Gratifying read

[Luke]

I just read this. - a seasoned rock critic, well known in the UK, on how after years of disgarding/dismissing/ignoring classical music, he has realised it is more relevant today than most pop music. Well-written, and a good read.

Key paragraphs:

During the 1970s and 80s, I mostly listened to pop and rock music, when even the likes of Captain Beefheart, Henry Cow and Popul Vuh were filed under pop. However far out I went as a listener, though, classical music seemed connected to a dreary sense of uninspiring worthiness that was fixed inside an ideologically suspect status quo, lacking the exhilarating suggestion of new beginnings, a pulsating sense of an exciting, mind-expanding tomorrow. There was something monstrous about it, as if in its world there were lumbering dinosaurs and toothless dragons, refusing to accept they were extinct. Next to Iggy and the Stooges and the Velvets, it sounded frail; next to Buzzcocks and Public Image, it sounded pompous...
For me, pop music is now a form of skilfully engineered product design, the performers little but entertainment goods, and that is how they should be reviewed and categorised. The current pop singers are geniuses of self-promotion, but not, as such, musicians expressing glamorous ideas.
Most rock is now best termed trad. I like a bit of product design, even the odd slab of trad, and have not turned my back completely on entertainment goods, but when it comes to music and working out what music is for, when it comes to thinking about music as a metaphor for life itself, what tends to be described as classical music seems more relevant to the future.
Once you make it through the formalities of classical music, those intimidating barriers of entry, there is the underestimated raw power of its acoustic sound and an endless supply of glorious, revolutionary music, all easily accessed as if it is happening now. Now that all music is about the past, and about a curation of taste into playlists, now that fashions and musical progress have collapsed, discernment wiped out, classical music takes a new place in time, not old or defunct, but part of the current choice. It is as relevant as any music, now that music is one big gathering of sound perpetually streaming into the world. If you are interested in music that helps us adapt to new ideas, to fundamental change, which broadcasts different, special ways of thinking and warns us about those who loathe forms of thinking that are not the same as theirs, classical is for you.

[some guy]

I'd like to know (know, not guess or surmise or even be pretty sure about from what he says) what he means when he says "classical music."

There are a few things one can conclude from what he says, but I'd still like it spelled out, explicitly.

[Luke]

Well, he talks in the article about a pretty wide variety of music, from Gregorian chant to Webern, Debussy, Berio, Brown, Cage, Feldman and John Luther Adams, and differentiates, also, between a) the clear appeal of Varese/Stockhausen/Xenakis etc to those into Zappa/Faust etc and b) what he calls 'the big, marbled names such as Mozart, Brahms and Beethoven [who] seemed far away from urgent, modern life and were all about death, dying and mourning' before repudiating this earlier opinion of his with a lovely description of how Mozart strikes him now:

'as a great, powerfully active mind moving across the uncanny, insanely absurd vastness of the cosmos, revealing and inventing itself and, therefore, reality around it, through the uncompromising, ongoing strangeness of music. Once you appreciate that the transcendent, freakish otherness of Mozart makes him as modern and subversive as any artist, as startling as any surrealist, you could spend all of your time patrolling his compositions and finding new places to start'

So I'd say he takes in a pretty wide definition of the term. But you'd have to ask him if you want anything more specific. 

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

a seasoned rock critic, well known in the UK, on how after years of disgarding/dismissing/ignoring classical music, he has realised it is more relevant today than most pop music.

And here's a similar article, by another former rock-music critic:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-mitchell/roll-over-chuck-berry-how_b_1273685.html

[Karl Henning]

I just read this. - a seasoned rock critic, well known in the UK, on how after years of disgarding/dismissing/ignoring classical music, he has realised it is more relevant today than most pop music. Well-written, and a good read.

Key paragraphs:

I love how "modern" he hears the Debussy Sonate pour violoncelle.

[Ken B]

I love how "modern" he hears the Debussy Sonate pour violoncelle.

He belongs to a culture that treats modern as a synonym for good, that's all. A common prejudice.  Still an interesting article.

[Karl Henning]

You are probably right, at that.

[Florestan]

I'm glad about, and congratulate him for, the conversion, but this

as a great, powerfully active mind moving across the uncanny, insanely absurd vastness of the cosmos, revealing and inventing itself and, therefore, reality around it, through the uncompromising, ongoing strangeness of music. Once you appreciate that the transcendent, freakish otherness of Mozart makes him as modern and subversive as any artist, as startling as any surrealist

strikes me as just blahblahblah.  Transcendent, freakish otherness of Mozart? Gimme a break, man, willya!

[Ken B]

I'm glad about, and congratulate him for, the conversion, but this

strikes me as just blahblahblah.  Transcendent, freakish otherness of Mozart? Gimme a break, man, willya!

It's worse than bafflegab actually, pandering to the vanity of those who see themselves as "subversive" whilst being thorough going conformists, but that's just journalists being journalists. Focus on the positive!

[some guy]

Well, he talks in the article about a pretty wide variety of music, from Gregorian chant to Webern, Debussy, Berio, Brown, Cage, Feldman and John Luther Adams, and differentiates, also, between a) the clear appeal of Varese/Stockhausen/Xenakis etc to those into Zappa/Faust etc and b) what he calls 'the big, marbled names such as Mozart, Brahms and Beethoven [who] seemed far away from urgent, modern life and were all about death, dying and mourning' before repudiating this earlier opinion of his with a lovely description of how Mozart strikes him now:

'as a great, powerfully active mind moving across the uncanny, insanely absurd vastness of the cosmos, revealing and inventing itself and, therefore, reality around it, through the uncompromising, ongoing strangeness of music. Once you appreciate that the transcendent, freakish otherness of Mozart makes him as modern and subversive as any artist, as startling as any surrealist, you could spend all of your time patrolling his compositions and finding new places to start'

So I'd say he takes in a pretty wide definition of the term. But you'd have to ask him if you want anything more specific. 

No, this is quite helpful. And it leads to a different conclusion (a better one) than the one I tentatively made from the first snippet.

Thanks, Luke!

[AdamFromWashington]

That's a great article, even if a bit pompous in places... Just don't read the comments! Someone called Debussy's Cello Sonata "ghastly," and there are gobs and gobs of people uttering in a million ways that "classical is dead." And the usual talk about how "boring" it is. 

[Mirror Image]

That's a great article, even if a bit pompous in places... Just don't read the comments! Someone called Debussy's Cello Sonata "ghastly," and there are gobs and gobs of people uttering in a million ways that "classical is dead." And the usual talk about how "boring" it is. 

I read a comment one time (I forget what website) where someone said 'All classical music sounded the same." What a moron.

[AdamFromWashington]

I read a comment one time (I forget what website) where someone said 'All classical music sounded the same." What a moron.

Well, because, you know, Schoenberg, and Mozart, and Brahms, and Boulez, and Bach, and Schnittke, and so on, and so on, all sound so much alike. 

It's hilarious how comfortable people are espousing opinions when it's clear they have no idea what they're talking about.

_{Still makes me sad, though...}

[Florestan]

Some comments of the Morley article are real gems.

Most classical dated horribly too, so they stopped playing it decades ago. The stuff we listen to now is the cream of the crop, and in no way representative of the total output at the time it was written.

(about Debussy's Cello Sonata)
Ghastly stuff. Not one decent tune in any of it. An unmelodic, grating, dull, morbid and depressing piece of oppression - well I guess it is an 'end-of -life Sonata', but life is for the living, frankly, and this just makes me want to cut my throat. I love much classical music, but some of it really is as dry as dust, and this is just awful.

I am really curious to know how and why Paul Morley considers so-called classical music to be relevant to "the future". He must be assuming that the future world will be like the world of the past in which intellectual copyright did not exist so composers like Mozart could not live by writing music alone and had to grovel to wealthy landowning elites to provide them with money and in return write flattering music for their patrons.

What Mozart and his contemporaries thought of the world and its drawbacks and inequities will remain forever unknown because they would have had to swallow their pride and write unctuous music for their patrons; likewise future music composers will have to write music that support despotic governments and remote political / economic / social elites.

Music that celebrates ordinary life or ordinary people at work, rest or play; music that addresses our concerns about life, how unfair it might be; music written and played by people who understand what it's like to be rejected, unloved or oppressed by those in power - ah, that's in the realm of "pop", "rock" or maybe "folk" which itself is pop music of other eras or other cultures.

I have spent the last few years self educating myself a bit about classical music. I soon realised that the artists, composers, recordings etc are infinite-so it can be a bit daunting knowing where to look or what to listen to. Radio 4s programme building a library is interesting because it's a bit like a show about 'covers' of classical pieces-they play different recordings of pieces and compare them....funny to think that most recordings in the classical world are actually covers!

Traditional classical music gives me a headache and makes me anxious. Too much going on! But I do enjoy instrumental ambient, drone and beatless techno stuff that is quite similar but less stressful.

Everything I ever needed to know about classical music, I learned from Looney Toons and Tom & Jerry cartoons.

The problem with classical is music is that it has failed to evolve (even so-called modern classical music is so obscure and designed to alienate the listener). Miles Davis is quoted as saying that jazz music is a "musical point of departure", classical music composers would do well to remember this - because classical music is stuck in the past and is not moving forward at all!

What surprises me is that it took Paul Morley so long to come to this conclusion that classical music is acceptable. I gave up on rock by the age of 8.

Everything else is 'pop'. I've read a fair amount about Mozart in my time. None of it suggests that his work was made for or consumed by chinstrokers.

You want pop? Listen to Havergal Brian's "The Gothic". That is pure pop - and a work that is insulted and demeaned by the useless 'classical' label.

[Karl Henning]

I read a comment one time (I forget what website) where someone said 'All classical music sounded the same." What a moron.

Well, to someone with no ears, it does all sound the same . . . .

[North Star]

Well, to someone with no ears, it does all sound the same . . . .

This can't really be true, as it would not sound at all to someone with no ears. 

[Luke]

I never said the comments were gratifying!