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Of course I got comments on my post about orchestras playing and playing the standard masterworks. I said this hobbled them as artistic institutions, and paralyzed them in other ways, restricting their imagination even in things as mundane as press releases. If you limit your thinking in the central thing you do, the work that takes up most of your time and energy, of course that has consequences.
But of course not everyone agreed. Which isn’t a surprise. My thought isn’t exactly orthodox, and of course many people love hearing the standard works over and over. That’s what the orchestral enterprise has been about, and it couldn’t have survived if people didn’t get something from it. But the big question is whether this focus on the same old pieces — great as they are — is sustainable.
I think not, for reasons I’ll shortly say more about. But right now I want to think about an objection made in a Facebook comment. This is a very good person, someone who does good work with a very good orchestra. She said — and certainly others think this — that there’ soothing wrong with playing Beethoven’s Fifth, because there’s always someone who hasn’t heard it.
But they also haven’t heard Ligeti!
Part of my Facebook response was something Sir Nicholas Kenyon wrote some years ago, he being a British critic — at one time classical music critic for the New Yorker in the U.S. — who went on to become director of the BBC Proms concerts and then Managing Director of the Barbican Centre in London. He wrote that, for people first coming to classical music, everything was new, new pieces as well as old.
But I’d go further than that. When we say that there’s always someone who hasn’t heard Beethoven — and when we use that as a defense of standard classical programming — we make an implicit assumption. Which is that hearing Beethoven is at the core of what classical music is about, and that in fact hearing the entire old canon is central. And that people will be nourished by hearing it. And (if we,re defending standard classical music practice) that they’ll be nourished by not hearing terribly much of anything else.
Miseducation
I can’t agree. The standard canon is only a selection of what classical music offers. It leaves out most everything before the Baroque era, much of the 20th century, and everything from our time. I was listening lately to one of Stravinsky’s marvelous late pieces, Canticum Sacrum (which is partly 12-tone), and grieving that you could spend a lifetime in classical music and never hear it live. And that you’ll only rarely hear even his most wonderful neoclassical works — the Violin Concerto, Apollo, the Cantata, Symphony of Psalms — to name just four.
And that’s just Stravinsky. (Who’s worth citing, since we revere him as one of the greats while ignoring nearly everything he wrote.) If we think that exposure to our standard programming gives new people an education in classical music, then we’re miseducating them, as we’ve miseducated ourselves.
Too mellifluous
And we’re also keeping classical music far from current culture, preserving it (again, even though the masterworks are important and powerful music) as a nostalgia trip. This won’t sit well with many of the new people we want to attract, because we’re asking them to accept a hidden assumption — that great art music is by nature largely mellifluous. Because, after all, that’s how the standard classical masterworks sound: rich with soft or grand chords and melodies.
Which, by itself, is fine. I’m not saying classical music music from the past is bad. But, taken as a whole (and heard day after day, week after week) it doesn’t sound like our contemporary musical culture. We have mellifluous music today, but much of what we hear — especially in the smarter precincts of nonclassical music — isn’t mellifluous. Electronic dance music has a harder edge. Indie rock can be full of noise. Even in classic rock (as I wrote not long ago in a post in which I talked about a track from the Stones’ Exile on Main Street), the electric guitars generate such a swarm of clashing overtones that even a simple E major chord sounds fierce.
Bob Dylan, on his earliest albums, will do things on his harmonica that clash with the chords he’s playing on his guitar. Nor is his voice exactly mellifluous. And he’s central to our current musical culture.
So if we insist on playing mostly mellifluous old music, we’ve stepped away from modern life. We in classical music may think of nonmellifluous music (music, let’s say, with a lob of dissonance) as the advanced course, but for most people today, that’s not true. Nonmellifluous music is mother’s milk to them.
So when they hear what we offer, many of them — whether they formulate this thought or not — will think that something’s missing. And the more we insist that we’re giving them the greatest musical art, the more they’ll think that something’s wrong.
A story, which I know I’ve told here before. Years ago, in my pop music days, I had a girlfriend who thought she might like to hear classical music, though most of her musical culture was pop. So one Sunday morning, as we had breakfast in my apartment, she asked me to play something classical.
I put on Handel’s Water Music. Or anyway something like that, something Baroque. After a little while, my girlfriend asked:
“Why isn’t classical music more noir?”
I took off the Baroque music, and put on Berg’s Lulu Suite.
“That’s what I mean,” she said. “Why doesn’t more classical music sound like that?”
I enjoy your posts very much. You’re never dogmatic. You simply pose questions and provide personal responses (not necessarily answers) to them. You encourage response from others. Forgive the following ramble. Concerning the future of classical music. In my opinion, classical music should never attempt to compete with pop music, folk music, r & b, rap, etc. Each type of music has the things that it’s good at. I think that when the avant-garde of the classical music world (or “modernists” if you will) kept the listener out of the loop (or composed for a very special type of listener, thereby creating “boutique” art), listeners understandably, were driven away. Of course, there have always been battle between “the ancients and the moderns,” but if the concert format established in the late 18th century and continuing into the 19th (corresponding to the rise of the middle class in Europe) is to remain, the audience needs to be considered, in all senses of that word. Imagine an audience looking forward to hearing a new work by a composer as they did with Brahms, Liszt and others of the 19th century. Back then, there were listeners who wanted to sit back and relax and those who wanted to sit forward and really listen. To me, that’s a nice mix. People bring different needs to music and if those needs aren’t satisfied, they’ll move on. Then there’s the training of classical musicians. I think that musicians must be trained technically, but they also need to be trained aesthetically. In all the performing arts, where performers often bring the creations of others to the audience, there is a repertory component (Swan Lake for ballet for example and Hamlet for theatre for example) but there should be a component that involves contemporary ideas and also global ideas. In my very limited knowledge of the dance world, it seems that there is a split between aesthetic and technical training in classical ballet and modern dance. People who go to dance programs pretty much know which branch they’re going to experience. In the world of theatre, it seems that performers do both repertory work and and newer work. Such a mix is a part of most actors’ training. Music, it seems, has followed more of the dance model. There are performers who do only repertory music and there are those who do mostly new works and works that are not part of the repertory catalogue (yet!). I’ve often hear the argument that achieving any depth in the repertory world requires years of continuous learning and relearning of this repertoire. The music has no bottom and no top. (Again, this tends to follow the dance model.) I don’t agree with that view. Studying a work that one has very little, if any, idea of how it might ultimately sound is so valuable when turning to a work where the sound of every note is imprinted in the mind and ear. I just wish that more teachers and music schools would adopt something more aligned with the theatre model of training and development. Ultimately, performers should perform works they have a strong commitment to, but the foundation for this commitment is usually laid back when the performers were children and in the early years of their training. Prejudices and predispositions are well fixed. How the work is presented to the public (jeans or tux, night club or concert hall) can never override the experience of creating music that might just coax the “sit back” listener to “sit forward” and the “sit forward” listener to “sit back.”
I suspect you are correct when you say, “We in classical music may think of nonmellifluous music (music, let’s say, with a lob of dissonance) as the advanced course, but for most people today, that’s not true. Nonmellifluous music is mother’s milk to them.” But if that’s true (and as I say, I think it is) why don’t “most people” make up an enthusiastic, large, and growing audience for contemporary music, on the same scale as the slowly dissolving classical audience? They seem happy to ignore the symphony orchestras and chamber groups who do classical repertoire, but they don’t rush to embrace contemporary music either. There’s a contradiction in there, I think.
Why?
1. It doesn’t have a beat; you can’t dance to it.
2. It’s not sung.
3. It’s too long.
I would put it this way: “classical music” is connected with very different ways of relating to music than the ways fans of other kinds of music (rock, hip-hop, even jazz) have. It’s almost a different style of life, and it’s pretty hard for people to change their lifestyles, their basic ways of enjoying music and fitting it into their lives.
These other ways of incorporating music into fan’s lives involve the things you mention: dancing to a pronounced, regular beat, songs rather than purely instrumental music, for the most part, and pieces that are mostly a few minutes long (which goes back to the early days of recording). Most “classical music,” whether baroque, 19th century, or 20th century, just doesn’t fit into the life styles of pop music fans, although of course there are danceable pieces, songs (mostly in foreign languages!), and short pieces in the classical field, too.
There’s the basic contradiction: in order to attract more pop music fans, either they will have to change their life styles (or at least set them aside temporarily, now and then) or “classical music” will have to become much more like rock, hip-hop, etc. The latter is basically what Greg is advocating, as far as I understand. I think that’s fine, to the extent that musicians, composers, etc., want to do it, but let’s please not completely abandon traditional classical music. That stuff is still a monumental part of human culture.
Jim: I think most “classical” musicians working as professionals in orchestras, chamber groups, etc., do get training in both old and new music, to some extent. But of course they may have preferences in what they like to play, if they have a choice.
A player in a large orchestra, such as the Berlin, London, New York, or San Francisco monsters, has to play whatever the higher-ups put on the program, of course, so they generally do it all, and do it very professionally. If they belong to a string quartet, say, or a trio, or mostly play violin/piano duets or solo piano, then of course they have much more freedom.
Getting back to Greg’s frequent question of the old vs. the new, this reminds me of one contributor to a classical music email list I was on years ago. I was astonished to see a post from him in which he seriously (I assume) advocated stopping performing all music that had been recorded, obviously including the Three Bs, etc. Since we already have perfectly good recordings of all that stuff, and many recordings of most of it, why pay musicians to keep cranking it out again and again these days?
If anyone doesn’t understand why that is a perfectly absurd idea, they clearly don’t understand the value of live performances, and they clearly don’t understand the pleasure musicians get from playing Beethoven, and finding new ways of performing them every time. In other words, they just don’t understand music at all.
Greg certainly doesn’t have that view of the subject, but I will continue to maintain that there is a lot of value in continuing to play and listen to Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and all the rest. The trouble is, of course, that both the musicians and the listeners have only a limited amount of time, as well as energy, to play and listen to everything. And since the classical music field covers centuries of stuff, and the stuff is continually expanded with brilliant new works, there has to be eternal competition over what to program and what to neglect.
This is what I and others call the “museum function” of classical music organizations: playing the old stuff over and over, the way museums have to keep that Rembrandt and Da Vinci stuff available year after year. Just burning all the scores and playing the recordings, the way that email list guy suggested, simply won’t work.
Why should all music sound the same? Why shouldn’t there be a diversity of new music – some mellifluous, some not? Why must contemporary musical culture be hegemonic? Could it be that contemporary musical culture is narrowly limited, and in need of liberation from those very limitations?
The purposes of playing “the same works over and over” I believe are some of the following:
1) they are such inspiration works, fun, powerful, technical, musical. I never get tired of playing these.
2) they are the legacy of humanity to itself. Everyone deserves to experience them.
3) these works actually CHANGE (yes, change) from one performance to another (although perhaps too subtle for most audience to notice), given different conductors, moods, players, halls. We take ownership of the music and RECREATE it as our own (or should).
4) both audience and players need more chances to discover patterns in the music: then it becomes a friend.
5) We COMPETE with other ensembles/musicians (the so-called world-class standard)
6) this is what we trained for: this music DEFINES classical as a genre: they set a high standard composers compete with. Competition (in my book) makes us all stronger.
7) we must show what came before, what happened since, and then what’s happening now: there is no vacuum.
You struck the nail squarely on the head.
With a museum, one may simply go for a visit any time and see works that are mainstays, from the canon of art. With a musical work, as soon as we stop playing it, is disappears, it has no persistence. That is certainly pointing out the obvious but when one takes a closer look at an orchestras schedule over the course of several years, it becomes apparent that we don’t play the same thing over and over. In fact, we see that many major works come up only every three to five years and some masterpieces every 10 to 20. That is playing something over and over? I often think that we insiders to the classical music business have a skewed perspective. We might be sick of something but so many others can’t get enough of, say, Beethoven’s 5th every few years.
That’s very true. There is still an audience for Beethoven symphonies, believe it or not, and thank Saint Cecelia for that. But it’s unfortunate that there are so many masterpieces to perform, including tons of contemporary pieces, that they keep crowding each other out of ensembles’ schedules.