There's so much wrong with this article that one hesitates where to begin. But let's take a couple of points.
The
article is an attempt at promoting the new LCMF Orchestra and obviously,
orchestral music is not on their agenda: 'And so the new LCMF Orchestra – which
debuts at this year’s London contemporary music festival on 15 December – aims
to provide a home for those who’ve never written for the orchestra,
improvisers, electronic producers....' so, people who don't know how to write
for orchestra and are not interested in it, who nonetheless are presented in
one breadth with someone who was an expert:
'For the Berliozes of today' - '....whose career paths...' like Berlioz'
- '.... have been fidgety and contrary.' So, if you are not accepted by
orchestral programmers, you must be a Berlioz. Which means there is a tsunami
out there of geniusses, which is highly unlikely. Such naive misunderstandings
are the result of 20C modernist propaganda: rejection = genius, in itself an
outgrowth of 19C romanticism. A cow is an animal, but that does not mean that
any animal is a cow.
But
all of that is not surprising because 'Composing in the approved idioms is
always preferred over something more raw, exploratory, problematic or new.'
Such descriptions have no meaning if not placed in context: the Eroica was all
of those things in 1805; 200 years later it has lost nothing of its qualities
but they have now been established as classical.
'Morton
Feldman had to wait until 2006 to be allowed on to a Proms programme, 19 years
after his death. Pauline Oliveros, another master, didn’t even get that close.
Those are just the dead greats.' The author has no idea what these lines really
mean: Feldman and Oliveros were writing sound art, the first in a brilliant way
(though entirely unsuited for the orchestra format due to the length of the works) and the
second in an embarrassingly amateurish way, as can be checked in her silly and
entirely uninteresting, primitive sound
scapes:
'How
long will it take for a living great such as Jennifer Walshe to be let in? And
what about those working outside the classical tradition? Who knows how much
more interesting things [we] could get if they really branched out to noise artists
such as Russell Haswell or improvisers and conceptual artists like Maggie
Nicols and Alison Knowles.' The author here confuses music with noise,
apparently he thinks that music IS noise. And mrs Walshe's engagements are
numerous but music is not one of them:
Such
texts are always self-defeating, assuming that if something has nothing to do
with music and its traditions and its formats and cultural aesthetics, it must
be 'branching-out', 'explorative', 'avantgarde' etc. etc. in short: the postwar
modernist ideology which was so happy to throw the entire Western musical
tradition overboard, considering it as a mere impediment, something best to get
rid of, like someone throwing a Velasquez in the bin because 'you cannot do
anything with it'. Barbarism pur sang disguised as artistic progress, as if
destruction = improvement.
'The
cartel that is the publishing industry – who feed composers who play the Auber
game to lazy programmers – are also to blame. Like corporations, they revel in standardisation of notation and style;
aesthetic conservatism is their aim. From this flows so many other ills. By narrowing the
pool, quality is constrained, diversity becomes impossible.' Publishing is
another field of complex problems: now that many composers have become
self-publishing - thanks to computer technology - the publishing houses are in
peril and indeed have turned into commercial businesses, which means that they
are offering services and materials to the orchestras and ensembles. It is
THERE where the selections are made, the publishing houses are only concerned
about surviving and selling their products to clients, nothing more.
'Which
is why London contemporary music festival has drafted a manifesto titled
Propositions for a 21st-Century Orchestra, with a few reminders of what matters
and what doesn’t. “Composers who’ve never written for the orchestra are NOT to
be feared,” we state. “Commissioning them will be our priority.”' For people
who apparently have not the slightest idea what music is, what sonic art is,
and what the musical tradition of the West is and has been, and its complex
relation to modernity, who obviously never explored the intentions of postwar
modernism in spite of the many writings produced by avantgarde artists, to
imagine that they are able to define 'what matters and what doesn't'
demonstates a joyful optimism resulting from a deep abyss of ignorance, to put
it mildly, combined with totalitarian ambitions - entirely in tune with the original impulses of postwar modernism.
But
at the end of the article, finally the truth comes-out:
'Fifty
years after composers such as Kagel and Cardew made the first attempts to pull
it apart and examine its power relations, the potential for dissecting the
orchestra conceptually – for prodding and poking it, for sticking it under a
social and psychological microscope – remains untapped.' The orchestra as an
object to study its social engineering, as if the music is merely a cover-up of
authoritarian, suppressing hierarchies, a fossil from undemocratic times and in
scandalous contradition with our enlightened, humanist times. Implied is that
if we listen to the sorry buzzing of Oliveros or the infantile parading of mrs Walshe,
we will be spared the sorry spectacle of unfair suppression of the poor players
who suffer under the crushing domination of Beethoven and his dictatorial
conductors. But in fact, another domination would have taken its place, that of
the ideology of nonsense, under the cover-up of progress and renewal -
comparable with totalitarian societies like the nazis and communism who
excelled in creating fake realities.
So,
instead of helping the orchestra as a cultural institution survive in modern
times - which is a legitimate and very real concern - such initiatives merely
help to undermine it by mobilizing wide-spread ignorance: it is a form of
populism, nothing more. I would have liked to advice such people to read
something more thorough about the subject before embarking on creating a 'new
orchestra', but I fear it may be too difficult.
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