory is calibrated to increase "exposure" and revenues.
Something has obviously gone a bit astray, I say with characteristic Canadian understatement.
But a field like classical music can offer a window into a scene where the "phony-baloney" does not rule the roost, where a bit of genuine truth can be glimpsed. I have been to many concerts where, completely outside the bounds of language, truth and not lies holds the stage. You can't really lie with a musical phrase. You can play it badly, or play it with no personal connection or conviction, but for a music-lover, this will pretty much be evident. The very abstract nature of music makes it hard to deceive the listener. Now, sure, we can argue about whether this or that artist is an empty virtuoso, but the more vacuous performers are largely known to the music world. Mind you, the pressures to sell records, to fill seats, while temporarily in abeyance due to the pandemic, are still there, but the performers who are most eager to pander are not hard to identify.
Most musicians are still out there to play music in a competent and expressive way--and they don't get paid a lot of money to do it, in most cases. So, when we despair of hearing an ordinary, warm, musical performance delivered with some conviction, we can usually find the remedy in a concert or online performance--well, when concerts recommence at least. Our chamber music society is launching its new season in mid-October with a piano recital in an outdoors setting. Easy to arrange in Mexico, but October in Montreal might be a different story!
I used to tell my students that when they played music, their real personality was right there for anyone to see and hear. Despite all the tricks and subterfuges and elaborate photo sessions of musical promotion, I still think this is true. It is pretty hard to lie with a dominant 7th.
Here, with one of those entirely truthful performances is the incomparable Grigory Sokolov playing some Beethoven:
I know what you are thinking, who the heck is Pierre Bourdieu? Some French sociologist of no relevance to us, probably? Well, that's half right. He was indeed a French sociologist, but every time you read someone pontificating about how classical music is just rich people showing off or how it has no "relevance" to modern life or how it is just another way of oppressing victim groups you are getting Pierre Bourdieu at second or third-hand. So let's have a look at what he proposed first-hand. As Wikipedia says, Bourdieu "argues that judgments of taste are related to social position, or more precisely, are themselves acts of social positioning." Further:
For Bourdieu each individual occupies a position in a multidimensional social space; a person is not defined only by social class membership, but by every single kind of capital they can articulate through social relations. That capital includes the value of social networks, which Bourdieu showed could be used to produce or reproduce inequality.
For me, this is rather like trying to understand the individual by examining what shoes he wears and what restaurants he goes to. Or perhaps trying to understand musical aesthetics by doing a rigorous examination of how everyone dresses at a Salzburg Festival concert. Lots of people wear Converse runners, but as far as I can tell they are all individuals. Lots of people wear suits and ties or evening gowns to Salzburg concerts but they too are all individuals. We could do a Venn diagram of the "multidimensional social space" of any particular person attending a concert and come up with, what? Probably a different one for every person. Sure, there are certainly group characteristics, but I think that people like Bourdieu have the causality backwards. In other words, the "social class" does not define the individual supposedly "belonging" to that class; rather the nature or characteristics of the class are determined by the people who comprise it. You read out the nature of the class by looking at the individuals, not the other way around. The idea that the class defines the individual is not only a kind of Marxism, it is deeply bigoted.
I have told this story before, but let me tell it again. I came from a lower class or lower-middle class in Canadian society even though we never thought of it in those terms. We were certainly poor by most standards. Expensive music lessons were out of the question! Also, where we lived there weren't even any expensive music teachers, so no problem. When I applied to the School of Music at the University of Victoria in 1971, I was so out of touch that I didn't even know I was supposed to audition on my instrument (I had taken up the classical guitar about a year earlier, before that I played electric bass and six-string.) So the conductor of the school orchestra, who happened to be hanging around, dragged me into a practice room and tested my musical aptitude. He played a high note on the piano and asked me to sing it back. Played a low note on the piano and asked me to sing it back. Played two notes separately and asked me to sing the interval. I think he may also have played a triad and asked if it was major or minor. That was it. I passed. This wasn't hard as I had been playing in a rock and blues band for a few years and had even written a bunch of songs. Obviously neither I nor the conductor cared a whit what "social class" I might have been in. It was the same all through my years at university. There were obviously students from social classes both high and low. But all that ceased to exist at the door. All that anyone cared about was: could you play your instrument? If a performer, that is. Otherwise, could you deliver the goods in whatever area you were in?
When you move from the professional musician part of the culture to the audience/media part, things can get rather fuzzy. For one thing, most of the patrons are, of course, wealthy (though people contribute at all levels), and as well, people writing about music may or may not be musicians themselves, so they may get deceived to a greater or lesser extent by all this social class stuff. But the reality is that classical music is pretty much ruled by its own internal standards. You can prove this for yourself by just looking at the backgrounds of composers. They rarely come from any sort of elevated social class. Beethoven: drunkard father, lower middle class. Mozart, father was a violin teacher, again, lower middle class. Sibelius' father was a doctor, but he died of typhus when the composer was three years old, leaving a mountain of debts. Stravinsky's father was a bass in the opera and his family did descend from minor Polish nobility, but they were not wealthy. Bach, of course, came from a very long line of organists and church musicians but he himself had to go to work as an ordinary church musician from age seventeen. Philip Glass' father owned a record store and he had to work as a plumber and taxi driver until well into his forties. I could go on and on, but it seems perfectly clear that musical ability may have something to do with genetics, but nothing to do with social class. What about musical taste, which is what Bourdieu is talking about? For that we need to take a closer look at his theory.
[Bourdieu] advances the bold claim that all cultural symbols and practices, from artistic tastes, style in dress, and eating habits to religion, science and philosophy—even language itself—embody interests and function to enhance social distinctions. The struggle for social distinction, whatever its symbolic form, is for Bourdieu a fundamental dimension of all social life.
Swartz, David. Culture and Power (p. 6). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.
(I am quoting from this secondary source because Bourdieu's original prose is often rather dense.) In relating the anecdote about my audition for university I was making the point that this incident and, in fact, my whole career at university was a powerful instance of how an educational institution can overrule social class. This is a fundamental reason for having institutions of higher education. Bourdieu however sees it differently.
Bourdieu maintains that the educational system—more than the family, church, or business firm—has become the institution most responsible for the transmission of social inequality in modern societies.
Swartz, David. Culture and Power (p. 190). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.
Why does he think this?
The education system, Bourdieu argues in Reproduction (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977:177–219), performs three central functions. It first of all performs the “function of conserving, inculcating and consecrating” a cultural heritage. This is its “internal” and most “essential function.” Schooling provides not just the transmission of technical knowledge and skills, but also socialization into a particular cultural tradition. Analogous to the Catholic Church, the school is “an institution specially contrived to conserve, transmit and inculcate the cultural canons of a society” (Bourdieu 1971c:178). It performs a cultural reproduction function.
Swartz, David. Culture and Power (pp. 190-191). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.
Yes, it is quite true that there are essential practices (what Bourdieu encompasses in his concept of habitus) that socialize students into a particular cultural tradition. You could describe these practices as virtues as they include things like honesty (thou shalt not copy other's work), truth-seeking, disciplined practice (thou shalt practice scales and arpeggios until they are easy and automatic), perception and understanding of aesthetic quality (what is a well-shaped phrase?, for example) and so on. Some of this is taught directly, but much by example. Bourdieu might call these "underlying nexuses that reinforce social-class relations" but that probably says more about the cultural tradition of Marxism that his work tends to follow. To be fair to Bourdieu, he is much less doctrinaire than other sociologists.
Bourdieu differs, however, from other reproduction theorists in that he does not see education as directly determined by the state, the economy, or social classes. In contrast to both functional and Marxist theories, Bourdieu argues that “relative autonomy” rather than close correspondence characterizes the relationship between the education system and the labor market.
Swartz, David. Culture and Power (p. 191). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.
Unlike Bourdieu, I didn't come to a theory of practice by studying Algerian peasants or the French educational system. But I am pretty familiar with the educational system of classical music. While the majority of music teachers might be inculcating uncritical adherence to a simple canon, the real peaks of the profession, from which the fundamental criteria of quality flow, are based on a deeper aesthetic understanding. Let me illustrate with a couple of examples. My best grasp of the technique of classical guitar playing came from three sources: the first was private study with José Tomas in Spain. Tomas was one of a small group of players that were all taught directly by Andrés Segovia. The group included Alirio Diaz from Venezuela, Oscar Ghiglia from Italy, John Williams from England and José Tomas from Spain. Except for Tomas, they all had exceptional careers as performers and Ghiglia also excelled as a teacher. Tomas, while an excellent performer, specialized more in teaching and was Segovia's assistant at the famous master classes in Santiago de Compostella where a whole generation of young guitarists learned their trade. I studied with Tomas in Spain and later on with Ghiglia in Banff, Alberta where he gave an excellent master class. The other source of my understanding came later when I was in two master classes taught by Pepe Romero, one in Canada and the other at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. Pepe came from a different tradition. Though the Wikipedia biography acknowledges no teachers, I believe Pepe's father studied with Daniel Fortea, a student of Francisco Tárrega, the founder of modern classical guitar technique. So of the two major schools of guitar playing, that coming from Tárrega and that coming from Segovia, I was lucky enough to have studied with masters in both traditions. There is a third important school of guitar technique, that coming from the pedagogy of the Uruguayan Abel Carlevaro, that I was able to observe in a master class he gave in Toronto in the 1970s. I say "technique" but there is always an expressive palette, what you might call a set of aesthetic practices, that are both enabled and suggested by the technique. Let me just hint here that there really is no suggestion of the malevolent influence of "social class" in any of this.
One more example: you might think that this delightfully egalitarian scenario is just because of the guitar being a lowly, plebian instrument. But another example might confirm my theory. The great violinist Paul Kling proposed to me once that every great violinist in the 20th century was either a Russian from the Caucasus, or studied with one! You can research that for yourself.
Now compare Bourdieu's view:
An important theme in Bourdieu’s work on education is his assertion that academic selection is shaped by class-based self-selection. Whether students stay in school or drop out, and the course of study they pursue, Bourdieu argues, depends on their practical expectations of the likelihood that people of their social class will succeed academically. Bourdieu believes there is generally a high correlation between subjective hopes and objective chances. A child’s ambitions and expectations with regard to education and career are the structurally determined products of parental and other reference-group educational experience and cultural life. Working-class youth do not aspire to high levels of educational attainment because, according to Bourdieu, they have internalized and resigned themselves to the limited opportunities for school success that exist for those without much cultural capital.
Swartz, David. Culture and Power (p. 197). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.
Bourdieu is apparently an expert mind-reader if he knows what all those children's ambitions and expectations are. It is claimed that he is an empirical sociologist, but all I see is mind-reading. I am pretty much a counter-example. I came from a "working-class" family and hated high school. But I had intellectual and cultural curiosity (perhaps that was why I hated high school) and after high school, while working at menial jobs for two years, I continued to pursue cultural interests such as classical music and Japanese art. One evening I was hanging out with some friends who had gone to university and one of them said "you are definitely university material." After that, I started thinking about it and eventually applied and was accepted. So it seems that a bit of curiosity and a modicum of intelligence trumps all of Bourdieu's "class-based self-selection." I would add to this the example of a friend of mine and likely the smartest person I have ever met. He was permanently expelled from the British Columbia school system in Grade 7 for being difficult (intellectually difficult, not physically!) and worked at menial jobs for several years. He also was a novitiate in a monastery, but did not take the vows. During this time he also began to educate himself by learning Italian, Latin and Hebrew. Partly with my encouragement he applied to university and was accepted. He did a double honours major in Greek and Latin, followed by a Masters in Philosophy, a Doctorate in Philosophy and an MBA. After that he entered the professional world first as a corporate loans officer at a bank and then as the chief administrator at one of the largest hospitals in Canada. He came from a lower middle class environment and left home at age sixteen.
I think the problem is often the use of mass statistics which really tell you absolutely nothing about exceptional people. And all the people that have significant amounts of cultural capital are exceptional.
From my own experience the idea that someone's musical taste might be the product of their social class is a questionable one. Yes, the environment you grow up in certainly has an influence. But in today's world where literally every culture is at your fingertips, I think this is less and less true. Sadly, the seductive lies of Marxism, that there are Dark Forces (capitalism, social class, racism, sexism) oppressing you, is always an easy sell for politicians who always have a plan to help you. Oddly, in the long run their plans never seem to work out as the only real beneficiaries are the politicians and their minions.
For our envoi here is Maki Namekawa playing two piano etudes by that very downtown composer, Philip Glass:
Classical music is still a man’s world. Female performers in the entertainment industry learn this early. As a soprano, my career has been defined by playing muses – roles such as Cleopatra (in Handel’s Giulio Cesare), Susanna (in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro) and Rosina (in Rossini’s The Barber of Seville) that were clearly adored by the male composers who created them. Performing them came naturally – after all this is what I had been trained to do. But where was my voice, where was the female perspective? The answer was simple, by and large there’s isn’t one. Almost every portrayal of a woman in the entire regularly performed opera repertoire is constructed through male eyes. The dominance of male composers is, today especially, staggering.
Last week’s Donne – Women in Music report expressed this in stark statistics. Across Europe, 97.6% of classical and contemporary classical music performed in the last three seasons was written by men, leaving a paltry 2.3% written by women.
But why? Is the patriarchy of the music business, the crushing influence of their husbands, or society at large to blame for such a skewed situation?
The writer is soprano Danielle de Niese and the question is a fair one. While I have always argued against quotas and the social engineering of women composers into places of prominence, I have never had anything against women composers. When I was an undergraduate there were always student women composers, though not as many as men. The same in graduate school where I was often in the company of fine young composers, quite a few of whom were women. Right now I am still posting on my most recent discovery, Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina and I recently put up a post on her slightly older contemporary Galina Ustvolskaya.
The very next paragraph in the Guardian piece is on British composer Elizabeth Maconchy, about whom I have written here. De Niese notes that
[Maconchy's] favourite form was the string quartet, of which she wrote 13. In 1942, a Royal Albert Hall concert featured her work alongside that of Mendelssohn, Brahms, Dvorak and Tchaikovsky, and in 1952 she won a competition to compose the Coronation Overture. The piece, Proud Thames, was premiered at the Royal Festival Hall in London to critical acclaim. She was the first woman to chair the Composers’ Guild of Great Britain, and she carried on composing until she was nearly 80. And yet her work is almost never heard today and she is little known. Why?
That's a very good question! In the cases of Clara Schumann and Alma Mahler, she offers evidence that Robert and Gustav were oppressive figures. Women composers seem to have just lacked any kind of genuine social support and tended to be denied scholarships and other opportunities provided to male composers.
The mechanisms of the classical music industry have long been a patriarchy. Music is a living thing, and any composer lives via the oxygen of performance, on stage, over the airwaves and through publishing. Did all those concert promoters, opera directors, orchestra managers and radio controllers simply forget to provide platforms for women? Without a platform, music as a living art form dies.
This may well have been the case for much of music history, but I'm not sure it has been so over the last forty or fifty years. I really can't speak to bias in musical institutions in Great Britain which seems to have been widespread. But they also treated guitarists with equal disdain, at least according to Julian Bream, up into the 1950s at least. In my own experience in music schools and other institutions since the 1970s, there really didn't seem to be any bias and women composers got as much attention as men. Mind you, both men and women classical composers are pretty much ignored in the wider world. But it is astonishing to hear that only 2.3% of classical and contemporary classical music performed in the last three seasons was by women composers. Wait, I think I see the hidden factor. This statistic was for ALL classical and contemporary music. So it includes all the regular concert seasons with Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Tchaikovsky and so on. If we just looked at contemporary music concerts I'm sure the numbers would be quite different. Why didn't they mention that statistic? Looking at the Bachtrack numbers, the closest I can find is this:
Top female contemporary composers
14. Sofia Gubaidulina 16. Kaija Saariaho 26. Sally Beamish
That is not quite as bad: out of the top 26 contemporary composers, three are women. Another article in The Guardian looks into this: Female composers largely ignored by concert line-ups. They have some numbers to back that up. If we are talking just contemporary music, then one would not expect a very significant difference. The article ends with comments from two orchestral managers:
The LSO’s managing director, Kathryn McDowell, said the orchestra championed the work of women. “Of the 12 young composers on our programmes this season six are women, and while entry to them is based purely on merit, we have seen a 50/50 gender split emerge for the past two years, signalling that the best composers writing in Britain today are just as likely to be women as they are men, which is exactly as it should be.”
Timothy Walker, chief executive and artistic director of the LPO, said the orchestra did “not make artistic choices based on issues of gender, religion or ethnicity” but was “strongly committed to supporting female musicians and composers”.
That kind of policy sounds exactly right. You can't just force a quota on musical organizations, but the search for composers of merit should not exclude women or any other group.
Let's listen to some music by Elizabeth Maconchy, particularly known for her string quartets. This is the Signum Quartet playing Elizabeth Maconchy's 3rd Quartet at Cadogan Hall during the BBC Proms 2013.
Most of the time government is content to throw a few dollars (pounds, euros?) at "cultural industries" and go on ignoring the arts. That phrase "cultural industries" that always seems to pop up in government policy studies, gives me a headache. I have this fleeting image of rows of composers at little desks writing thousands of hemidemisemiquavers in a backstreet sweatshop somewhere. I have little faith that government cultural policy--which means, basically, subsidies--will have much effect one way or the other on the cultural fabric of the nation, so, for me, examining what is being said is largely a way of understanding how the mainstream of society tends to regard the arts.
Last spring, Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly launched a broad Cancon policy review, saying "everything was on the table" in how the federal government funds Canadian culture and media.
For those of you not familiar with Canadian cultural policy, the main thing driving it is Canada's proximity to the giant engine of US culture. Eighty percent of the population live within two hundred miles of the US border so they are inundated with US radio and television. Canada has a native media industry who are always trying to get hefty government subsidies so that in Canada we can hear and see our own stories instead of American ones. Yes, it is a problem. But the result of this seems to be Canadian programming (called "Cancon" for "Canadian content") that is even duller and less creative than it otherwise would have been.
A "Netflix tax," which would have been levied upon digital media producers and Internet service providers, had been discussed previously as a potential source of revenue to fund more and higher quality Canadian content.
Netflix has been killing cable companies in Canada, just like in the US. The expected response was to hit them with a tax to support local content. As it turns out, they got Netflix to "voluntarily" promise to invest $500 million in
developing and distributing Canadian television shows and movies
Six of one, half a dozen of the other in my view. Canadian cultural policy, no matter how nice it sounds, always comes down to punishing successful businesses economically so you can support, with subsidies, ones that people are less interested in. The secret ingredient is always the government who chooses whom to punish and whom to reward.
Now let's look at Great Britain, where there is a very different cultural context:
Opening the conservatoire, its principal, Julian Lloyd Webber, said the new building came at a difficult time for arts funding, and he hoped to use the new college “to ensure that the future arts industry is not dominated by the wealthy elite”. He will have to try hard. Those studying music at university are vastly more likely to hail from private schools, or from abroad.
The driving force in cultural policy in the UK seems to be the fight against historic class divisions: the "wealthy elite" serve as the scapegoat much as the US does in Canada.
Music is taught in the majority of schools around the country, but it is skewed towards the rich. Those wishing to study classical music, a grounding that can lead to rock and pop, must often pay for private tuition and own their own instrument, which cuts out those who cannot afford it.
The same is true in Canada, of course. Those families who through cultural tradition or wealth or both who provide private music lessons for their children give them the possibility of becoming musicians that other families do not. But in Canada it does not seem to be an issue, while in the UK it is.
I guess my cynical takeaway from these two articles is that, first, Canadian cultural policy is all about, all about, finding a way to subsidize influential cultural moguls that can be sold to the general public. In the UK it is all about trying to find ways of supporting cultures, like classical music, that are tarred with the brush of elitism, by making them seem not elitist. So it's really about smoke, mirrors and hypocrisy. Isn't it?
Let's have a suitable envoi. For those who don't know, Julian Lloyd Webber is the brother of Andrew Lloyd Webber and a fine cellist. Here he is playing the last movement of the Haydn C major cello concerto:
Cultural appropriation is the adoption or use of the elements of one culture by members of another culture. Cultural appropriation is sometimes portrayed as harmful, framed as cultural misappropriation, and claimed to be a violation of the intellectual property rights of the originating culture. Often unavoidable when multiple cultures come together, cultural appropriation can include using other cultures' traditions, fashion, symbols, language, and cultural songs without permission. According to critics of the practice, cultural (mis)appropriation differs from acculturation, assimilation, or cultural exchange in that the "appropriation" or "misappropriation" refers to the adoption of these cultural elements in a colonial manner: elements are copied from a minority culture by members of a dominant culture, and these elements are used outside of their original cultural context—sometimes even against the expressly stated wishes of representatives of the originating culture.
Of course "cultures" don't actually have intellectual property rights, but what Teen Vogue is on about is the use of elements of fashion by Westerners in order to give themselves a festive, but exotic air:
Click to enlarge
Well, ok, but what about the music? The Music Salon can reveal that pop music is mostly appropriated from a whole bunch of places. First of all, sure, white pop artists have been covering and recycling black musician's work for decades, but we can go deeper. Did you know that every single pop artist has appropriated--without permission--the entire harmonic and melodic structure of Western European music? Yes, it's true! The scales and chords that pop artists use every single day were taken whole from European musicians who developed them over hundreds of years. Not to mention the instruments. Yes, the electric guitar was an American invention, but the guitar itself and its system of tuning goes back to Medieval and Renaissance Spain and Italy. The piano was invented by an Italian in the early 18th century. Drums? Woo-hoo, they go back a long, long way, but a lot of their use was transmitted through Islamic and Turkish cultures (who also gave us the cymbals and high-hats of the drum kit).
Wait, it's even worse! All, all, of the terminology used in music like "melody", "harmony" and "rhythm" comes from the ancient Greeks who also invented the idea of the scale and intervals. Now there's some cultural appropriation for ya! What about song lyrics? Well, the pop musicians themselves come up with them, of course, but the whole idea of "lyrics" is taken from Greek poetry, sung to the lyre, hence the name.
And hey, that diadem of flowers worn by the woman in the photo above? Well, of course that whole idea also comes from the Greeks. The word is διάδημα,"diadema" which means "band" or "fillet". Actually the Greeks probably stole it from the Egyptians. The sunglasses are also a European invention, by the 18th century English optician James Ayscough.
So this whole idea of "cultural appropriation" is historically confused. Let a hundred flowers bloom I always say... Let's listen to some culturally appropriated pop music that no-one has complained about so far. This is "Love You To" by George Harrison from Revolver, who was busily appropriating North Indian classical music. Unfortunately, the original is not on YouTube, but this is a very accurate cover version:
Ann Althouse and I seem to be on the same page today. She quotes this fascinating passage from a Victor Davis Hanson piece in the National Review:
More and more Americans today are becoming Stoic dropouts. They are not illiberal, and certainly not reactionaries, racists, xenophobes, or homophobes. They’re simply exhausted by our frenzied culture.... Monastics are tuning out the media.... When everything is politicized, everything is monotonous; nothing is interesting... For millions of Americans, their music, their movies, their sports, and their media are not current fare. Instead, they have mentally moved to mountaintops or inaccessible valleys, where they can live in the past or dream of the future, but certainly not dwell in the here and now...."
Hey, that's where I went, incrementally, starting, oh, about forty years ago.
Let's listen to a musical metaphor for moving to an inaccessible valley. This is Bruckner, Symphony No. 7 conducted by Claudio Abbado with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra.
UPDATE: I was in a big hurry this morning and never got to the end of that Hanson piece (he does go on). But sure enough, the best was at the end:
Today at 6 a.m. in the dark, I stopped at a gas station in the California coastal foothills. The car next to me had, I thought, way-too-loud booming rap music of the “kill the ho,” “bust up the pig” generic type. Why listen to all that before sunrise? I decided, in protest to the early-morning noise, to leave my own music louder than his as I filled the tank. The first song happened to be a short old folk rendition of Carl Sandburg’s lyrical “The Colorado Trail,” a sad homage to a 16-year-old girl who died on the way westward: "Laura was a laughin’ girl, joyful in the day. Laura was my darling girl. Now she’s gone away. Sixteen years she graced the Earth, and all of life was good. Now my life lies buried ’neath a cross of wood." I then switched tracks to Joan Baez’s folk version of the 18th-century “Plaisir d’amour.” As it ended with Plaisir d’amour ne dure qu’un moment? Chagrin d’amour dure toute la vie, the young driver, his neck and wrists spotted with tattoos, got into his car (he had earlier turned down his stereo around “Now she’s gone away”) and drove up alongside me. What next? He grinned, “Hey, I liked your songs, okay?”
I read an odd post on a blog the other day that asserted that performing artists like musicians and actors were inherently in a low social class--that the 18th century was correct in putting them in the same social class as servants. The poster went on to say that acting, in general performing in public, was essentially demeaning. I often find arguments that are fundamentally discordant with what I believe to be stimulating, or interesting at least.
Just to recapitulate the history a bit, artists of all kinds up to the late 18th/early 19th century were a service industry. They provided splendour and gilding to the nobility and the church. There were exceptions, of course, such as Carlo Gesualdo who was himself a member of the nobility, but this is generally true. When we get to the late 18th century composers like Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven chart a fundamental shift. Haydn was a servant, though a highly-prized one who, by the end of his life was the most famous musician in Europe. Mozart was perhaps the first composer to make a living without taking a position in a noble household. And Beethoven transcended the "servant" category entirely and created a new identity for musicians: as revealers of transcendent truth. This shaped the whole social role of musicians in the 19th century when music became revered as the highest artform.
In the 20th century music fractured into a number of competing categories: "classical" music, now more or less a museum of great works of the past, "contemporary" music, an ideological category asserting music as a higher truth and not to be crafted to suit popular taste, "popular" music which grew and grew in importance until now it is nearly the only category of music of any social importance, "folk" music, which is now whatever is left over after pop musicians have looted it for ideas (bluegrass, traditional blues, "old-time" music) and finally, "world" music, which is whatever artists in the rest of the world manage to catch the attention of audiences in the developed world.
It seems that what has happened is that the most popular popular musicians have come to be members of a new noble class: celebrities (Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, etc.). A very few contemporary composers and musical scholars have managed to hammer out a small niche in academia. The rest of musicians seem to be reverting to the servant category as they play more and more weddings, funerals and bar mitzvas and fewer and fewer serious recitals.
My encounter with music was always rather at odds with the overall trends. First of all, I came from a very low and beaten-down social class: Canadian prairie farmers. Think of them as being like Appalachian hillbillies without the glamour! Even the discovery of pop music was something of a step up and when I stumbled across classical music in my late teens, it seemed a portal to the great world of history and aesthetics. That was a life-changer. All the usual kinds of careers, like banking, medicine, the law, teaching, seemed like so much cold porridge compared to the sheer, stunning aesthetic power of Beethoven, Bach and Stravinsky. Right?
Of course, to have these kinds of reactions you pretty much have to be oblivious to the lure of money and prosperity. But so I was. I spent most of my career actively avoiding monetary success because it seemed, frankly, beside the point. Would anyone with a brain sit down and rank classical composers by how much money they made? Rossini would be number one and Schubert dead last. Does that seem right?
So from that angle, the reason I retired from being a performer was that I could not get my career to the point where I did not have to accept demeaning engagements. So I preferred to not perform. Nowadays I think of myself as a composer and the only recent performances have been of my own music. But as a composer, I have no real professional standing. This is as much a plus as anything. If I were a university composer I would be part of the academic scene that I have a lot of problems with. If I were an established composer of some kind then I suppose I would have to be chasing after insulting commissions like the one the Canadian government is offering to compose a two-minute fanfare in celebration of Canada's 150th anniversary. Thanks, but no thanks. So instead of low social status as a composer I can enjoy no social status, neither high now low. Somehow I prefer that.
I'm sure that some of my readers will have some comments to offer, so go to it!
Here is something to listen to while you are commenting: this is the Piano Sonata No. 8 in C minor, op. 13 by Beethoven, nicknamed the "Pathétique" played by Krystian Zimerman:
I have scare-quoted the present participle in order to distinguish what I want to talk about from the ordinary thing musicians do when they look at a musical score. The kind of "reading" I want to do is not in order to play or analyze a piece of music, but rather to get a sense of the import of the piece in a social or historical context. Of course, a great deal of writing on music purports to do exactly this, but I want to do it from a fresh perspective, uninfluenced, if possible, by the sociology of music as it has been practiced for the last hundred years or so.
My method is going to be simple and direct--this is how I hope to avoid the usual wrong turnings that come from an excessively involuted method and from hidden assumptions and intentions. In other words, there will be no identity or class politics! I intend to pick a few pieces and notice how they project and reflect their social and historical context.
I think one of the things that we can read off from listening to a piece of music is the level of social or cultural confidence it exhibits: the ebullience factor, if you like! The history of modern Europe really began in the Middle Ages as learning and prosperity slowly began to emerge from the centuries of chaos that followed the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire. (Please forgive my bald simplifications--I am just trying to give a very simple overview.) Some of the triumphs of this period include the three Medieval renaissances that scholars have noted. In the last of these, the earliest universities were founded in Bologna and Paris. Towards the end of the 12th century, the first steps toward a sophisticated polyphonic music were taken by Léonin and Pérotin at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. This is the first flowering of what would be the astonishing development of music in Western Europe. Here is an example, Sederunt Principes by Perotin, to my knowledge the very first example of a music composition in four independent voices:
What is really remarkable about this is that it came out of centuries of plainchant, unison single-line music not fundamentally different from any of the music of the ancient world. Now, true, there may have been lots of improvised multi-voice counterpoint going on in all sorts of cultures, but until an Italian monk named Guido of Arezzo figured out how to write down music in a clear and effective way, it would have disappeared as easily as it appeared. In other words, what happened between 1000 and 1200 is that in Western Europe composers learned how to take advantage of notation and voilá, the history of Western music really took off.
Just listening to this music, we can hear things like religious devotion, a delighting in the rich sound of the multiple voices and a feeling of space and stability from the long-held tenor notes. This correlates well with the contemporary architecture:
Notre Dame Cathedral
Let's jump ahead a few hundred years. By the 16th century the ability of composers to handle harmony through the detailed control of dissonance and consonance was highly advanced. Here is an example by Tomás Luis de Victoria:
This music also embodies religious devotion in sound and an appropriate architectural comparison would be to the Escorial in Spain. Both exhibit an almost mystical sobriety and restraint along with technical mastery:
This sobriety and restraint is perhaps a reflection of the brutal religious wars that tormented Europe between 1524 and 1648.
Once these wars ended and Europe managed to arrive at a religious tolerance, and once the threat of Islam was also defeated with the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 and the Battle of Vienna in 1683, the existential threats to European culture were over--at least for a while. This is reflected in a greatly increased ebullience and in the growth of instrumental music which added to the timbres of vocal music. A splendid example is the Magnificat by Bach, born in 1685, just two years after the Battle of Vienna:
This wonderful extroverted brilliance continued to develop in the music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven and one thing we notice is that the devotional character starts to vanish from the music. More and more it reflects the secular values of the Enlightenment. Yes, these composers and many others wrote religious music in the form of masses for orchestra with choir and vocal soloists, but the music itself is really indistinguishable from purely secular forms like the opera and symphony. Here is the Symphony No. 104 by Haydn that was very popular and played at some of the first public concerts in London:
The idea of music written for public performance instead of private ones just for the nobility really took off with the enormous growth of orchestral and opera performances in the 19th century. Large halls were built and large orchestras formed to play in them. And, of course, composers wrote larger and larger pieces of orchestral music for them. Here is the Symphony No. 7 by Anton Bruckner for an example:
It is fairly easy to notice that, alongside the magnificence of this huge orchestra with its wide range of instrumental colors that we luxuriate in over the more than an hour performance, there is also the development of an introspective aspect. The music is no longer simply brilliant and charming, it is also ponderous and foreboding. This is the Romantic aspect of the 19th century. There is the sense that something social or historic is coming to be (also reflected in the philosophies of Hegel and Schopenhauer). Again, please forgive my excessive simplification.
As we move into the 20th century the confidence of European society and culture is shattered by brutal wars, not over religious differences, but political ones. Totalitarianism and total war comes close to destroying Europe entirely. The music reflects this very clearly as in place of the confidence and brilliance of earlier times we have tortured and agonized music. This is Erwartung by Arnold Schoenberg, a thirty minute monodrama for soprano and orchestra. Note that this prefigures the dislocations of World War 1 as it was composed in 1909, five years before the war began!
After the First World War, composers tried to recapture the confidence of pre-war Europe, but they did it mainly with technical innovations and the Second World War caused yet another dislocation answered by even more complex technical innovations. I think that Le Marteau sans Maître of Pierre Boulez exemplifies this quite well:
Yes, this is sophisticated and highly complex music, but we are just listening to it in a simple, direct way. To an ordinary listener I think that the general impression is one of chaos and confusion with no clear themes or rhythms.
I don't want to take this any further in this post. To summarize, the clear certainties of the earlier days of European civilization enabled the development of clear and confident musical forms. But sometime in the 19th century these certainties began to erode. The history of how and why that happened is not going to be discussed here, but the effects on music are quite evident, I think. As the 20th century exploded in violence, the foundations of culture and music were shattered and the result was a music that reflected all of this. And we can hear it, very easily. It is right there on the surface.
Alex Ross has a new article up for the July 4 issue of the New Yorker, which has this stunningly absurd cover:
Which reminds me of this one from 1976:
Except that the second one was meant to be a joke. I think. Ironically, John Cleese, the most famous of the Monty Python silly walkers, was very much in favor of Brexit.
But on to the Alex Ross piece. The New Yorker, never hesitant to tell us when we don't quite live up to their standards, seems to have changed the headline from "The Sound of Hate" (which still appears as the title on the browser tab) to the more neutral "When Music is Violence."
Alex Ross is a fine writer and a good critic with just one fateful flaw: he is a faithful foot soldier in the Gramscian March Through the Institutions, meaning that he always has to take the official Party position on issues. Of course, if he were a dissident he would not have the job he has. One aspect of the ideology is that civilization in all its manifestations always contains terrible flaws that oppress the innocent and this, rather than the benefits, must always be the focus. Let's see how that plays out in this article:
When music is applied to warlike ends, we tend to believe that it has been turned against its innocent nature. To quote the standard platitudes, it has charms to soothe a savage breast; it is the food of love; it brings us together and sets us free. We resist evidence suggesting that music can cloud reason, stir rage, cause pain, even kill. Footnoted treatises on the dark side of music are unlikely to sell as well as the cheery pop-science books that tout music’s ability to make us smarter, happier, and more productive. Yet they probably bring us closer to the true function of music in the evolution of human civilization.
Yep, there it is in a nutshell. He adroitly opposes "standard platitudes" against the Marxist critique. I believe this is the Straw Man argument so beloved of so many public commentators? Well, yes, it does make one's job rather easier. But the worst is yet to come. It turns out that, for Alex' purposes, music can be equated with the sounds of war itself:
Daughtry underscores something crucial about the nature of sound and, by extension, of music: we listen not only with our ears but also with our body. We flinch against loud sounds before the conscious brain begins to try to understand them. It is therefore a mistake to place “music” and “violence” in separate categories; as Daughtry writes, sound itself can be a form of violence. Detonating shells set off supersonic blast waves that slow down and become sound waves; such waves have been linked to traumatic brain injury, once known as shell shock. Symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder are often triggered by sonic signals; New York residents experienced this after September 11th, when a popped tire would make everyone jump.
But Alex Ross is certainly no hack and alongside The Narrative, he does cover some basic truths as well:
Humans react with particular revulsion to musical signals that are not of their choice or to their liking. Many neuroscientific theories about how music acts on the brain—such as Steven Pinker’s notion that music is “auditory cheesecake,” a biologically useless pleasure—ignore how personal tastes affect our processing of musical information. A genre that enrages one person may have a placebo effect on another. A 2006 study by the psychologist Laura Mitchell, testing how music-therapy sessions can alleviate pain, found that a suffering person was better served by his or her “preferred music” than by a piece that was assumed to have innately calming qualities. In other words, music therapy for a heavy-metal fan should involve heavy metal, not Enya.
Having to stick to a strict ideological position means that Alex Ross can only select as examples of musical torture acts by the USA and its allies:
Jane Mayer, a staff writer at this magazine, and other journalists have shown that the idea of punishing someone with music also emerged from Cold War-era research into the concept of “no-touch torture”—leaving no marks on victims’ bodies. Researchers of the period demonstrated that sensory deprivation and manipulation, including extended bouts of noise, could bring about the disintegration of a subject’s personality. Beginning in the nineteen-fifties, programs that trained American soldiers and intelligence operatives to withstand torture had a musical component; at one point, the playlist reportedly included the industrial band Throbbing Gristle and the avant-garde vocalist Diamanda Galás. The concept spread to military and police units in other countries, where it was applied not to trainees but to prisoners. In Israel, Palestinian detainees were tied to kindergarten chairs, cuffed, hooded, and immersed in modernist classical music. In Pinochet’s Chile, interrogators employed, among other selections, the soundtrack to “A Clockwork Orange,” whose notorious aversion-therapy sequence, scored to Beethoven, may have encouraged similar real-life experiments.
The fact that the true masters of torture during the Cold War were the Vietnamese, the Russians and the North Koreans is passed over entirely. The masters of the disintegration of a subject's personality were the Communists, who invented "brain-washing".
I am not in any way advocating the use of music to torture, by the way. It seems both absurd and ineffective. I wonder though if its use weren't a clumsy attempt to forestall criticism? After all, strapping someone to a steel grid and torturing them with electricity (an ever-popular scene in Rambo movies) seems rather in a different class of cruelty than forcing them to listen to Christina Aguilera.
Here is a criticism that certainly seems well-founded:
Pop music in the American tradition is now held to be the all-encompassing, world-redeeming force. Many consumers prefer to see only the positive side of pop: they cherish it as a culturally and spiritually liberating influence, somehow free of the rapacity of capitalism even as it overwhelms the marketplace.
Alex Ross concludes that:
What to do with these dire ruminations? Renouncing music is not an option—not even Quignard can bring himself to do that. Rather, we can renounce the fiction of music’s innocence. To discard that illusion is not to diminish music’s importance; rather, it lets us register the uncanny power of the medium. To admit that music can become an instrument of evil is to take it seriously as a form of human expression.
There is a very clever technique being used here that I call the "argument from hidden agency". Can you see what it is? He talks about the "fiction of music's innocence" which seems very wise and progressive. But the basic moral error is that music in itself has no moral agency. Music can no more be innocent or guilty than can a sunset or a chair or electricity. Only persons with the capacity for moral judgement have moral agency. A person can be innocent or guilty, not music. The use of the Rosamunde march in Nazi concentration camps does not condemn the march as guilty, but only the persons who used it for a vile purpose. Marxist cultural theory makes a specialty of hiding the real moral agents and this paragraph is an excellent example. Of course music can be used for evil purposes, but the agency does not belong to the music, but to the persons who use it. Just as another person can use the same music for a good and useful purpose.
Marxist cultural theory, in its need to smear all the accumulated fruits of civilization so that it can blame the establishment for oppressing the people, has to avoid the real moral question. Instead, moral clarity is replaced with confusion, which is why the writing is so often tortured.
Let's listen to some music. How guilty is this music, the Symphony no. 29 in A major of Mozart performed by The English Concert conducted by Trevor Pinnock:
The idea of "leading from behind" has its origins in politics, but reading a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal brings it to mind. I read the WSJ primarily as a guide to business and economics related events, but it is also good for general news. I find myself often reading the arts coverage as well. USA Today is the largest circulation paper in the US, but the WSJ is a close second. The New York Times is a distant third along with the LA Times. I guess USA Today skews more to the middle class reader and the WSJ to the upmarket reader. Whatever that means. But what has long puzzled me is the WSJ's coverage of music as in, what they choose to cover and what they don't.
Today's article, "Deconstructing Beyoncé’s Most Intriguing Samples on ‘Lemonade’ " is an example. It seems to be a review of Beyoncé's new album just released titled "Lemonade". But, as so often these days, it is not a review in the sense of being a critical evaluation. The writer, Neil Shah, says:
Critics are praising the project, which initially was an exclusive for husband Jay-Z’s Tidal music-streaming service, but is now available for purchase as a download from Apple’s iTunes and digital retailers. (A physical version is coming too.)
The "critics" referred to are NPR with this piece: "Beyoncé's 'Lemonade' Is Defiant In The Midst Of Upheaval" which is a critical review in the same way that a Donald Trump rally is a critical review of his foreign policy. Here is a sample:
Beyoncé couldn't have produced a body of work this defiant, or blunt, two years ago. Lemonade has been made possible by the cultural, social and political upheaval we're in the midst of, triggered by the deaths of boys and fathers and women, who will never be forgotten.
We've all been changed by these events. Beyoncé may be a machine, but she's changed, too. And so have Serena Williams, actress Amandla Stenberg, literary giant in the making Warsan Shire, and the other figures featured front and center in the visual version of the album — from the women who look like my mom and my aunties and my cousins, to those carrying the grief of a nation: the mothers of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Mike Brown.
So, pretty much a manifesto for Black Lives Matter. Without in any way commenting on that political movement, I think it is safe to say that this review has nothing whatsoever to say about the music on the album. The other review linked to is in the New York Times: "Review: Beyoncé Makes ‘Lemonade’ Out of Marital Strife." As you would expect, the NYT review is more in depth:
Her reactions swing from sorrow to rage to determined loyalty, and she reaches beyond the electronic-R&B of “Beyoncé” to embrace new influences and collaborators: the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Father John Misty, Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig, Animal Collective and Led Zeppelin. “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” a collaboration with Jack White, is a funk-bottomed blues-rocker that has Beyoncé fighting back, declaring, “You ain’t trying hard enough/You ain’t loving hard enough,” working up to a scream. “Pray You Catch Me” is one of two collaborations with the British songwriter James Blake: slow-motion ballads of suspicion and longing. During “Forward,” the other Blake collaboration, the video has its most moving sequence: family members stoically holding photographs of men who were killed by police. It’s followed by a scene of a New Orleans Mardi Gras Indian in full feathered and beaded costume, shaking a tambourine in posh dining rooms as if to exorcise them.
This is as close as they get to a discussion of the actual music--most of the review talks about the costuming, the visuals, and associated poetry by Warsan Shire. This bit is revealing:
On their own, the songs can be taken as one star’s personal, domestic dramas, waiting to be mined by the tabloids. But with the video, they testify to situations and emotions countless women endure.
Yes, situations and emotions of countless women who are perfect material for reality television. Frankly, we seem to have reached the point where pop stars like Beyoncé and reality tv stars like the Kardashians are barely distinguishable.
But enough of that, back to the WSJ piece. It is actually the most detailed, in the musical sense, of the three articles:
Executive producer Beyoncé Knowles Carter’s artistic choices are always a fascinating slice of the pop-culture zeitgeist.
Is followed by a listing of five samplings that are used on the album. These are all legal, by the way. Sampling of older recordings is so prevalent these days that artists pay a fee for the use of them. Here is the song "Hold Up" from the album (just the audio):
This is supposedly based on Andy Williams "Can't Get Used to Losing You" from 1963:
Just the staccato chords, I guess. Anyway, the point is the WSJ did track down the samples relating to five of the songs on the album. Is the WSJ readership appreciating their efforts? Not at all. As I write this there are just a few comments and this one is typical:
Only in America can a hair extensioned, silicon pumped up, no talent, photo shopped, spouse of an alleged thug drug dealer get press. A non event - irrelevant. Nothing like spot lighting law breakers. This delusional 'sage' thinks she's some kind of 'river to her people' yeah right. A river that flows directly into the $ bank. She's nothing more than a shill for Soetoro in other words - A Useful Idiot.
Let me hasten to say that this is not my view--just a comment on the WSJ review and they were all completely negative.
So why does the WSJ continue to review this sort of cultural artifact? Is it "leading from behind"? Do they want to go to any lengths to avoid being seen as a stuffy newspaper for the rich? Oops, it may be too late!
I think that what we are seeing here is one of the fundamental problems in our culture. In order for any concepts of aesthetic quality or moral content to be transmitted generally in the culture, they must be promoted by figures and institutions that have cultural, moral and aesthetic authority. This basic mechanism has been eroded to the point where it is not those with authority that have the microphone, it is those opposing, deconstructing and rebelling against authority. Even the WSJ, which should be a bastion of traditional aesthetic values, feels it has to deliver appreciative articles on artists like Beyoncé--and this in the teeth of the obvious tastes and interests of their own readers! A few weeks ago they published an article on a particularly painful recording of jazz fusion. I left the first comment which described it as being very painful to listen to. I expected some push back, but when I checked a week later, mine was still the only comment.
Perhaps the WSJ just thinks it is leading from behind as in keeping an eye on and reporting on cultural trends like Beyoncé's album and its unrelenting rage against everyone who isn't a black woman--from her husband on down. But what they should really be doing is exposing this as the rancid politics of personal destruction and glorification that it is.
Don't you think?
My review of the album: nasty, sneering and unlistenable.
UPDATE: Of course you won't want to miss the review in The Onion.
"How do we use music to increase quality of life for people in challenging situations?"
Daniel Berkowitz, the Philadelphia Orchestra's director of collaborative learning, asks the question, and says the orchestra is increasing the number of ways music can answer the call.
The initiatives are part of a changing institutional direction, [orchestra president Allison B. Vulgamore] said, taking the orchestra more heavily into social-mission work. "I want to be off stage as much as we are on stage," she said.
Of course, what an orchestra should be doing off stage is practicing, learning their parts, maintaining technique, changing strings, refurbishing instruments, not to mention relaxing and listening to music, maybe going to someone else's concert occasionally. NOT trying to be social workers. Oh dear me, no.
And that was how I was going to end the item. But it really deserves more of a comment. I'm sure that many people reading the original article (linked above) in the Philadelphia Inquirer blog would just think to themselves, "how nice, the orchestra is doing some good works." Or, perhaps, "well, it's about time those snobby elitists got out there and did something for the regular people." Probably the ones who react, as I do, by thinking, "oh, God, is there nothing in life that can remain unpoliticized?" are a tiny minority. But politicization of yet another corner of life is what this is. Just another in the long, long list of aspects of life that were previously private or personal or in their own separate realm but that now must be brought under the yoke of the Politicization of Everything. The Personal is the Political.
One of the most debated issues here at the Music Salon has been politics. Some have argued convincingly that this blog should be entirely free of all political issues. For the most part that is what I do try to do. But every now and then I am tempted to wander into one of the contested issues of our day: Global Warming!!
But in this case, I am only protesting the intrusion of politics into music. I am concerned with defending music from being politicized. You see, while we might speculate occasionally about the social context or effect of music, that really should be peripheral at best. I suggest what I think are worthwhile pieces to listen to, but apart from suggesting ways to listen to them, I don't tell you how to listen to them. Or contemplate how they might improve your life. If Mozart doesn't grab you, that might seem odd to me, but hey, it's all up to you.
But the kind of project and mindset revealed by the above article is one that leads, inexorably, to totalitarianism of one sort or another. You can put it as innocuously as you like: "How do we use music to increase quality of life for people in challenging situations?" but it still adds up to someone thinking they have a social mission to go out there and tell people how to live. What is the question mentioned? "How should you change your life?" And what is "the call?" It's the siren call to action of the social justice warrior. Oh, and we can't debate this. Debate is closed off because it is racist or elitist or sexist or somethingist. You either answer the call or you are the Enemy.
I don't know anything about what challenging situations there are in Philadelphia and I don't want to get into analyzing them here. And I certainly don't want to be suggesting solutions. But what I do know is that there are a lot of possible ones. Perhaps it is the case that the policies that have been tried for the last several decades are simply wrong. Another thing I am pretty sure of is that the ideal solution to social problems is not trying to enlist orchestral players as social workers. It is almost certainly something they will be very bad at.
What projects like these are really all about is not, emphatically not, about addressing the problem of challenging situations in society. Not at all. What they are about is "virtue signalling", a delightful recent coining that refers to the situation where a lot of what the privileged say and do is intended to illustrate how deeply they care about solving the Social Problems of Today. The actual results are surprisingly unimportant as we can see from looking at cities like Detroit after decades of deeply caring social policies that have driven away over half of the population.
But, as I said, I don't want to get into any of that. I just want to say, leave the orchestra alone to play music. That is what they are good at and if you want to improve your state of mind, just attend a concert or two.
This is Mariss Jansons conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra in a performance of the Symphony No. 10 by Shostakovich:
The BBC, who seem to alternate between doing really wonderful things and really silly things, have an article up titled "Five classical music controversies." They rehearse some fairly well-known events in music history such as some anti-Semitic language in the text of Bach's St. John Passion and the public reactions to the premieres of pieces by Satie, Stravinsky, Cage and Reich. They also stumble rather badly in discussing the Symphony No. 3 by a composer they call "Ludvig van Beethoven". Beethoven's Swedish cousin, perhaps? The Symphony was never "formerly known as" the Bonaparte symphony. There was a dedication, which was withdrawn, but they enlist the over-excitable Tom Service to try and gin up a controversy:
“Imagine if events hadn’t intervened, and Beethoven had stuck to his original plan, and his third symphony had been called the ‘Bonaparte’. Imagine the reams of interpretation and analysis that would have gone into aligning the piece with the Napoleonic project, its humanist ideals and its all-too-human historical realisation.”
I won't even bother critiquing what is wrong with that--just about everything! But what I would like to do is mention a few actual controversies that seem to be roiling the world of classical music lately.
First off, here is a controversy that I expect to take off any day now: well-off parents will be criticized for spending the time and money to get their children quality musical instruction. Like reading to their children at bedtime this will be smeared as elitist and an example of inequality that we should feel guilty about. My advice: ignore all that crap.
Second, the ongoing, relentless propaganda drive that classical music has built in structural misogyny because there are not enough woman conductors and not enough woman composers. People keep writing that this has to be discussed more, brought out into the open. Of course there are innumerable articles hectoring us about it, week after week. We just don't get it! And we don't get it because the arguments are always statistical, but the reality is that classical music is still based on aesthetic quality, not statistics. If there were a woman composer equal to Bach, we would be listening to her. There are some outstanding women conductors like Marin Alsop, who has no lack of work--this year, again, she will be conducting the last night of the Proms. There are also women composers who are doing fine work, like Jennifer Higdon, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Music. But forget the quotas!
Third, classical music, like the Republican Party, is always dying, but never quite dies. One's musical tastes often change as one gets older, just like one's political views. So I have hope that classical music will survive for a while yet. But we have to be careful that in a confused attempt to resuscitate it, we don't destroy it in the process. And yes, I am looking at all those advisors who go around lecturing young musicians on how to "brand" and market themselves. If we can just reconcile ourselves to the fact that classical music is a bit more complex than the average pop song and just a tad elitist as a result, then we can stop contorting ourselves into being pseudo-pop stars.
Fourth, classical music is often accused of being too dependent on historical repertoire. Oddly, I don't recall the Louvre being accused of being too historical because of their collection, which prominently includes ancient Greek sculptures and the Mona Lisa, dating from the early 16th century. Nor the Prado for its extensive collection of Hieronymous Bosch (late 15th, early 16th century) and Francisco de Goya (18th century). Nor do we chide the Royal Shakespeare Company for focusing on the works of their 16th century namesake. Classical music has the enormous benefit of wondrous repertoire from the Middle Ages right up to last week. This is a plus, not a minus. Sure, like all composers, I would like to see more recent music on the programs, but I certainly don't think we should sacrifice Bach for Pierre Boulez. No quotas!
And fifth, there is the huge, ongoing, and possibly worsening situation of music education and the public perception of music generally. It is unpleasant to read very popular writers on music who lack the most basic historical or theoretical knowledge of music while at the same time our universities churn out hosts of highly trained musicologists and theorists who can't find work. I hope that the disappearance of discussion of classical music from the mainstream media is just a symptom of their general obsolescence and it is simply a case that we are all moving to the Internet.
So there are some real controversies, or issues at least. Please feel free to weigh in with your own opinions.
Let's end with some music. How about that non-Bonaparte Symphony No. 3 of Ludwig van Beethoven. Here is Christian Thielemann conducting the Vienna Philharmonic:
(I was going to put up the excellent Daniel Barenboim performance from the 2012 Proms, but I simply can't stand the BBC announcer's introduction.)
