Well-meaning, competent orchestral programmers, who want to avoid the pertifying impression of a 'museum culture' and are on the look-out for new works which will not disrupt the performing culture of the orchestra too much, are confronted with a devilish paradox: an unknown name on the programme means reduction of ticket sales, but if a new work is presented, it is supposed to reflect modern life in the hope that audiences will recognize their own experience in it and thus, accept it. But what if new music merely reflects the elements of modern life that audiences wanted, for a moment, to escape, because they were quite unpleasant? (Like Carter's celebration of rush hour at Times Square.) Makes such attitude them 'escapist' and 'conservative'? Logically thought-through, this would mean that Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Wagner, Mahler etc. etc. are only protected from writing 'conservative music' by their being locked-up in history, which provides the excuse to listen to them conservatively but apparently neutrally in terms of aesthetics.
So, an orchestra that wants to be 'of its own time' feels obliged to include reminders of this time, which often turn-out to stand in sharp contrast to the character of the repertoire on which the orchestra's performance culture is based, and that is not a matter of idiom but of what it 'says'. Such inclusions then need a lot of marketing and promotion effort to convince audiences that it is not as bad as it mostly sounds. In practice, this comes-down to a success if the audience receives the newling with a polite applause.
I sometimes get the critique from programmers on a proposal, that, yes, the piece is beautiful, well-made, well-scored and - in itself - even original and expressive, and yes, it fits well within the normal, regular programming, but.... it does not reflect contemporary concerns, given the problematic world we live in. This is like saying: this is very good thus not of our own time. What does that say about our own time? That we are not supposed to produce good works? And if it happens, they should not be performed because of falling short of the requirement of ugliness, clumsiness, and of being badly scored, unoriginal and inexpressive?
The popularity of Beethoven's works with both performers and audiences, and not least with the financial administration of orchestras, does not result from his reflecting contemporary concerns around 1800 but from the filtering of real life experience through his personality into the form of abstract (i.e. non-conceptual) music, which makes it accessible to people from different times and places, recognizing the essence of comparable experience. In the Eroica, we do not experience the enthusiasm and hope of the French revolution, but enthusiasm and hope in itself, which can be invoked by numerous experiences. And so it is with every music: it distills the essence from life experience and makes it atemporal, like mathematics, as the architect Leon Krier says about classical art. And thus, contemporary music which can achieve a similar process, is contemporary for ever.
About Me
- The Subterranean Review
- Education: Rotterdam Conservatory, Cambridge University // Activities: composition, writing
Monday, 7 November 2016
Schoenberg, again
Sometimes, even music critics who, in general, support the performance of contemporary music - they do not want to be seen as 'conservative' - begin to feel something of the abnormality that new music needs advocates, champions, performers with a 'mission', as if it is a profoundly different genre altogether. Is this because classical music audiences and performers are by nature conservative, unwilling to expose themselves to something they had not known before? Or is, in general, 'new music' indeed a quite different genre, requiring an audience quite different from the regular classical one?
The New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini touches on this question in his recent article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/arts/music/just-why-does-new-classical-music-need-champions.html?_r=0
Does this mean that Tommasini unintentionally exposes a 'conservative' side, quickly covering it up at the end of the article? Or is it a glimmer of awareness of some worrying truth peeping through the carefully cultivated façade of 'established' 20C new music, a beginning of doubt about received wisdom as tirelessly expounded in academia and propaganda, seeing the crumbling walls of the old bulwark?
Tommasini correctly points towards Schoenberg as the moment when 'new music' became a specialized category with a value framework, very different from the musical tradition which was, at the time, still in full development and which could still count upon a wide public interest, and was a firm part of the cultural field. All that has been lost, and a lively tradition has to be recovered from scratch, which will be very difficult to do in the present cultural climate.
The New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini touches on this question in his recent article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/arts/music/just-why-does-new-classical-music-need-champions.html?_r=0
Tommasini correctly points towards Schoenberg as the moment when 'new music' became a specialized category with a value framework, very different from the musical tradition which was, at the time, still in full development and which could still count upon a wide public interest, and was a firm part of the cultural field. All that has been lost, and a lively tradition has to be recovered from scratch, which will be very difficult to do in the present cultural climate.
Friday, 28 October 2016
Trend: orchestras leaving the concert hall
In the USA, a new trend seems to have spread considerably over the last years, a trend which probably will also increase in Europe where the Berlin Philharmonic has already been detected playing Brahms in a factory hall. An important article, summing-up what happens, can be found on the site of Vulture:
"Theater, opera, and virtual reality have discovered immersive as the ultimate buzzword, promising to obliterate the fourth wall or the screen, or the stage, or whatever divides performers from passive consumers." The idea that concert audiences are mere passive consumers comes from people, who are completely ignorant of music and what happens when it is experienced. Is someone reading a book in a chair, silent, calm, almost immobile, a passive consumer? No, because what is being read creates an imaginary life in the mind and heart. The same with listening to classical music: an acoustical, imaginary landscape is unfolding, and if the music is well-played, this may be a gripping and enriching experience. The workings of the imagination are not passive at all, but active engagement; the observation that the body seems to rest quietly during the process, and that it is only what you see that tells what is happening, is pure materialism, and basically stupid and nonsensical. A good orchestral concert in a concert hall will be entirely immersive to the perceptive listener, and does not need physical immersion to make its point.
“Arts administrators are united in the belief that spreading music as far as possible, in both the digital and physical worlds, is more than just a marketing gimmick: It’s a strategy for survival. The world is full of intellectually curious, artistically adventurous young people who would no more buy a ticket to hear Brahms’s Requiem in concert at Geffen Hall than they would stick a stamp on a handwritten letter.” Here, the solution of the problem of decreasing audience numbers is sought in the presentation format instead of in education, which, after all, is the only way to make the art form understandable to newcomers. What is the point to lure people into classical music who think that handwriting is not 'cool' and who could not manage to stick a stamp on an envelope? Here we see pandering to the lowest denominator and not to 'intellectually curious, artistically adventurous young people', because such people would know quite well how to find their way into the arts. That the numbers of potential lovers of classical music are understood as to diminish, says something about the general educational achievements of society, and not about the art form seemingly 'failing' to attract new audiences. In other words: if society sinks its levels of sophistication, let classical music shrink and become an island of the insiders.... and if they can no longer afford orchestras and concert halls, so be it, they should restrict concerts to chamber music.
Some quotes:
"By now the deinstitutionalization of music has become institutionalized." Concerts have to be organized, if music making is not the activity of private people in their home or in a communal space, solely for their own fun, or being merely shared by their friends. When music making is in the format of a public event, which should be encouraged if we want classical music to survive as a cultural phenomenon within modern society, the concert hall is the best possible creation of an environment where the music can get into its own and experienced as separate from the noise and distractions of daily life.
"Theater, opera, and virtual reality have discovered immersive as the ultimate buzzword, promising to obliterate the fourth wall or the screen, or the stage, or whatever divides performers from passive consumers." The idea that concert audiences are mere passive consumers comes from people, who are completely ignorant of music and what happens when it is experienced. Is someone reading a book in a chair, silent, calm, almost immobile, a passive consumer? No, because what is being read creates an imaginary life in the mind and heart. The same with listening to classical music: an acoustical, imaginary landscape is unfolding, and if the music is well-played, this may be a gripping and enriching experience. The workings of the imagination are not passive at all, but active engagement; the observation that the body seems to rest quietly during the process, and that it is only what you see that tells what is happening, is pure materialism, and basically stupid and nonsensical. A good orchestral concert in a concert hall will be entirely immersive to the perceptive listener, and does not need physical immersion to make its point.
“Arts administrators are united in the belief that spreading music as far as possible, in both the digital and physical worlds, is more than just a marketing gimmick: It’s a strategy for survival. The world is full of intellectually curious, artistically adventurous young people who would no more buy a ticket to hear Brahms’s Requiem in concert at Geffen Hall than they would stick a stamp on a handwritten letter.” Here, the solution of the problem of decreasing audience numbers is sought in the presentation format instead of in education, which, after all, is the only way to make the art form understandable to newcomers. What is the point to lure people into classical music who think that handwriting is not 'cool' and who could not manage to stick a stamp on an envelope? Here we see pandering to the lowest denominator and not to 'intellectually curious, artistically adventurous young people', because such people would know quite well how to find their way into the arts. That the numbers of potential lovers of classical music are understood as to diminish, says something about the general educational achievements of society, and not about the art form seemingly 'failing' to attract new audiences. In other words: if society sinks its levels of sophistication, let classical music shrink and become an island of the insiders.... and if they can no longer afford orchestras and concert halls, so be it, they should restrict concerts to chamber music.
Saturday, 22 October 2016
Regional Europe
You don't have to be an academic, or a politician, or a political scientist to understand that the European Union is in an existential crisis, and that the European nation states are not capable and not suited to handle the problems which concern every European nation in itself. As I see it, many of the EU problems are not caused by its structure alone, but by the fact that the nations have - out of free will - surrendered some of their sovereignty to the EU and then, where problems arise, want to act nationally without taking the interests of other countries into account, thus working against the very idea of the EU. No wonder that the complex structure of the EU gets stuck regularly.
Elsewhere on this blog I have argued that the idea of dissolving the nation states into regions, which are united in a European federal state, would offer workable alternatives to the current state of affairs. Now, some people have already thought along these lines, as mentioned in the Wiener Zeitung:
Wholeheartedly recommended.
Elsewhere on this blog I have argued that the idea of dissolving the nation states into regions, which are united in a European federal state, would offer workable alternatives to the current state of affairs. Now, some people have already thought along these lines, as mentioned in the Wiener Zeitung:
Dr Ulrike Guérot has written about such idea and developed it into an organisation:
Wholeheartedly recommended.
Friday, 21 October 2016
Psychopathology as a career
On 13th October of this year, Ricordi published a press notice, referring to an interview in Die Zeit with composer Georg Friedrich Haas, in which he reveals the difficulties he had with emancipating from his nazi youth:
http://www.ricordi.com/de-DE/News/2016/10/Haas-Zeit-Article.aspx
Earlier, Haas had revealed to the world that he had finally wholeheartedly accepted his psychopathological sexuality:
If one would still doubt, in spite of the overwhelming evidence in modernism itself, that the movement was born from trauma and psychopathological conditions, Haas' revelations - so wholeheartedly shared with the world - are another proof of the sickness that is at the heart of the wish, to delete the entire dimension of musical communication and psychology, and to concentrate upon the pure sonic material.
These are sonic variations, and they are, to some extent, stylized. But how interesting is that in itself? How much information (intellectual, aural, emotional, aesthetic) does it offer? Enough to ask for the listener's time and attention? If you don't expect music, but the changing shades of colours in pure sound, it may be interesting for a while.
In the modern scene, Haas' sonic art is much appreciated, and one can understand why: it reflects and vindicates the morbid, nihilist emptiness of postwar modernism, the tragedy of a lifeless world amidst the ruins of a musical culture - ruins that only exist in the hearts and minds of traumatized people with pathological psycho problems.
http://www.ricordi.com/de-DE/News/2016/10/Haas-Zeit-Article.aspx
Earlier, Haas had revealed to the world that he had finally wholeheartedly accepted his psychopathological sexuality:
If one would still doubt, in spite of the overwhelming evidence in modernism itself, that the movement was born from trauma and psychopathological conditions, Haas' revelations - so wholeheartedly shared with the world - are another proof of the sickness that is at the heart of the wish, to delete the entire dimension of musical communication and psychology, and to concentrate upon the pure sonic material.
Does Haas' work express morbidity? Or does it merely represent it, like Tracey Emin's bed does not express sordid life experience but merely represents it? Haas explores the properties of pure sound:
Haas experienced the work of John Cage as a liberation from 'order', which he (Haas) clearly understood as 'suppression'. If you think the concept of order is merely restricting you, the last thing you should comtemplate is to become an artist. Cage wanted to exclude human intervention from music and the liberation of sound as an aesthetic phenomenon in itself, not needing artistic manipulation. The result is not music, of course, which is an art form, and all art forms are results of human aesthetic manipulations of their material, and as such carry psychic and aesthetic content. Cage never understood what art is, let alone what music is. I can only consider Haas as an incredibly naive and damaged person without understanding of art, music, and of civil society - so, perfectly suited for a career in the modern music scene.
A title like 'Dark Dreams' does seem to be an appropriate description of Haas' entire artistic project:
Interestingly, at the end of this piece, something like music appears, as a voice from another world, screaming and mumbling as if from a dark pit from which there is no escape. There may still be a composer of music hidden in this man.
Stockhausen was, as a teenager, traumatized during the last days of WW II, Xenakis was similarly traumatized. I know of a modernist composer, who gave-up his composition because even as modernism it was hopelessly amateurish, and took-up a career as a conductor of new music with various specialized ensembles, and as a loud propagandist of modernism, attacking the central performance culture as a whole, in his opinion a mere bourgeois playground of stale convention. His poisonous fanaticism was effective and reminded one of the Spanish inquisition, Nazis and the enthusiasm of Lenin and Stalin. This composer's parents, who were both psychiatrists, had committed suicide when he was a teenager. Obviously, that is not the best preparation for aesthetic creation - unless one is endowed with something like a spiritual inspiration.
Modernism is (was? it is still around) something reflecting sickness. No creative developments can be expected from it.
In the modern scene, Haas' sonic art is much appreciated, and one can understand why: it reflects and vindicates the morbid, nihilist emptiness of postwar modernism, the tragedy of a lifeless world amidst the ruins of a musical culture - ruins that only exist in the hearts and minds of traumatized people with pathological psycho problems.
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