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I find it so exciting, and often wonder why it is that symphony orchestras find it so difficult to champion new music, to draw some sort of hipster crowd to the new and avant-garde. I feel like it could be done with the right marketing. Turning away from the suffocating elitism of Western art music. Host a cocktail hour with a talk introducing the piece, so people don't walk in blindly wondering what they're supposed to be listening for. All any music takes to be understood and appreciated is a little bit of exposure, a little explanation and background.
People fear what they do not understand. If the public doesn't understand a modern composition, it is the fault of the performers and conductors for keeping the pieces shrouded in mystery and confusion. If the performer does not find the piece approachable, their audience certainly will not. Be a charming Bernstein of a conductor; get up and say a few words about the piece. Have a pre-concert lecture. Stop locking these composers up in academia. It is the fault of the conservative institutions for not embracing new music as accompaniment to the old, as a part of the continuum, as something that should be an integral part of learning. Learning old music may be technical, but there are so many resources; listening to recordings. With new music, you have to rely on yourself, your internal rhythm, your understanding of pitch relationships regardless of the tonal or atonal framework. This is something our young talent should champion, should be excited to be a part of.
But the rich and moneyed want to hear Beethoven and Mozart. They want tonal. They want pretty. They want white-bread, white-guy, dead German from the 18th century. I can't change this, but part of me hopes against hope that when the next group of music patrons and season-ticket holders comes of age to replace the aging ones, that they show an interest in more daring fare. But how can they do this when the symphony hall is treated as some sort of Cathedral, where the Germanic pantheon of composers is held up like the saints and martyrs? Where modern music is close to sacrilege? For goodness sake, the reason all those Bachs and Brahms' attained fame is because the public actually WANTED new music in their day. It wasn't until Mendelssohn dug up Bach and had it performed that anybody went "hmmm, perhaps we should perform both old and new music, and venerate these old masters"
Veneration is fine by me. There will never be a symphony like the Eroica. But does that mean classical music should cut off its own head?
You know, I was speaking to Marshall Griffith of CIM about new music and old and he mentioned a few things from the composition end that I found interesting.
ReplyDelete1) Composers are often encouraged or at least find it desirable to compose something very much unlike anything that has been heard before. Originality is certainly positive, but if you take this to the extreme, you create music that no one else can understand because they have no reference point. It is of course impossible to create music truly uninfluenced by anything, but the further one moves from the extant the more difficult it becomes for someone playing or listening the music to understand it.
2) Composers may not and often do not care whether audiences understand their music or not. Babbitt of course would be one of the really famous examples, but Griffith said that he thinks quite a few composers simply write what they find interesting without caring whether anyone can understand it or not.
If I'm a patron, is the prospect of going to hear incredibly alien music that I very well may not be able to understand written by people who don't give a damn whether I get it at all? Probably not for most people.
Of course some composers do care. Eric Charnofsky wisely said he gladly accept a concert riot over an empty hall, because at least it showed that people were passionate about their music.
I agree with pretty much everything you said as well. I find it absurd that if I, say, decide that I don't believe Bach to be the best composer of the Baroque that that is practically an offensive statement.
I do think, though, that composers often contribute to the problem, especially considering the public perception of composing and composition that often exists.
Great stuff. Intelligent examination of music in social and philosophical contexts is too often missing at conservatories where students lock themselves in practice rooms for 8 hours.
A couple other questions I would be interested to see you take on:
1)Is there really good and bad music or is there only music that one finds good and music that one finds bad?
2)What do you think of the romantic notion of "genius?" I feel like it still very much exists today and can be a major problem.
Matt: I was just reading a fascinating article that examined the cult of genius. It was Classical Music as Popular Music by James Parakilas in the Journal of Musicology.
ReplyDeleteSpecifically, it was showing the performance practice approaches that differentiate "classical" music from early music. And one of the big points of the article was the classical veneration of the personality of the composer, or at least an assumed musical personality. I've always had teachers telling me not to play Mozart the way I play Beethoven. There's these assumed stylistic differences that have to do with the personalities the musical institutions have imbued. Classical music is often presented as a series of contrasts: Romanticism is reacting to Classicism, and so on. And thus, one's performance should reflect that.
But in early music performance practice, it's about reconstruction; copying the instruments that would have been available to the composer, utilizing period temperaments, and in essence, making the piece sound right for the time and place and de-emphasizing the individual composers. It's reactionary against the cult of genius, although there is still veneration of particular composers (Biber, Josquin, Ockeghem...).
I don't know where I stand on it. Conflicted yet proud of my classical training. After all, the discipline inherent in the system is character-building. It's important to learn good technique so that you can have the freedom to move past it and make your own artistic decisions. And part of that has to do with the music you want to perform.
There's so much out there that it takes a long time to go beyond the indoctrinated canon, but that's ok. You have to start somewhere, and I do think that generally, cliches in music do happen for a reason. After all, it's Beethoven's 5th we know and love, but that doesn't mean we hold all his pieces in the same esteem. We do not generally hear his Wellington's Victory (which was really famous in its day but today is ignored as a piece with little substance). I think the classical canon has its faults, but the faults are more of exclusion than what has been chosen and validated. The pieces there are incredible works of art.
I do feel, however, that the classical canon reflects a disturbing point: musicology as a discipline originated in Germany, which could be partially to blame for the prominence of German composers in the canon. In reading about composers from other countries, I'm forced to ask what I've missed out on.
I guess my opinion of the cult of genius is that it, like everything, has been incredibly subjective. The bearded white dudes have decided the pantheon of composers and we've been along for the ride. I suppose one reason I want to be a musicologist is to examine the questions that nag me about music that I can't answer through performance. Another reason is because there are so many things about the institutions that uphold this music that I don't agree with...and upon which I like to ruminate through this blog and in my grad papers.
I've been meaning to continue this for a while . . .
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting way to look at early music performance practice. I never really thought of it as reactionary, probably because even as I participate in it, I see that reverence for individual composers is still very strong for a lot of people. It is true though, that reconstructive practices come across as more period centric than individual centric.
I've come to think the reason we believe that Mozart should be played differently than Beethoven is that we place a premium on trying to understand the thinking and decipher the intent of composers. Is music about what a composer was intending or what I, with whatever notions and biases I might have, get from the music regardless of what the composer might have thought? Our training certainly leans toward the former, though a more cynical view might be that it is simply necessary as it makes music, which cannot really be objectively judged for value, more restrictive and better allows a class of elite musicians to have market value and survive.
My real problem with the idea of genius is this:
We seem to have this belief that those who can and do become important composers and influence music are inherently transcendent geniuses and the rest of us are only along for the ride. Maybe its my own paranoia, but I feel like it can be a shadow looming over music and that it pops up all the time in subtle ways.
For example, Pierre Boulez recently spoke at Case and he was asked where he thought music was going. His answers, word for word, was "Wherever the next genius takes it."
I feel like we also expect our geniuses to be like Mozart: someone who is already achieving by the time they are 5 and seemingly destined for greatness. We revere child prodigies and look to them to be our leader-geniuses.
On one hand this makes sense as they are a scarce commodity, but on the other hand, what really makes a child prodigy. There is a fascinating study about Canadian professional hockey players done by Barnsley, Thompson, and Barnsley in 1985 in which it was discovered that the birthdays of professional hockey players skewed significantly toward the early months of the year. It is rather absurd to claim that an early birthdate grants natural talent applicable to hockey, so they investigated further and discovered evidence of what would be called "relative age effect." The hockey players born in early months of the year throughout their youth careers were several months ahead of their age-group peers in terms of physical development, and this gave them an advantage. They tended to be the best players when young because of this, were deemed by evaluators to have the most talent and potential, and consistently received the best instruction, the most invites to play on top tier teams, etc. The advantages just kept compounding until, regardless of whether they were really the most talented or not, they were the ones who ultimately found the greatest success.
So is looking to our 3 year old suzuki violinists to find our future geniuses really the best way? Don't we succeed or fail based on the advantages or disadvantages our circumstances grant in addition to our inherent ability? Child prodigies start out as part of a small group of people who have the advantage of musical training from a very early age and guarantee themselves further advantage by being the best in that small group.
And what about people with musical abilities that are unconventional and don't fit into our perception of what a genius should be? Ives and Cage could never come from a class of even the best suzuki violinists. Cage clearly felt ill-served by the educational establishment in his youth because of his unconventional ways.
and I have to split this post...
I feel like we have created a system in which we take people who fit certain perceptions which may not even represent what we say we they represent, give them the best conventional training, very often try to mold them into what we think they should be, and try to anoint them as our leaders while telling everyone else to stay out of the way.
ReplyDeleteI was generally not the best of among my peers growing up, and it affected my musical training. I had teachers who let me do whatever I wanted, and I had already developed interest in atonal and avant-garde music on my own in early high school. The downside of course is that pretty much everyone capped my potential and maximum achievement at something low, but on the flip side, if I had been a bit better and my teachers had decided it was worth making sure I got the "right" music education because of my perceived potential, would I be at CIM playing orchestral excerpts with lots of vibrato and extolling the virtues of Brahms instead of where I am now?