Paul Kilbey2013-05-21T12:44:59-04:00Paul Kilbeyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=paul-kilbeyCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Paul KilbeyGood old fashioned elbow grease.The Classic Brits are Not What's Wrong With Classical Musictag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.19524222012-10-09T16:24:52-04:002012-12-09T05:12:02-05:00Paul Kilbeyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-kilbey/a vociferous blog by Morley with a vicious little number of his own on the Telegraph website on Monday.
The awards ceremony, which began in 2000 and has been hosted by Myleene Klass for the last five years, just seems to have got too much this year, spewing out awards to popular figures such as film composer John Williams, Military Wives man Gareth Malone, and schmaltzy waltz king André Rieu - all to the utter disgust of Morley, who vividly describes himself as stupefied by the experience and stunned by its complete lack of musical substance.
One of the good points that Rhodes makes in his blog is that Morley, as a rock journalist, was better placed to begin this heady and violent assault on the Classic Brits than classical types themselves, who would have found themselves open to claims of jealousy or elitism. Morley's rock background, however arbitrarily, functions to give him carte blanche to be as idealistic as he likes without appearing snobbish. Classical musicians themselves inevitably look like they're stuck in an ivory tower if they try and knock down one of the only classical events which is enjoyed by an audience greater than the ageing bejacketed few - but Morley, knowing popular culture so well, faces no such obstacle.
And you have to admire the force with which Morley used his platform; there is, to be sure, plenty which is completely deplorable about the Classic Brits and the dim, platitudinous light in which they cast music. It's obvious that any music ceremony which involves Andrew Lloyd Webber, Alan Titchmarsh and Gary Barlow is pretty low on cred, and Morley's article is a virtuosic romp through the lowest points of the sad and faintly depressing evening that this probably was.
But on the other hand, you do have to wonder what anyone actually expected from the evening, which is politely ignored in more serious classical circles and, I assume, omitted from the CVs of those credible classical artists who randomly happen to win its awards. It's nothing but a popularity contest, in other words, but actually that's fine, because it's meant to be a popularity contest. And that's why, while Morley's article remains essentially worthwhile for showing that nominally "classical" music is just as prone to vacuity and populism as pop, I really wonder what Rhodes's follow-up was meant to accomplish.
Unlike Morley, Rhodes spends most of his article dissing the popular crossover stars the Classic Brits indulges, scoffing at the very thought "that André Rieu, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Andrea Bocelli are amongst the greatest classical musicians alive today" or "that Mylene [sic.] Klass and Vladimir Horowitz are both pianists". Myleene Klass is a pianist, factually speaking (and pales in comparison to Horowitz little more than Rhodes himself), and I'd like to know where exactly Rhodes read that the Classic Brits were meant to award the "greatest classical musicians alive today", rather than to award - like most awards ceremonies - whomever the organisers felt fitted the criteria best.
In other words, it baffles me as to why Rhodes ever even thought that the Classic Brits were going to be a celebration of highbrow classical music rather than a haphazard, pointless publicity stunt. In assuming that this awards ceremony was meant to be more than it is, Rhodes is himself part of classical music's image problem, with its obsession with greatness, aesthetic purity and anti-populism.
What's more, Rhodes's final flourish - declaring that "It is an undeniable truth that we will still be listening and talking about Bach, Beethoven, Chopin et al in 300 years" - is stunningly pessimistic. This music will still be top of the list in 300 years only if nothing better has been produced in the intervening period, and while it's a tall order, the idea that this isn't even a possibility is what's really wrong with classical music at the moment.
Classical music is obsessed with the past to the point that it believes in its own death - or at least it's sufficiently concerned about its health to feel threatened by an event as irrelevant as the Classic Brits. The best way - the only way, in fact - to promote classical music for the future is to actively celebrate the huge amounts of brilliant, original and worthwhile music which is still being written. This is why I believe in the future of classical music, and it's why I couldn't care much less about the Classic Brits.
If you're in London, I'll be talking some more about classical music past and present at Foyles next week in a discussion on art, genius and tradition. It's a satellite event to the Battle of Ideas, which is at the Barbican on 20-21 October.]]>Nothing: A Centenary to Celebratetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.12667952012-02-09T18:27:29-05:002012-04-10T05:12:01-04:00Paul Kilbeyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-kilbey/
Our poetry now is the realisation that we possess nothing.
2012 does not only mark the hundredth anniversary of the fall of the Qing Dynasty, and the signing of the International Opium Convention at the Hague. It is not just the centenary of the births of Eva Braun, Jackson Pollock, Kim Il Sung and Woodie Guthrie.
Not uniquely is this year the one hundredth since the deaths of Otto Schoetensack, Bram Stoker, Robert Falcon Scott and Nikolai of Japan. It may be one hundred years since Nils Gustaf Dalén won the Nobel Prize for Physics, for the invention of automatic regulators for use in conjunction with gas accumulators for illuminating lighthouses and buoys, but that is not the only anniversary to celebrate in 2012.
No indeed.
It is also a hundred years since the birth of John Cage, that incredible American composer and thinker to whom we owe nothing. No other figure ever has made nothing come alive the way he did, and we owe him that. In his remarkable Lecture on Nothing, he comments that 'Nothing more than nothing can be said'.
While some say there's nothing like the music of Mozart, I say John Cage's music is like nothing.
I'm not just talking about 4'33'' here, his famous 'silent' piece. This, in fact, might well be the loudest, most un-nothing piece there is by him, as it is the one which has accumulated the most relentless commentary. Everyone seems so set to uncover something within it that nothing isn't left, which is a pity. It's actually a very beautiful experience in concert, if you listen without the correct mindset.
I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it.
His other pieces have a certain nothing to them too. John Cage would often use the I Ching, or Book of Changes, to determine elements in his compositions: he would ask this divinatory system compositional questions, and use the chance-determined answers to fill in the score. To say that the results were nothing but random would be wrong. Closer to describe them as random but nothing.
The works can be confusing. Etudes Boreales is a work for cello or piano which was composed by tracing star-charts. The result is so precise, it ranks among the hardest works for cello there are. It doesn't necessarily sound like that, though. Four3, which was choreographed by Merce Cunningham as Beach Birds, is for four performers, on piano or pianos, violin or sine wave, and twelve rainsticks. It is nothing if not/and immensely beautiful.
Some people don't get John Cage, but I think it's just jealousy. After all, we can't all be like John Cage. Nothing would happen.
Slowly, as the talk goes on, we are getting nowhere and that is a pleasure.
This is arguably an extremely unhelpful introduction to John Cage. But in a sense, there's nothing to say. One has to hear, and read, and see John Cage's work. In a world where nothing is certain, this is certain.
John Cage's book Silence collects a number of his lectures and articles and, celebrating its own 50th anniversary, it has recently been republished. Next Monday, an event at the Royal College of Music will set three of John Cage's pieces - including Etudes Boreales and Four3/Beach Birds - to new choreography. It's free; that is, there's nothing to stop you going. Or make you go. Either way. Or both.
All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear that I know nothing.
Cage in Motion is at the Britten Theatre in London on 20 Feb at 7.30pm.]]>Anthony Hopkins: Significantly Better at Acting Than Composingtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.12078512012-01-15T18:39:04-05:002012-03-16T05:12:02-04:00Paul Kilbeyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-kilbey/new album Composer. It's statistically very probable, after all. But now I think it's basically fact: there are some worse composers out there than Anthony Hopkins. Some. Maybe about 20.
Composer is a mawkish and redundant album full of tracks which sound like student entries to a competition to write a soundtrack for a posh instant coffee advert. It has evidently been written by someone who has heard an awful lot of movie soundtracks, but not by anyone with an ear for being original. It is, in fact, unoriginal almost to the point of being funny, but somehow not quite. How in the world it ever actually came to be performed by the CBSO and released professionally should rightfully be beyond the comprehension of man.
That's more or less how I'd leave it, if Composer had been by someone who wasn't stratospherically wealthy and famous. The album doesn't actually merit any publicity, because it is not only rubbish but irrelevant rubbish. However, it has got loads of publicity already, because it is by Anthony Hopkins, so I'm going to carry on for a bit explaining why it's terrible.
Oddly, when listening to it, I was actually quite struck by how accomplished it sounded, in a way. The problem isn't that this is incompetent music; it's technically plausible and does at least indicate some sort of awareness as to what one does with an orchestra. What makes it particularly uncomfortable is, actually, just how self-assured it is. I got the distinct impression that Hopkins really thinks this is worthwhile stuff he's writing, that he's contributing something lasting or at least not wholly pointless to the musical world.
There is, I suppose, the sort of swagger to this album that one would expect from an actor who has been lauded for decades for his spontaneity. The combination of diligence in learning lines and freshness in delivering them in front of the cameras - for which Hopkins is especially renowned - has its analogy in the compositional process, which requires tirelessness in fleshing out and realising momentary flashes of inspiration. But whereas Hopkins's intuition and flair equip him perfectly for film, they simply do not do likewise for music. His compositions are naïve and crass, and all the more embarrassingly so given the confidence of their delivery.
To someone of zero international renown such as myself, it seems odd that Hopkins should be so intent on adding 'an extra string to [his] fiddle', as he put it in an interview on the project. As far as I can see, this brilliant, celebrated actor's fiddle already had a full complement of strings. As did his bow. In fact, the passion with which he has delivered this unpleasant, ill-advised project may well have pulled a bowstring or two loose.
This is, of course, nothing but a vanity project, but what concerns me is just how vain it is. Not just in terms of its obvious genesis in the expanses of Hopkins's bank account, but also in terms of his apparent pretensions for himself as a composer. At least Hugh Laurie had the grace to give the impression that he was just having a bit of fun. Hopkins appears to be attempting to tap directly into the fairly large market supply of people who think that all composers are always going to be sensitive, brooding geniuses who are better than you.
This is a stereotype which badly needs addressing, in an age when new classical music is actually, secretly, getting smarter, cooler, and more relevant. Perhaps the best thing that can be said of Hopkins's album is that any real engagement with it is likely to debunk somewhat the hackneyed stereotype of the composer as aloof genius. It is certainly not the work of a musical genius.
Wikipedia's got it right, though: visit Anthony Hopkins's page, and you will see the following text:
"For the composer, see Antony Hopkins."]]>A New Year's Resolution for 2012: Give Contemporary Classical Music a Chancetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.11769902011-12-30T17:26:50-05:002012-02-29T05:12:01-05:00Paul Kilbeyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-kilbey/
But, in the spirit of Christmas, here is one ready-made for you. It isn't even that hard to keep. It is simply this: give contemporary classical music a chance.
It's true, classical music hasn't had the best reputation for - well, okay, for about a century. And it's often been sort of deserved. Serialism in the 1920s and '30s may have been a bit of a blind alley; Arnold Schoenberg, the inventor of this fascinating but rather cerebral technique, certainly didn't manage to 'ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years' - and given that he said things like that, it's quite hard to commiserate with him really.
And after the Second World War, several composers that hit the headlines came across as stunningly academicised, preaching a sort of lab-coat approach to writing music which gained them little popular support. American composer Milton Babbitt's infamous article 'Who Cares If You Listen?' has come to epitomise the sort of brazen disregard for the populace which the new-music intelligentsia seemed to possess. Irrespective of what it actually sounded like, new classical music shot itself in the foot by alienating itself from its audience.
All the while, furthermore, two things were happening. Firstly, popular music of various forms was gaining, er, popularity. Jazz became a mainstream phenonemon at exactly the same time as people started losing track of classical, and the rise of pop music over the past 50 years requires no introduction at all. And secondly, concert hall programming was ossifying, risking new works less and less, and falling back again and again on Beethoven, Brahms and the rest of them.
These two factors have combined to mean that it's common now to consider classical music a resolutely dead thing. Going to classical concerts tends to reinforce this idea as well; it can feel a little like pretending you're a Victorian for the evening. There is, undeniably, a strongly traditionalist air around an awful lot of mainstream classical concerts. But I think that one of the reasons that 'normal' concerts always seem slightly too stuffy for me is that the majority of concerts I attend are of contemporary music.
If you actually go to any of these, it will become very clear that contemporary classical music's image problem is very much an imagined one. People wear jeans and drink beer. They don't often talk about serialism. It's actually fairly normal. And, incidentally, they go because the music is frequently amazing.
If you want to sit down and doze off for a couple of hours, then new music probably isn't for you. But it probably is if you like it when interesting things happen, when you are played sounds you've never heard before, when you're challenged. Crazy stuff happens in contemporary music. People do weird things to pianos, and plastic bags. They make incredible scores and write odd instructions in them. They take from jazz, from rock, from folk music, from - um, other. If what you want is an interesting story, you needn't look much further.
I think the major problem contemporary classical music has is that people are still put off by its academic, too-serious reputation. As I've said, this is fair enough in a sense. But ultimately, this is a reputation gained through some composers' words, and not their music. It's worth remembering, after all, that composers are people who are (more often than not) better at expressing themselves through music than words. That is why they are composers.
The obsessive theorising of Schoenberg, Babbitt and others does not adequately represent theirmusic, which can be strange but is frequently beautiful and always worthwhile. These people do not sound like they write.
And, of course, they're not even contemporary any more. The cutting edge is full of fascinating people like Thomas Adès, Tansy Davies, Gabriel Prokofiev, who don't see genre distinctions in the same way as those who stereotype contemporary composition. All they ask is that you listen to their music from time to time.
It's not even that obscure any more. There are a huge number of recordings on labels like NMC and Nonclassical, and there are plenty of concerts out there which are well worth hunting out. The Barbican have a big contemporary month ahead, with the world-renowned Kronos Quartet, a Jonathan Harvey opera, and much else to look forward to. The Birmingham Contemporary Music Group even have some family events lined up. And so on.
So this year, I think you should resolve to give this amazing new music a chance to be heard. I could go on and on. But I have socks to wash.
]]>Christmas Number One Chart Engineering: Smells Like a Massive Waste of Timetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.10956952011-11-15T18:00:00-05:002012-01-15T05:12:01-05:00Paul Kilbeyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-kilbey/Apparently there is a race going on between Adele and Lady Gaga regarding who can sell more albums.
Frankly, I think they've both sold loads already. But, given that the artists don't appear content with the ludicrous amounts of success and accolade they have already achieved, even Lady Gaga's fans are now resorting to cheap put-downs about Adele's weight, in the hope that perhaps this will persuade people to buy stuff by the Gaga instead.
No - there is also a weird sheen of evangelism which runs through pop fandom. You have to persuade other people to buy the right music, to propel this music up the charts.
The famous - and successful - 2009 campaign to get Rage Against the Machine's Killing in the Name to Christmas Number One is very much a case in point.
Sure, it was fun to stick two fingers up at the X Factor, but it would be deluded to believe that this wasn't achieved by a PR campaign every bit as rigorous and cynical as that which supported Joe McElderry.
Granted, it was 'grassroots' rather than corporate, but it was still an act of chart engineering.
And it was also completely reliant on the assumption that people would be willing to buy a piece of music for an arbitrary cause, rather than because they liked the song. (Does anyone actually want to listen to RATM at Christmas? Whatever happened to Shakin' Stevens?)
There were several copycat campaigns last year; in case you've forgotten they were for The Trashmen's Surfin' Bird, which reached Number Three, and a new recording of John Cage's composition 4'33'', which made it to Number 21.
This year, expect to be deluged with requests to download Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, a song so famous you probably either already own it in some form or don't particularly like it.
The thing is, I'd always had the impression that the charts were meant to represent what music people actually wanted to buy and listen to. They've never been a measure of musical quality, I don't think, unless you consider Celine Dion to be better than Frank Sinatra or Kissin, on the basis that she's sold more records. But until recently, it has been possible to distinguish the issue of popular musical taste from that of how successful different releases' marketing campaigns are.
At least people who buy the X Factor single presumably want to listen to the song.
Anyone who downloads the Nirvana song this Christmas will do so either because they are gormless enough to fall victim to the marketing campaign, or because they have some spurious belief that doing so will make Simon Cowell cry.
And specifically choosing to force a song by Nirvana, a band who were made profoundly uncomfortable by mainstream success, up the charts only adds to the utter lunacy of the whole thing.
There's a reason 'alternative' music doesn't often make it to the mainstream. It's 'alternative'. As a protest campaign, demonstrating the huge commercial potential of Nirvana is not really on topic. But perhaps I am being naïve in expecting protests to be focused or coherent.
Anyway - has this become a yearly tradition? As well as the Christmas Number 1, are we also always going to have the Christmas Unfocused Attempt at Subverting the Music Industry?
I'm really not conviced on the merits of this. Yes, it's annoying that the X Factor dominates the charts at Christmas every year. But if the alternative to this demonstrates that expressions of non-conformism and alienation can in fact be made both more popular and more mainstream than nice young men who smile a lot then frankly we are all doomed.
All I want for Christmas is this: I want you to buy one piece of music over the Christmas week, but I want it to be a piece of music that you actually want to own and listen to. If it is by whoever wins X Factor, that's fine; I just probably won't send you a present. But if it's Smells Like Teen Spirit, you don't even get a card.
]]>Carhorns or Coldplay? No Contesttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.10628022011-10-27T19:52:07-04:002011-12-27T05:12:02-05:00Paul Kilbeyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-kilbey/here recently that contemporary classical music was a good thing, I didn't necessarily mean 'honk a carhorn in my face for ten minutes in a very small concert hall'. This is, however, something which happened during Exo, one of Kings Place's 'Out Hear' contemporary music concerts, on Monday this week.
The piece was Plateaux for Two by Danish composer Pelle Gundmundsen-Holmgreen, a sort of space-duet for cellist and percussionist. The players - Clare Graham and Barnaby Archer of the Azalea Ensemble - performed in the aisle down the centre of the audience, rather than on the stage: an incredibly intimate place from which to honk incessantly, as Barnaby was obliged to do.
Not that I'm complaining. Well, ok, maybe I should have sat a bit further away. But apart from that I liked the piece. Each of the five movements approached the idea of a duet in different ways: sometimes the musicians played more or less together; sometimes they sort of ignored each other; in the last movement the percussionist didn't play at all and it was just the cello playing a strange broken line feeding back on the previous movements. Always, the music was abrasive, aggressive and impenetrable. And fascinating, obviously.
The rest of the concert was generally less superficially bonkers than Plateaux for Two but was still full of surprises. Chris Petrie, the composer of three of the concert's six works, had the percussionist play piano strings with a brush during Exo. Another Dutch composer, Poul Ruders, extracted mad sounds out of piano and brass in his huge piece Abysm, a work of a sort of trapped intensity which responded abstractly to three literary quotations. 'What seest thou else / In the dark backward and abysm of time?' asks Prospero in The Tempest. Ruders's response was just as strange and mystic.
Maybe most bizarre to look at was the moment in Invisible Cites 2, for me Petrie's strongest piece, when the horn and trumpet players used water balloons as mutes. The musical effect of this may not have been quite as zany as the gesture, but this remained a great moment - a moment when I hope it wasn't just me who smiled and thought 'This absolutley would not have happened at a concert of either Beethoven or Coldplay'. It's not that contemporary classical concerts have a monopoly on weird and fantastic live visual experiences (I think we can all learn something from Janelle Monáe), but it certainly does produce a lot of them. Even if, rather than water balloons, it's just the sight of a performer engaging in mad acts of virtuosity, there is always so much more than the music at a contemporary performance.
I don't mean to say, obviously, that the music isn't interesting as well. This was a fantatstic evening of music from the Azalea Ensemble, conducted by Christopher Austin, played extremely well and more than a series of odd incidents. But I do want to point out that none of the music in the concert was dry or dull. It was cerebral, yes, but also superficial - sometimes garishly superficial, as my eardrums will testify. It was music which begged for attention, and hugely repaid it.
I feel this is worth pointing out especially after Guy Stagg reminded everyone earlier this week that Coldplay still exist. In the article he holds Coldplay up as an example of 'miserable' music and applauds them for it, as if they are somehow a charity case (he begins by asserting that 'Coldplay must be the least popular band in the world'). For Stagg, the dreary tedium of Coldplay makes them 'what life sounds like', and this is good and we should like them for it. (A more accurate take on Coldplay can be found here.) Stagg's conclusion is nonsense.
We don't have to settle for Coldplay any more than we have to settle for a dull and miserable life. Interesting things exist, in life and music, and if there is any connection between the two at all then we should definitely all be listening to people shoving water balloons up trumpets and honking carhorns in our ears.
]]>Stop Listening To So Much Damn Musictag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.10103542011-10-14T05:02:22-04:002011-12-13T05:12:01-05:00Paul Kilbeyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-kilbey/cocktails, which were great but did not serve to wake me up. All in all, come half past eleven, I wanted to go to sleep.
It was only when I turned the lights off that I realised that the people next door, whom I have never met, were having quite a loud party. That's annoying, I thought, but never mind. It wasn't that late, and given that it was a Wednesday evening the chances of them having organised some sort of massive rave seemed pretty low. It will stop soon, I thought, and then I will no longer be listening to a muffled version of 'People are Strange' and some annoying woman talking about central heating. That'll be nice. Something to look forward to.
It was in this haze of benign optimism that I spent the first forty minutes or so. After the Doors album finished, I started to get annoyed. The noise level actually increased slightly at that point, and the steady consistency of the all-Doors soundtrack was replaced, I think anyway, by a heavy metal fan's iPod put on shuffle. That went on for about an hour and a half. Then someone stuck on some Damien Rice or something and everyone was quieter for a bit. Somehow not in a positive, things-are-winding-down sort of way, though, but more in a this-is-a-bit-awkward-we're-all-getting-smashed-and-some-idiot's-just-put-on-Damien-Rice sort of way. There followed a slight pause, perhaps while they forcibly ejected the Damien Rice perpetrator, and then normal musical service resumed. From about 2 o'clock onwards I can't remember much of of what music they were playing, and I imagine they can't either - not just because they must have been completely wasted by that point, but also because the actual music being played was clearly completely irrelevant to the event. Of course, having some sort of loud music playing was essential, but what it actually was didn't matter in the least, just so long as it was loud enough. The heavy metal shuffle continued, interrupted only by the occasional attempt at power-ballad karaoke, until around 5.
Not having managed to sleep at all during any of this, it was all I could do to make it through breakfast, bus, work and bus again without dozing off. The one thought on my mind on returning home at half past six was to make up for all the sleep I'd missed. I lay down on my bed. And what did I hear? Well, I think it was Judas Priest.
Obviously I cannot vouch for the amount of time my neighbours spent in silence during the day. I am, however, completely prepared to believe that the only time they gave themselves off from listening to constant loud random music was the three-or-so-hour gap during which I got my entire night's sleep, prepared for work and left the house. These are clearly committed people. What interests me, though - at least, what I think interests me, given that I still haven't caught up on my sleep - is why in the world anybody thinks that listening to that much music could possibly be a good thing. It's not like you can pay attention to it all. Can you imagine spending an entire night reading unrelated paragraphs of text, one after another, while simultaneously attempting to shout a conversation with your friend?
Obviously, the answer to that is no, and the reason it is different is the amount of cultural kudos music arbitrarily appears to have acquired. It is a way people identify and make friends with others; it helps us define ourselves. And arguably music has always done this, from singing around a campfire to shaking hands at the opera, music is inherently a social facilitator. But contemporary culture still manages to really single itself out here, because this is surely the first time ever in history where in order to use music as a social facilitator, you have to shout louder than it. Music may be assumed to bring people together, but actually it kind of gets in the way. And certainly at this point, any actual musical value which music might contain is completely eradicated from the equation. I'm not sure there are any less musical activities than competing with music at a party.
It's been a feature of the last hundred years or so that music has come to play an ever more prominent part in our daily lives. As recording and production technology have improved, they have cheapened music at every turn. What was once the domain of the maestro, the wise old fiddle player, the unmarriageable middle daughter, has now become the means by which every teenager is meant to express his or her individuality. The 'content' of music remains just numinous enough that this hasn't become a complete contradiction-in-terms.
Is this mature, natural, Keynsian growth? I'm not convinced. I think this is musical hyperinflation. And this is a problem not just because it means I don't get enough sleep. It also means that people aren't actually paying attention to music any more. Music is worth savouring once in a while. And like anything, if you consume too much of it, it loses its affective power. I'm already looking forward to the Barbican's English Journey event next Saturday, mainly because I have absolutely no idea what it will sound like. A week's preparatory not-listening to this piece can only make the actual performance more interesting. And a night spent not-listening to anything at all is bound to have all sorts of benefits. My fingers are crossed, anyway.
]]>Why Stephen Fry Should Stop Gushing Over Dead Peopletag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9967782011-10-05T19:00:00-04:002011-12-05T05:12:01-05:00Paul Kilbeyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-kilbey/
I was no closer to an answer to these questions after 'A Classical Affair' at the Barbican last week, a discussion featuring the quartet of Fry, Classic FM creative director Tim Lihoreau, businessman and newspaper columnist Sir David Tang, and pianist James Rhodes. These weren't really the questions tackled: the discussion was meant more as an opportunity to reflect on the place of classical music in society today, how to address its popular perception of being 'antiquated' and 'irrelevant', that sort of thing. They did this by talking exclusively about antiquated and irrelevant classical music. Go figure.
Fry kicked us off by ruminating - ruminating as only he can - on whether there might be a better word for 'classical' music than 'classical'. He even gave us a hashtag for this question (#newnameforclassical). 'Orchestral' was quickly and comically dismissed on empirical grounds, and Fry was unsurprisingly unconvinced by some of the replies he'd received on Twitter suggesting 'dead' or 'shit' or things like that. That was more or less how the rumination ended. What was really intriguing about this, though, was that nobody needed to clarify what body of music they were actually talking about. Everyone apparently knew precisely what pieces and styles 'classical' constituted.
In fact, I think I had less idea how to define 'classical' after the discussion than I did before. What the term means to Fry and co. can more or less be summarised as old, great, traditional, proper, relaxing, nice. And this definition appears to concern 'the great composers' exclusively, by which they meant various famous dead people like Mozart. I hadn't realised that 'classical' just meant really old stuff, and I certainly hadn't realised that all those modern fellows, those Weberns and Ligetis and Schoenbergs, had completely missed the point of classical music and could be dismissed out of hand. Tang helpfully commented that the music of Webern 'sounds horrible'. Arnold Schoenberg is referred to throughout Fry and Lihoreau's Incomplete and Utter History of Classical Music as 'S------g'. And even James Rhodes, tonight's hip young pianist, with his jeans and trainers and the words 'I'm not an elitist' implicitly tattooed on his forehead, got in on the act. He declared that he had 'a real problem' with contemporary composers, and that he 'would to God [that] a contemporary composer actually wrote a fucking TUNE'. He was, of course, preaching to the choir, and this comment of his was greeted with cheers and applause.
Seriously though, come on. Who would cheer and applaud if someone said 'I would to God that Alan Hollinghurst actually wrote a fucking FANTASY NOVEL', or 'I would to God that Lars von Trier actually directed a fucking CHICK FLICK', or 'I would to God that Seamus Heaney actually wrote some fucking LIMERICKS'? If tunes are not in many contemporary composers' repertoire, then that is because there are plenty of tunes to choose from in popular music, and so 'classical' composers today quite sensibly busy themselves with other tasks. It is beyond shameful to hear a pianist like James Rhodes, who clearly goes out of his way to attract a new audience to the concert hall, denigrate contemporary composition so forcefully and stupidly. And it is beyond hypocritical for a group of influential people like all those on stage to bang on about the power of classical music to enrich people's lives, without making any effort whatsoever to extend or challenge their knowledge or understanding of it.
Let me clarify: if there is a problem with classical music today, it is that people think it has finished. And if people think that classical music is 'dead', then this is because the classical music that they hear on the radio and watch Stephen Fry gush about is by dead people. To be fair, it's pretty hard to fault the logic. Fortunately enough, as it happens, classical music (for want of a better term) isn't dead, but this isn't because the spirit of Mozart lives on; it's because people are still composing it, many of them very well. Give Pierre Boulez's music the time it deserves. Listen to some Gerald Barry. Google 'Tansy Davies'. To appreciate any music is to explore it, to be drawn into it. Give contemporary classical music a chance of that, and then reject it. You too, Stephen.]]>