Yesterday I recorded my co-worker being unnecessarily berated by a customer. This person was buying a set of headphones and discovered that the price was wrong at the register. My co-worker immediately checked, found that the tag was expired, and explained how she was still going to give the customer the discounted price. He then proceeded to verbally attack her as if she was trying to trick him. She repeatedly explained how crazy he was being but he insisted on complaining, even telling my manager that we had a “dummy” working for us.
Obviously, this guy had an extreme case of paranoia and/or an inferiority complex. It made me wonder what he would think if I played the recording back for him. How often is someone recorded while being a dick? I don’t think I’ve ever listened to myself being an asshole; would being continued by such a thing be enough to force a change in bad behavior? It’s not like anyone is rationalizing being an asshole–it’s more of a knee-jerk thing. I’m curious to see if I’ll become a better person once I started sifting through a year of my own personal communications.
So The Rambler has informed me that IMSLP, a web site that posts scores for public domain music, has been put on hiatus by GoDaddy at the request the Music Publishers Association of the UK (MPA). Apparently, this is not the first time this has happened. The MPA is concerned over the status of a Rachmaninoff piece (The Bells). I have no idea how the legal nuances of this work out since, obviously, these scores are available internationally through IMSLP. The part that concerns me is how Rachmaninoff feels about all this. He died in 1943. Many people have been born, lived full lives, and died since his death. Isn’t the point of copyright to protect creators? To give them financial incentive to create? How is Rachmaninoff benefiting from this? How is his family benefiting from this? I’m pretty sure he never even had kids so there would be no younger beneficiaries of his work. Even if he had kids, it would be pretty likely that they would have already lived out their long lives as well. To me, this is the problem with the copyright system: our culture is being held up for ransom.
This was a video created by vocal group Octarium and subsequently commented on by Alex Ross. It draws attention to how difficult it can be for people who want to make a living in music, not just non-profit groups, to thrive and how little an audience can care about that. Mr. Ross points out that he can’t understand why so many people don’t want to pay for their musical entertainment even while they’re willing to pay for over-priced flavored hot water, otherwise known as coffee, on a daily basis. I think the answer is simple: coffee has mass. When you walk into a coffee shop and order your tall cafe mocha latte decaf espresso you can expect that said coffee shop now has one less tall cafe mocha latte decaf espresso available for sale. You can also expect that they had to spend money to obtain that tall cafe mocha latte decaf espresso in the first place. Music, on the other hand, can be created and disseminated with literally no expense at all (studios have been shutting down left and right for the last decade for a very good reason). Even live music can be be an expenseless endeavor for the performers, assuming it’s not an opera company or an ensemble large enough to require a special size of venue. All that is required to produce these things is time and commitment. All that’s required to distribute the product of that time and commitment is an internet connection. So why should any consumer feel the need to pay for this? If coffee were so cheap to produce and could be replicated ad infinitum, do you think people would expect to have to pay for that as well?
A recent post over at The Free Arrow, that came to me via Greg Sandow’s blog, talks about the idea of using a scoreboard of sorts at classical concerts to help the uninitiated follow along. The author, Michael Oneil Lam, tells us that he is not part of the classical world but does go to concerts because his wife is a musician. He states his frustration with following program notes at these events:
My biggest gripe about modern orchestra concerts is that I lose my place so easily. The program notes talk about an “icy interlude in the high strings indicating a modulation to the subdominant;” but even if I understood what a subdominant was, the violins are nearly always playing and they always sound high to me so I have no idea when the particular segment referred to by the program notes actually occurs. Thus, I have to look several events forward and backward in the notes and try to pattern-match them to the things I’ve heard in the past 5-10 minutes to have any hope of knowing where I am in the piece (“is this the ‘lyrical horn solo’ or was that the bit a couple of minutes ago?”). After 15 minutes or so of this, I inevitably give up.
He then goes on to describe how a scoreboard would be able to display the name of the piece, conductor, composer, current position in the music and even what section of the orchestra the audience should be paying attention to. I have to applaud Michael for spending the time and effort to come up with a fairly novel idea but I also can’t help noticing the myriad of issues at classical concerts that this idea should bring to our attention.
For one, why do we require such detailed program notes in the first place? Why don’t program notes exist at concerts for any other genre of music? At a pop music concert (to use a convenient general term for non-classical music) we’re only told the name of the artist if they decide to tell us themselves. We only know the name of the song or the backstory for it if the musicians choose to talk to us about it. And we certainly never hear about subdominant modulations or the theory behind why the guitar solo is based on a pentatonic scale. These are all things we regularly find in program notes though. It’s as if the classical world is so insecure about whether the music can be appreciated on its own that it decides to shove obtuse information into the face of the audience in order to assert its complexity and importance. Pianist Jeremy Denk checked something similar to this off on his list of program note sins, calling it the “insider’s club” sin:
Included in many program notes are tidbits of historical information.
It’s amazing how canonical these tidbits can become. I played Beethoven’s First Concerto a number of times last season and every single program note noted that while the First Concerto is called number 1, it was actually composed second, after the Second Concerto, which was actually first. Now, as a performer and person, I am theoretically glad I know this, in the larger context of the Beethoven story, but, finally: YAWN. In fact, double yawn! Yawn times infinity plus one! Suppose you as a listener and program note reader do not know the Second Concerto, and you’re just looking for help to appreciate the work before you: this seems like a pretty “meta” piece of information to help you out; it seems like what a kind of tedious museum guide would say. Ironic, because of all Beethoven works the First Concerto is not “meta”: from the moment the piano enters, its simplicity requires no insider information. Beethoven takes care to speak to you with obvious grammar, with clear rhetoric, almost Phrasing for Dummies. And he takes you dummies through an epic tale nonetheless, using the harmonic equivalent of “see Jane run” as a doorway to shaded, subtle corners of tonality.
When I find these tidbits in program notes, I get an unshakable mental image: a group of gentlemen in smoking jackets, smoking cigars in a private club, exchanging “I say, old chap, did you know that the first concerto was actually composed second”? They’re chortling to each other, but their back is to you; through the knowledge they share, they exclude the larger group. The tidbits of knowledge are a badge of belonging, even though they do not particularly or centrally illuminate the work in question. For some reason these tidbits have become a habit, even a required element of program notes: I have no idea why.
One might say that knowing things like the name of the piece or conductor or movements is very basic information that the audience should know so that they can follow up on what they heard afterward, if they liked it, and I would agree. Part of the problem with giving this information out in program notes is that it’s highly passive. One of the things that’s great about pop concerts that you will rarely find at a classical concert is how communicative it all is. The musicians often talk to the audience, play with the audience, even enter the audience. The audience often sings along, dances, even talks back. The interconnection between performers and listeners, at a good concert, can be magical. Then you go to a symphony and the most interaction you get is an academic lecture before anyone has actually arrived, applause (when it’s actually allowed), and a bow. Maybe one of the many small things that would help orchestras become intimate with their audience would be doing something as simple as speaking to them and not in academic jargon but simple speech; speech that shows that they’re normal, relatable people too. While I don’t agree with this guy’s ultimate solution to classical music’s problems, he encapsulates how much easier it can be to for an apathetic audience to enjoy a very old piano piece simply be engaging them:
Essentially, concert halls seem to be made into study halls. We don’t go there to listen to the music and experience something communal but to instead study work that we’re told is important and apparently that’s what outsiders see it as too. Michael feels that he needs to be told which part of the music he should be paying attention to but that’s not what music is supposed to be about. We’re simply supposed to listen, to feel, to soak in an experience that’s beyond words, beyond program notes and study guides.
A common topic, and one that I follow quite a bit, is how to save classical msuic. There are blogs, such as Greg Sandow’s, that talk about nothing but this. What I’ve noticed is that the vast majority of these conversations contain language that directly demonstrate one of the largest problems that the genre has: elitism. I don’t mean to slam people who seem to be honestly trying to find solutions to things such as an aging audience and dwindling funding but perpetuating a rather large issue, even while trying to figure out solutions, really needs to be addressed. I recently read a post over at Seated Ovation that contrasts the German classical scene with the American scene; in particular, their ability to attract young audiences. The article contained this gem:
And, generally, young people turn out for the Berlin Philharmonic. There’s an especially large surplus of the 25-35 crowd who dress well and seem culturally refined, more like the breakdown of the Met Opera than the New York Phil (the Staatsoper audience, based on the two performances I attended in their main theater, seems to skew older).
We’ll ignore the anecdotal evidence, especially since the writer claims it’s anecdotal himself, and focus on the language he’s using. Namely, why would one feel the need to point out that this 25-35 crowd is culturally refined and well dressed? Maybe they are, but who cares? Statements like this imply that one is not cultured if they’re not attending symphony performances. I would argue that most orchestras are so far removed from modern culture that they can’t be used as a measure of how “refined” someone’s sense of culture is at all. At best, it’s a measure of how aware one is of the culture that our modern world sprang from, especially since the majority of what you will hear programmed is over 100 years old, even in Berlin (judging by the current season at the Philharmonic).
This simple sentence also implies that those who go to orchestral concerts have the desire and finances necessary to get all dazzled up. There’s something to be said for wearing your best clothes to a performance; it makes the show something special and allows you to escape your routine. That said, it also carries connotations of superiority, as if you would not be welcome if you couldn’t fit this mold. Maybe that’s not the case, maybe it is, maybe this is a very small implication anyway. Regardless, it helps to preserve the damaging image that classical music has of being elitist which can keep even adventurous listeners out of the concert halls.
I’ve come across this sort of thing reading posts at On An Overgrown Path as well. For instance, not in this post but in the author’s comments, he writes:
This path raises all sorts of interesting questions. Have the ears and brains of the young people – the MP3 generation – lost the ability, like their audio systems, to decode more complex musical sounds? Does this explain the increasing popularity of world music, the sound of which is largely percussive and light in complex overtones? Does it also explain the decline in popularity among young listeners of classical music? Do we need to spend more time thinking about the auditory capabilities of audiences and the limitations of audio reproduction systems? Do we need to think more about the lost art of listening?
The implication here being that young people simply can’t hear the greatness that is classical music. The music is simply too complex for their dumbed down ears. This sort of statement doesn’t seem to phase the classical audience that will likely be reading it but anyone who’s not already in that circle is probably going to feel, as I did, that this is a bit of a shot at those who listen to popular music.
The intentions in all of this are great. We need more people asking questions about why the classical audience is aging and trying to find out what will keep this tradition vibrant but it’s at least a little ironic to me that the very people doing this tend to perpetuate some really bad PR. It’s all seems to add up to people asking, “How can we get people to step up to our level?” As opposed to asking, “How can we make ourselves relevant to a world that doesn’t even know we’re here anymore?”
I uploaded a new piece for violin and cello today. This is my first attempt at writing something for string instruments other than guitar, and other than purposefully synthesized strings, and it turned out nice. This was written pretty quickly, an just a day, hence it’s a doodle just like most of the piano pieces posted here so far. Anyway, check it out.
I also spent a little time mixing all my classical tracks down to flac format. These are lossless, meaning the quality doesn’t diminish when the files are compressed into something that doesn’t take up an enormous amount of space. They’re still bigger than MP3s but not significantly. Seems to me that this is the way everything you find online is going to start going so I’m gonna jump on that train. They’re already widespread in torrents…..
Anyway, I’m considering making flac versions of everything I’ve done and possibly even remixing old songs that I absolutely butchered in my more ignorant days. We’ll see.
Berkeley’s New Music portion of their Noon Concert Series kicked off today with a work by Dan VanHassel called Lush Intrinsic. Hopefully it wasn’t that great as I didn’t make it to the show in time for this piece. Rain and my poor judgment of how long it really takes to get to Berkeley from San Francisco both served to create a personal obstacle course between myself and aural bliss. Persistence paid off in that I didn’t miss the next two bits of music.
Babylon was composed by Liza White for trumpet and percussion. At first, with only Scott Macomber on stage, playing very drawn out descending pitches, it appeared that the music was going nowhere. At one point he even stopped to clear his spit valve and I assumed he was either warming up still or this was going to be one of those heavy-on-the-theory-weak-on-the-implementation sort of pieces. Either way, it was a bit awkward, especially as someone else walked on stage to, seemingly, move parts of a drum kit around. It wasn’t until drummer Jordan Glenn started to actually play said drum kit that I realized this was all part of the piece. Well, possibly not the spit valve part, although there was more “play acting” of sorts later in the performance as Macomber and Glenn both stopped and pointed back and forth at each other as if confused about who’s supposed to go next. According to White, the piece is about “personal restlessness” and “struggling to assert oneself in an honest way”. That being the case, I could see how these little bits of stagecraft would fit into the theme. The actually music was quite nice once it got going. The drums managed to echo White’s hip-hop influence without injecting hip-hop into the classical backdrop in a gimmicky way. The trumpet lines didn’t do as much to grab my attention and, in a way, seemed almost arbitrary. That being said, the piece worked quite well.
Matt Schumaker’s Tintinnabula for soprano and two pianos was last on the program. The title of this piece immediately made me think this was going to be some sort of tribute to Arvo Part until I remembered that the word is also Latin for “bell”. Come to think of it though, it was very clear that the work had anything to do with bells either. Apparently, Schumaker had funeral bells of sort in mind, possibly as a metaphor for the voice of a dead loved one, but even the program notes were a bit confusing on what exactly the intention was. So, I ignored the programmed notes and listened to the music as that’s probably the most important part of the whole experience. David Milnes conducted the work but I’m not too sure why. He didn’t do much to offset the balance issues between the pianos and soprano Julia Hathaway and pianists Ann Yi and Keisuke Nakagoshi were so focused on what was clearly a very complicated score that they rarely looked up to see the tempo that Milnes was calling for. It seemed they had it together anyway, which was amazing. The work had some clear rhythmic cues in the piano playing but there were so many chaotic flourishes throughout the piece that it’s hard to believe that anyone could keep a regular pace going in their head while playing them. The interplay between these two chaotic forces, the pianos that is, created some lovely textures and, after a while, started to sound solidly structured in some vague way. The piano playing also served to all but completely mask Hathaway’s singing. Possibly, assuming that the voice in the work is that of the deceased, this was the point. I’m hoping this is the case as the only alternatives would be poor writing or an inability to properly project on the part of the soprano. I did, overall, enjoy Mr. Shumaker’s music even if I did find myself wishing that he had written for two pianos by themselves.
Let’s hope that Berkeley continues to give the spotlight to people like these more often. Afterall, the sun was out by the end of the concert. I’m not a superstitious man, just saying..
Not knowing any music of Maurice Durufle, I didn’t know what to expect out of his Requiem. A quick look showed that he was a French contemporary of Francis Poulenc and appeared to be a fairly conservative type, judging by the descriptions of his work. I assumed I would be hearing music of a fairly generic Romantic variety but, while it wasn’t very disconnected from Romanticism, it certainly wasn’t a humdrum reactionary debacle either.
The piece was performed by the International Orange Chorale of San Francisco, conducted by Zana Fiala in its solo organ accompaniment incarnation. Interestingly enough, Durufle arranged the work in three ways which I can only guess is a tip of the hat to Catholicism. Organ duties were handled by Stephen Lind with excellent attention to timbre. Lind’s handling of the ranks provided the strongest sense of drama to a performance with a bit too much balance. Certainly a Requiem shouldn’t be evoking feelings of existential passion but talking about death shouldn’t be a neutral affair either. Kudos to Fiala for handling the music with grace at least.
Megan Stetson and Pawel Walerowski took up the solo mezzo-soprano and cello parts respectively during the Pie Jesu section. They blended beautifully with the organ and seemed to add just the right amount of flash, which was fairly little flash. That’s far from a complaint as the nature of the writing seems to suggest that this is the desired effect. I know it worked for me, as did the majority of the concert.
The Hot Air Music Festival is a student run program put together by Carrie Smith, Andrew Meyerson, and Matthew Cmiel. The focus of the event is new music which, in classical connotation, means music written within the last 60 years by mostly living composers. That being said, the lineup did run the gamut of old new music as well as very new new music. Compared to average classical concerts, this one certainly takes a huge step towards letting go of the past. The fact that it’s put together by young people is either a sign of naivety about the reality of putting together successful music festivals if you’re a pessimist or a sign of good things to come from the future music directors of the world if you’re an optimist. Personally, I like to imagine it’s the latter.
I hate to start off describing the strongest performance of a show but I also love doing things chronologically. By the time I arrived at the festival a group of high school students were coming out to perform a piece called Lies You Can Believe In for string trio by a composer listed on the bill as Missy “Misdemeanor” Mazzoli. My expectations were very low due to this bit of cringe-worthy humor. This performance was nothing short of stunning though. The music itself was beautifully crafted. It had the rhythmic intensity of early Stravinsky and hints of Janacek’s harmonic language. This was music you could get excited to. The energy may have also had a lot to do with the performance of this young group. Each player seemed intensely involved in what was going on, especially Alexi Kenney on Violin. Not knowing the piece, it’s hard to say how accurately it was played, and I have the feeling that there were plenty of flubs and balance imperfections, but it really didn’t matter. The enthusiasm brought to the work was intoxicating.
Immediately following was Philip Glass’s String Quartet No. 5. Maybe it was just the shift from such an emotionally tense piece but this one, as well as the performance, seemed to take a while to find its stride. I wasn’t immediately sucked into what I was hearing but once it got good, it was real good. This wasn’t a flawless performance as the violins, played by Anna Washburn and Kevin Rogers, seemed to have trouble staying together during the quick flashy lines that were interspersed throughout the piece but it was fun nonetheless. By the end you could find audience members nodding along as if this was a hip-hop concert and the players just seemed so happy, especially during the false stops closer to the end of the piece which totally faked me out at first.
While one could draw a line between the Glass and Mazzoli pieces, it was very difficult to figure out how Xenakis’s Okho for a djembe trio fit in. I have to put a disclaimer here in saying that I’ve never been able to find a Xenakis work that I truly enjoyed. That said, this one became pretty tiresome. The composer’s obsession with math never turns into something moving or touching or even interesting. Certainly there were some intense mathematical concepts being applied here but you can’t hear them and so they don’t make you curious. The performance didn’t help the state of things either. The players were almost completely expressionless the whole time. I had the feeling that Asako Okamoto was simply bored after a while. For being a piece about rhythm, this was an incredibly static performance. Only after the applause kicked in did some smiles appear but by that time it seemed more like relief at the completion of what is probably terribly difficult music to keep together. Kudos to them for that accomplishment at least.
Next up was Arvo Part’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, a beautiful piece that should need no introduction. Matthew Cmiel conducted this as well as the following two works. The playing throughout Part’s music was as tight as it should be for such a simple, on the surface, piece. Where things didn’t seem to come together was the interpretation. There are so many textural possibilities to music of this sort and they weren’t brought out at all. It seemed that it was just played instead of played with a sense of purpose.
Schnittke’s Concerto Gross No. 1 or, as I like to call it, Schnittke-does-Penderecki-and-some-generic-baroque-and-romantic-composers, followed. For a work that has so many fruitful ideas popping up all over the place, Schnittke sure did a good job of squashing them. I suppose that’s a fault of the polystylistic thing, or a success if you have a short attention span. This work sounded very difficult to play in every sense yet it was handled with great care. The soloists were particularly on point and the balance was handled much better than in the previous work. It almost doesn’t matter how well you perform if what you’re performing isn’t all that great unfortunately.
John Adams’ Shaker Loops was the point at which everything finally came together. Now we had a brilliant composition as well as an inspired performance. The music of Adams being a sort of endurance test, it’s understandable that poor execution of a harmonic here and there or of a ritardando will happen but it didn’t subtract from the overall feel of what was being played. This was certainly a fitting finale to an all around great program. Hopefully the next go round will smooth out the hiccups and turn into something even more lovely.
I actually planned on writing a long, serious piano piece but, after a few failed attempts, I realized that I’m probably not capable of fully realizing my concept yet. So, in the interest of having something to show for my work anyway, Doodle No 15 Indifferent Twinkle is the final attempt, written in about a day and made into another Doodle.
English
Français
Recent Comments